Being Productive and Measuring Productivity

What do NHS organisations need to consider?

As a result, NHS organisations need to combine the operational view with the workforce view to create these productivity metrics. Who owns this in the organisation? Who will bring the data sets together and build a suite of supporting reports? Is it HR, divisional leads, or workforce reporting teams? What platform can the metrics be monitored on (and accessed by users), and do the resources exist to pull them together? Creating the metrics is not a one-off piece of work, but needs careful mapping and planning, consulting with various stakeholders, testing, and refining.

This exercise should not be static either; users should be able to interact with the data to perform route case analysis, look at best and worst practice, and monitor interventions over time.

What comes next?

And at the end of the process, you will have the required set of productivity metrics, but these are just the first steps… how do you monitor poor performance? There needs to be a tangible and accessible link to the workforce data and metrics, and trying to do this in silos will be a barrier.

HR and Operational Leads need to quickly know what is impacting poor performance – no longer relying on “gut feel”, but with evidence-based conversations. Can the Leads identify poorly performing specialities and point of delivery, and then assess sickness levels, agency usage, turnover, and training compliance at ease and all in one click? We think this is essential and part of the overall process of creating the metrics and ensuring that they are useful and user-friendly.

How can Liaison Workforce help?

At Liaison Workforce, we have successfully deployed our People Analytics platform to help organisations compliment their workforce data with their activity data. We support them to look at “patient spells” by speciality, and point of delivery to empower HR and Operational Leads to see how workforce performance is impacting their productivity – benchmarking the number of spells per WTE over time. This enables HR and Operational Leads to enter focused interventions and monitor effectiveness over time, to evidence what works, and promote best practice.