Enhance Employee Wellbeing at The Team Level: A Case Study of Healthcare Workers in UK - Lu Wang
Given the multiple pressures on the NHS and its staff, staff wellbeing is increasingly important. While most research and interventions focus on individuals, hospital staff rarely work in isolation. Whether on a ward, in a clinical unit, or delivering community care, healthcare professionals operate in teams in various capacities, where collaboration, pressure, and emotional intensity are shared daily.
Our research thus focuses on team-level wellbeing: how staff experience, express, and support wellbeing collectively through everyday interactions. While much of the wellbeing tools and research focus on individual wellbeing, evidence suggests that wellbeing is not just shaped not just by individual factors, but also by the dynamics within teams, through shared challenges, emotional contagion, informal support, and communication patterns.
The data collected at SWFT will provide SWFT with meaningful insights on staff wellbeing at the team level that go beyond existing staff wellbeing surveys. The active and participatory engagement of different teams of SWFT employees can also foster co-learning through which we hope to contribute to a more accepted and sustainable change by focusing on themes central and critical to staff and building local capacities to address ongoing and future wellbeing challenges. The findings and outputs will be made available to the NHS to help improve staff wellbeing more generally across different trusts.
We have planned a total of four activities for this project. We have already completed part of Activity 2: Interviews with NHS employees across different teams to explore and contextualize staff wellbeing at the team level.
Key outcomes from interviews:
- Get insights into personal experiences, perceptions of wellbeing, and what helps or hinders personal and team wellbeing
- Differences in perceptions of employees’ wellbeing between managers and employees
- Differences in experience of wellbeing among different teams that are location-based and/or function-based (e.g., community service teams, acute care teams etc.).
Changes from original plan:
We planned to recruit eight participants from each of ten teams (80 participants in total). However, so far, 30 participants have signed up. We have completed 18 interviews and one focus group with three participants. More interviews are scheduled in the coming weeks. Recruiting participants within the NHS was challenging due to their demanding schedules and high workloads. Recruitment and data collection are ongoing as we work toward reaching our target number of participants. We are continuing our efforts to engage more NHS participants. These efforts include: (1) meeting with people at SWFT's site office the week on September 25th to introduce our staff wellbeing project and gain support, and (2) meeting with the locality team on September 29th to encourage engagement across areas outside the hospital.
Because of the demanding schedules and heavy workloads of NHS employees, the following changes have been made to the original plan for the other three activities:
- Activity 1: In-situ observations (team-based co-development activity) to understand local and team differences. (a) Observe team interactions and collaboration in daily work settings. (b) Attend staff wellbeing meetings where teams discuss well-being concerns and initiatives.
- Changes: The in-situ observation will be conducted shortly after the meeting with people at SWFT's site office.
- Activity 3: Presenting an evidence brief summarising findings from Activities 1 and 2 to different staff teams for discussion and contextualization (co-development activity).
- Changes: this activity will be conducted after in-situ observation.
- Activity 4: Quantitative study. Develop and pilot a well-being survey to capture staff experiences, behaviours, and perceptions of team well-being.
- Changes: The wellbeing survey will be continuously refined after more interviews are completed. Then, it will be distributed to team members (both employees and supervisors) to capture their experiences at work, their behaviours, and their wellbeing.
Although the project is still in progress, we have begun to generate valuable preliminary insights into staff wellbeing. Through our initial work, it has become evident that employees involved in community service roles are particularly vulnerable to team wellbeing challenges. This important finding has prompted us to expand our engagement efforts to include the locality team, recognising the importance of capturing a better understanding of team wellbeing across areas outside the hospital. Reaching out to the locality team is helping us establish new relationships and networks as well as develop future research initiatives and collaborative activities. The broader engagement will ensure that our findings are relevant and impactful for a wider range of staff, supporting the translation of research insights into meaningful improvements in staff well-being across different settings.
Employees primarily see team wellbeing in terms of their daily experiences with the team. What matters are day-to-day interactional behaviours, not just stated values or training. This differs greatly from the managers’ perspective.