St Elizabeth Hospice

Despite the pressures of their workload, the majority of the Hospice’s Senior Management Team took part in a half day Active Ethos® workshop. We looked at the value of creating bespoke, ownable values and getting them embedded in and around the organisation. We then worked together on words and phrases that feel relevant to the Hospice, its objectives and people, and considered how aspects of the current values could be honoured in any rewrite. The discussion and all further actions were in the context of supporting St Elizabeth’s vision: “All in our community affected by life-limiting illness are able to live fully and die with choice and dignity.”.

Following the workshop, members of the SMT and SLT proposed colleagues, service users and associates we could invite to talk about their experiences and share their stories. In addition, we were given access to two recent research projects which dug into people’s relationship with the Hospice, their views and hopes for its future. Encouragingly, most of the suggested interviewees agreed to speak to us, and over the course of the next few weeks we held good quality group and individual interviews. The notes from these conversations, combined with the research notes, gave us a superb insight into the life of St Elizabeth’s, its challenges and opportunities; aspects of team experience in which it had almost no difference from a commercial business and areas in which it is wildly different. We found enormous pride and care amongst people, a wealth of opinions and ideas, and an overwhelming sense of wanting the best for the Hospice and its team.

Given this rich body of material we had an enormous amount of information to pick through to draw up key themes, language used and a sense of what would drive the organisation to be its best self for everyone, every day and deliver on its vision.

Having developed an initial proposal for a values set, we presented them, along with a clear explanation of the logic behind them, to the SMT for their subjective response. To their enormous credit they questioned the proposals intensely – how would they be used in specific situations, how would certain words be perceived by key demographics, what positive change would a particular value deliver? This robust challenge of each of the values demonstrated clearly that each member of the Hospice SMT was thinking hard about their ethos as a tool to drive improvement.

A follow up to gather objective responses a few days later gleaned additional thinking, and we held a number of one to one meetings to discuss these in more detail. This allowed us to review the values set – the logic had been fully approved, but its articulation required a different approach in three of the four proposed values. The rewrite was shared with the SMT and SLT to their unanimous approval, and then taken by team members to their departments. In addition we presented to the Culture and Diversity group, to ensure that the proposals would support their objectives. ​

For Larkenby the final stop was a Board presentation in which we talked them through the process, their team’s input, and the values set. The level of rigour this demonstrated gave Trustees confidence that the values set agreed by the SMT would support the changes that the Hospice needs to make, to help it achieve its vision.