PHS: Building psychological safety and shared purpose in a newly formed organisation
The Challenge
PHS was formed in March 2020, weeks before a global pandemic reached the UK. They had to hit the ground running, delivering under real pressure while also doing all the work that comes with being a brand new organisation.
Most organisations spend their first year agreeing how they want to work together. PHS spent it responding to a public health emergency, and did that job well. The conversations about purpose, roles and ways of working didn’t happen as explicitly as they might have liked, due to the pressure they were facing.
Several years on, with a new structure in place and more capacity in the diary, the management team in PHS Science and Analytics decided to go back and have those conversations properly. They wanted to look at psychological safety, decision-making, purpose and role clarity. They also wanted the wider staff to cover the same ground, so that everyone had a say rather than the thinking only happening at management level.
The Solution
We designed two days for the management team and a one-day session for the wider staff, which we ran three times with three different groups. Smaller groups helped to generate discussion and contribution and running the same session three times meant everyone had the same experience.
1. Questionnaire
After the first day we sent a questionnaire to find out which themes mattered most to this group. What came back shaped the second day - we changed the agenda to match what people had told us, so the time was spent on the conversations they most wanted and needed to have. The team also arrived having already done some of the thinking.
2. Two days with the management team
The management team looked at purpose, decision-making, role clarity and psychological safety together, because in practice they were connected. The group took a look at how it works as a team, tested where different types of decision sit, and talked openly about how the new roles are settling.
3. Three sessions with the wider staff
We opened the same themes up to everyone else. Every member of staff had the opportunity to share their thoughts and say what they needed from the management team and each other. Delivering three times allowed for a real discussion in each group while keeping the content consistent across the whole team.
4. Resources for afterwards
We wrote up the themes from the sessions, the priorities the team agreed, a decision-making framework they could test on a familiar piece of work, and prompts for the conversations still to come. These built on what the team had already established.
We facilitated all of it in a coaching style. We asked questions and let the team reach its own conclusions.
The Impact
This was a team that had already proved what it could do under pressure. The work we did together gave them the space to think about how they want things to be going forward.
The outcomes included:
· Work underway to draw the department's existing vision and principles documents into a single statement of what the service is there to do.
· Agreement on a shared framework for decisions, along with a clearer way of making decisions visible to the wider team.
· More open conversation within the management team, including about where challenge could be sharper.
· A shared and realistic view of how the new roles are bedding in, and of what will settle with time.
· An agreed order of priority, so that effort goes first to the things that unlock other work.
· A whole-team away day, run in response to staff saying they wanted more time together as a full group.
The management team is now working through those priorities and continuing the discussion.