Learning Outcomes
After completing this assessment, the students should be able to:
- critique the role, purpose and harnessing of talent in an organisation.
- construct talent management strategies that are rigorous and flexible.
Assessment Guidelines
This assessment aims to write an essay which provides a comprehensive description and analysis of NHS in terms of talent retention strategies at the workplace. To complete this assignment, you must read the case study below and accomplish the tasks.
Case Study
Flexible working in the National Health Services (NHS)
Important definitions:
NHS: The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded national healthcare system for England, Scotland and Wales. It provides a comprehensive range of health services to people in the United Kingdom, including medical treatment, dental care, and mental health services. The NHS is funded through general taxation and is free at the point of use for most residents in the UK.
Trust: In the NHS in England, a Trust is a type of public sector organisation
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that provides healthcare services. NHS Trusts are responsible for managing and delivering healthcare services within a specific geographic area. They are independent organisations that operate within the NHS and are accountable to the Secretary of State for Health.
Case Study:
Recent improvements in working conditions in the NHS have required the introduction of several HR initiatives designed to make the NHS an ‘employer of choice’. Part of this strategy is to support and improve employee recruitment, retention and performance.
One element is flexible working, and North Trust – an acute NHS Trust – has introduced a flexible working policy that is intended to offer a range of flexible working opportunities to all employees, irrespective of age, gender, job role or other criteria. The policy is presented within the Trust’s Managing Diversity Policy and was formally introduced about a year ago. It includes practices such as:
- part-time working;
- job sharing;
- flexitime;
- career breaks;
- compressed working weeks;
- working from
The policy emphasises that this is not an exhaustive list of practices and that suggestions of alternatives from employees will be considered. The Trust has adopted a decentralised approach to flexible working. It has devolved the responsibility to managers to decide whether or not individuals should be able to work flexibly. To this end, all managers were invited to a 30-minute briefing session at which they were introduced to the policy and told to support requests for flexible working wherever possible. It was felt that briefing all employees would be too operationally complex, so managers were asked to ensure that their teams were aware of the policy published on the Trust’s intranet system.
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To support the flexible working policy, a trial of ‘self-rostering’ also took place in one of the wards. This is a practice by which nursing staff can put requests for the shifts they want to work into a computer system, and they are guaranteed (subject to certain conditions) to have 50% of their requests fulfilled. This was a significant change from the previous system in which they had been able only to request not to work one or two shifts in any given rostering period, and all other shifts were imposed.
Other Trusts that have implemented such a system have had very positive feedback from employees on how it improved their ability to reconcile working and domestic commitments. In line with its devolved approach, the Trust keeps no formal records as to which employees have chosen to adopt the various flexible working practices listed in the bullet-point list above. The information is only held by line managers.
The HR director was therefore surprised and concerned when an external audit of the flexible working policy indicated that although the policy was sound, the implementation of the whole range of flexible working practices within it was less so. This was supported by feedback from the Employee Attitude Survey, in which responses to the questions relating to flexible working suggested that employees felt that the Trust was not primarily focused on flexible working and could do more to support them in this area.
The HR director commissioned focus groups with managers and other employees to seek their views on the operation of flexible working in the Trust. The following were identified as critical issues:
- Employees were unaware of the Trust’s policy and procedures on flexible working;
- Managers lacked confidence in their ability to implement the policy and were unsure about the limits of their discretion;
- There was a significant focus on ‘service delivery’ and concerns about the impact of flexible working on this;
- There was a perception that the policy applied only to women with children;
- Those in more senior positions felt that flexible working was untenable because of their workloads and the damage they perceived it would do to their career prospects;
- Some employees felt that flexible working did not apply to them but were aggrieved by the extra burden they believed that others working flexibly imposed upon them.
Interestingly, however, whereas the formal flexible working practices were not widely adopted, employees indicated that they felt that their managers were informally very flexible and supportive. For example, managers would allow them to arrive late or leave early on occasion, as long as the time was made up at some other time in the week, or they would be allowed to leave early if it was quiet, on the understanding that they would stay on at busy times. Employees suggested that this was helpful and that such informal flexibility was essential.
This was reinforced by an evaluation of the self-rostering trial, which indicated that, contrary to the evidence from other Trusts, the nurses did not like the self-rostering system. Although some of this revolved around a lack of familiarity with the computer system, the greatest concern appeared to be the formality of the system. Once the shift pattern was confirmed, it was complicated to change – formerly, the nurses had been able to swap shifts among themselves to meet their needs. They now felt, however, that control of their working patterns had been taken out of their hands.
Tasks:
You are the HR Advisor for the Trust and have been asked by management to:
Task 1: Identify the current issues that Trust is facing in applying flexible working and explain why these may have occurred.
Task 2: Based on examples from the case study, critically examine the importance of building a strong employer brand for talent management.
Task 3: Put forward a list of recommendations and justifications that could be put in place to improve the current situation and strengthen the Trust’s Talent Retention Strategies and Employer Brand Image
