Wellbeing
more intimately bound up with what you have to do than in many businesses. You can’t simply end a telephone call or watch a difficult customer leave the shop with a sigh of relief. As a care leader it is up to you to help
your staff and your residents by creating conditions that enable a free and open exchange of views. Some of that will come through training, providing help with anger and stress management and building communication and listening skills, but most of all it will come through building active engagement. When you get it right your care home
Live the values “Don’t do what I do, do what I say” is the most destructive approach that a leader can take. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what you say or what you try to instil in your employees. If you as leaders are not living the values, demonstrating them with your every action and decision, then how can you expect your employees to believe that you are sincere? We’ve already seen how important it
is for the leadership to develop the story, translate it into something meaningful and live it every day. However, engagement is all about your staff taking the preferred values and actions into their own belief and behaviour set. The solution is to put engagement with values more into the hands of your staff. You can do that by using the 4Es methodology, which involves educating, engaging, empowering and enabling. We start by educating employees in
the strategy and values of the business, but when we do so we don’t simply instruct or educate on a factual level. You’re in the people business and that means that people and their emotional welfare are as important, if not more so, than any business case. When we talk about our values we do so in a way that teases out real-life examples, which help people to develop empathy and understanding as they assimilate. While educating we can also start to
engage people in the values. The best way to do this is to factor in the observations, concerns and experiences of your staff. Don’t forget they are on the front line and can give valuable insights, some of which may even require a resetting of values so that they are more
in tune with what is deliverable on a day to day basis. You also need to empower them to
act and to use their judgement to react to situations as they arise. This doesn’t mean that you’re giving them permission to rush off to the drugs cupboard or to dispense inappropriate medications, but it does mean that they should have the freedom to act in the best interests of your residents. This brings us on to enablement.
Particularly in a care or nursing home situation, staff may not be dealing with residents on a one to one basis, but are likely to have to balance the needs of one individual against another. So help them to do so, work with them on skills such as communication and decision-making and taking responsibility.
Conclusion Being a care team leader can sometimes feel like walking a tightrope. You have the usual sort of personnel problems, which would be familiar to people in any business, but your ‘customers’ are far
Jo Geraghty
As a co-founder of Culture Consultancy, Jo brings a wealth of culture change, employee engagement and change management experience to businesses ranging from SMEs and fast growth companies through to multi-national organisations. She is co- author of Building a Culture of Innovation, which has been shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute’s management book of the year award and is also development director at Engage for Success.
January 2017 •
www.thecarehomeenvi ronment .com 17
will be a place of joy; both to live and work in. When your staff are empowered and actively engaged they are constantly on the alert, looking for ways in which they can deliver the highest level of care possible. In turn, those who are being cared for will benefit from genuine care and attention rather than following a tick box process. Earlier this year a video of a care
worker dancing with a resident to Daydream Believer hit the headlines across the world. It showed care homes in a new light and provided a welcome antidote to all those negative headlines of which some newspapers are so fond. The sad thing is that it was seen as something so unusual that it was worthy of comment. Now you and I know that there are
many such positive events happening in care homes every day, but we also know that there are many missed opportunities, times when we could have done more if only we weren’t on autopilot. Building active engagement in shared values means building the chance for positive interactions to take place not just once in a while but all the time. TCHE
Reference 1 Engage for Success.Engaging for Success – enhancing performance through employee engagement. [
www.engageforsuccess.org].
©Peter Maszlen/Fotolia
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