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From mid-late September to the end of November, all NHS organisations are invited to take part in the NHS Staff Survey – an exercise targeting 1.5 million employees.
We wait on tenterhooks for the latest update about our response rate to see how much it’s edged up in the last week. At the halfway point, we’re nudging 40% and that’s a bit ahead of the pack so we’re feeling good about that.
For the time being we stick with the strategy of openly celebrating the highest performers. But as the deadline looms, anyone who hasn’t completed it will have received seven discreet but polite emails from the survey company. For me, it’s hard to avoid being a broken record in every internal meeting.
Every year there’s at least one person who asks me this question directly. And, of course, the answer is simple on one level – if you don’t fill it out then how can you expect us to have a decent picture of how things are for staff, and where we need to improve. But all of us also know there’s more to unpack. We feel it when we’ve completed the survey and clicked ‘submit’ – I’ve done my bit, but do I really think that I’ve been able to be honest, and that it will make any difference if I have?
Reasonable enough questions, and we should be pleased if people are asking them. We don’t want sheep working in the NHS, just blindly doing things because they’re told to. That culture of curiosity needs to extend to ‘givens’ like the staff survey too (and I’ll say more about sheep later on).
What’s less reasonable is to just dish out the stock answer to this question and leave it there, as I’ve seen done on many occasions and am almost certainly guilty of doing it myself. Staff deserve more than that.
So, I offer a few more possible angles on this that don’t appear as far as I can see on the staff survey FAQs:
The NHS (and healthcare in general) is a massive system of hundreds of different organisations and thousands of teams. It’s also over one and a half million humans. The humans are the most important bit, not the system. The system wouldn’t exist and couldn’t function without the humans. And it’s not perfect by any stretch but the staff survey is one of the few ways that all those humans get to say important things about what that system and those organisations and teams should be doing. Without the humans speaking up, the system just becomes a bureaucracy and anyone who’s read Hannah Arendt (which I would thoroughly recommend) knows that’s a dangerous thing.
So – fill it in because you’re a human.
Of those millions of people in the NHS you will probably work very closely with a small number – say 10s of people – and occasionally with probably 100s. Some will be close friends and people who are important to you. When you’re filling in the staff survey, you’re not really doing it for yourself, you’re doing it for them. The staff survey is anonymous so can’t pick up individual issues and is specifically designed to shed light on shared issues and trends.
So, filling it out is not going to fix any difficult relationships with your colleagues (sorry), there are other avenues for that, but it can trigger change which benefits NHS staff more widely. Correspondingly, there will be 100s of people out there filling in the staff survey for you.
So – fill it out for them.
The survey asks a selection of questions you almost certainly won’t get asked at any other time. It’s a thorough assessment of how you feel about working for the NHS and you owe yourself the space to really do some thinking about that once a year. Clicking on the little circles is tedious but less so if you treat it as an opportunity to check in on yourself.
Whether you want to shower praise on the NHS via the survey or give it a good kicking, you should really go for it. Answer with brutal honesty. You’ll feel a lot better once you’ve done it. It may also help you formulate new ways of making that point that you’ve been struggling to get heard.
The NHS Staff Survey is by no means perfect and is no replacement for regular appraisal and good honest relationships between staff and managers or supervisors. But it’s not intended to replace those, it’s intended to reflect broad trends and lead to broad improvements. It can only do that effectively if a significant proportion of staff fill it in.
Matts Alvesson and Andre Spicer describe the way some organisations encourage ‘functional stupidity’ amongst employees.
‘Functional’ because it’s helpful to have everyone working in concert. ‘Stupid’ because it relies on that sheep-like behaviour where we just follow, without questioning or thinking.
But across the NHS, we have to strike a balance. Working together on a shared purpose is core to what we do, but so is curiosity, reflection and challenge.
It seems many of us put on sheep’s clothing when it comes to the NHS Staff Survey – we know we should fill it out and so, dutifully, we do just that.
But please – filling out the staff survey should never be something to be blindly compliant with, unless we’re happy for meaningless, vanilla results leading to meaningless, vanilla actions.
Remember, we’re humans not sheep, and filling that survey out as honestly as you can is your annual celebration of that humanity.
So, grab a cuppa and join the 1.5 million voices who understand the NHS from the inside.