Baptistcare
1 - The Great Facilities Tour of WA
2 - Improving Leadership Behaviour
The Great Facilities Tour of WA
Background
Integral has enjoyed a partnership arrangement with Baptistcare for many years providing assistance in coaching, 360° surveys, meeting facilitation and executive team development. More recently, Integral has been invited into Baptistcare facilities in metropolitan and regional locations to offer facilitated discussions with operational staff who deliver residential and clinical care service within their aged care venues.
The Challenge
Aged care service provision has many inherent challenges: accommodating ongoing requirements for COVID-safe operations, enduring changes from the Royal Commission Investigation into Aged Care service Provision, always being prepared for forthcoming Accreditation Assessments at facilities and inherent staff shortages in the health-related industries in WA. These factors have culminated to put further significant stress on aged care facilities. Maximising staff engagement and input in this dynamic and often stressful environment is an ever-present need at Baptistcare.
The Solution
Integral was invited to begin offering workshops within Baptistcare venues across the state to enable staff to discuss and consider how they undertake their work. Beginning with a conversation on what they most enjoy about their contributions, these workshops offer a safe place for staff to identify what barriers prevent them from maximising their work input. It was also an ideal opportunity to stimulate an investigation on what techniques (within their sphere of influence) are available for them to overcome (or at least, lessen) these barriers.
These workshops have been energetic, engaging and thought-provoking and are specifically customised to the unique needs of the participating group. Tools or practices are shared with the participants and practice time is offered to enable them to “test-out” new ways of approaching their work. A collective “book of proceedings” is generated from each experience and these high-level ideas and participant responses are shared with facility managers for the potential of follow up and further exploration. A cumulation of ideas from across the state will also be shared with the Baptistcare Senior Leadership Group.
Integral took on the challenge to build a robust and customised approach using Baptistcare’s values and behaviours to underpin this development opportunity. Working collectively, Integral targeted workshop outcomes to support Baptistcare values, so outcomes from the workshops were relatable to the organisation’s culture and its vision for the future.
Integral was extremely conscious that aged care services have pressures and responsibilities associated with service delivery that means professional development interventions must be designed to maximise staff engagement and minimise staff absence from work. For this reason, these workshops were held on site and scheduled on dates and in times that maximised staff opportunities to participate.
The Results
Regularly engaging all facility staff in conversations on topics that matter to their work, is a significant step that Baptistcare has taken. Integral facilitators often personally witness a sense of jubilation in workshop participants as they participate in collective problem solving to their challenges and feel the power of support emanating from others within the workshop.
Inherently, these sessions demonstrate senior leadership group support toward these vital facility staff. In addition, this program has created a wave of energy and enthusiasm within these Baptistcare facility locations (as recognised by residential managers) directly supporting a more constructive Baptistcare culture in many locations.
Improving Leadership Behaviour
Background
Faced with the opportunities and challenges around leadership and culture, our client Baptistcare, one of WA’s largest aged care providers, knew they needed to partner with the right consultants. While many of their issues were not unique to their organisation, they required a partnership with a team who would take the time to understand their specific needs and customise interventions to suit. Integral was engaged to help develop leaders across all levels of the organisation and support the overall culture change process. Over a period of more than three years now, we have delivered a series of programs in partnership with our client designed to develop leadership skills and improve organisational performance and culture.
Testimonial
“Baptistcare has been on a cultural journey since 2017, we are working on creating a culture where ‘Our people’ and ‘Our customers’ are at the centre of every decision we make, where collaboration is the norm and we work as one team towards one goal – ‘A Meaningful Life’ for all.
In 2017 our people told us that they felt our Values didn’t feel right anymore so we went on a journey where our people led the creation of a new set of Values and behaviours. The team at Integral have partnered with Baptistcare to help on this journey, they have been instrumental in lifting our leadership capability and influencing the culture we aspired to have. This has involved leadership development, 360 degree feedback profiling, coaching, Executive team work, skills development and mediation services. Integral have always delighted me in every interaction, they have are not only incredibly responsive, they are passionate about how we achieve our goal on changing our culture and this has been a true partnership. Without the support of the team at Integral we would not be seeing the positive results we are – which include a lift in leadership capability and importantly a significant uplift in our people and culture engagement scores, which are now just under World Class engagement levels.”
Amanda Vivian, Chief of Support Services, Baptistcare
The challenge
Staff feedback in 2017 indicated that there was room for improvement in leadership behaviour, staff engagement and truly living the Baptistcare values. With some new members on the leadership team, the time was right for a new approach to leadership and culture change and Integral were invited to assist.
Our solution
One of the most important elements of this tailored solution was that it started at the Executive level, with the Executive team and sixty senior leaders completing a 360-degree survey and undergoing subsequent personal coaching. The assessment tool provided clarity about the realities of the current state to more accurately measure and diagnose the styles, competencies, dynamics and overall climate individuals were operating in. The coaching further highlighted the specific challenges and opportunities and facilitated clear action plans to work towards improvement goals. This opportunity for feedback and coaching is continuing to be offered to all new leaders and the original cohort are reassessed.
Our lead consultant has also worked with the Executive team over a number of years, facilitating strategic planning retreats, providing individual coaching (along with other members of the Integral coaching team) and providing input and feedback about the Executive team dynamics and behaviours. This has resulted in a great deal of trust being build between Integral and the senior leaders of the business.
With senior leaders first doing the work themselves, they led by example and became champions for the rest of the organisation, which in itself contributed to a shift in workplace culture. Coaching and skills development initiatives were then rolled out across corporate and operational departments covering strategic and frontline themes such as Root Cause Analysis, Presenting Skills, Coaching Skills, Unconscious Bias, The Leadership Challenge, and Communication. It is this blended approach of diagnostic assessments, coaching and training that has been most powerful in effecting positive change for this organisation.
Further work
Integral continues to partner with Baptistcare in the provision of 360 feedback, coaching, facilitation of leadership forums and engagement with the Executive team. It is truly encouraging to know that our partnership with Baptistcare has contributed to increased scores in the annual engagement survey results and positive shifts in leadership behaviours.
