Senior leader reflections: Emily Boaz

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust runs Good Hope, Heartlands, Queen Elizabeth and Solihull hosptials, and Solihull community services.

My decision to join UHB stemed back to when my dad had a heart attack and received treatment and care at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. Prior to that I had never really considered working within the NHS, but he had been really positive about the incredible care he had received that it had sparked my interest. Before joining UHB I studied Business Management and Human Resources (HR) at Cardiff University and was working for a small social care charity.

I applied for my first job as an HR advisor at UHB in 2014 and when a secondment opportunity arose to work as an HR Manager, I went for it before successfully applying for a permanent role as an HR Manager. I started to move more into the organisational development (OD) side of workforce in 2019 and become the Senior OD Manager in 2021. Good OD to me is really about improving the performance and health of systems by amplifying the humanity in our organisations, enabling people to flourish, thrive and have meaning in their work.

When I was younger I wanted to be a paediatric nurse. I started working in a care home when I was 16 and soon realised that working a shift pattern wasn’t for me. But I really enjoyed working with people so my path into HR came from there really.

My favourite thing about my job is my team. We work really well together and all look out for and after each other. We constantly look to challenge each other around our thinking and ideas to come up with new ideas to take forward across the Trust. They have a lot of enthusiasm and want to make a difference and make things better for our staff. ?The second thing I enjoy about my job is that ability to look at something and try to see how we can do it differently and make it better. ?We can also have a little bit of fun while we do it, which I think is really important when you’re in work.

The most challenging thing we face is that we are only a small team and there's so much more we want to do to make a real impact. But hopefully as we grow and deliver on the work that we are doing as a team this will come.

We have quite a lot of variety in the work that we do within OD and don’t really have a ‘typical’ day. Our work comes from looking at and understanding lots of different pieces of data to understand what is it that staff are saying would make a difference to their roles, whilst also helping the Trust to deliver. This can be from rolling out and delivering the Talent Management Framework, developing retention strategies based on the exit interview responses, improving the experience of staff starting in the organisation through our 100 day engagement sessions,?to going and working with teams to improve?their experiences at work and enable better team working. ?

As someone in leadership, one of the most important things we can do is to remember your team is a group of individuals – not a machine. Not everyone can deliver the same thing every day and I don’t expect them to. It's okay to be human and for people to have down days, which is why I like to really get to know my team so that I can understand if they are having issues.

Everybody does such a serious job and there's so much stress and so much pressure in the NHS, especially at the moment, so we inject some fun within our work to enjoy it. If you can have those moments where you can laugh and joke and work together, I think you then end up with a much more positive experience at work.

I also encourage them to learn from their mistakes, so if something has gone wrong – what can we do differently in the future and how can we share this learning? ?

We do a virtual daily catch up every morning and on Monday our catch-up is very work focused, so we discuss what do we need to do and what we want to achieve. Then for the rest of the week, the catch-ups are a mix of work and what is happening in our lives. This is really important to me as we all work remotely and only have a face to face meeting as a team once a month. So the daily catch-ups help us to feel connected.

I think that if we can be kind to each other, that makes such a difference in the world of work. I spend time as a manager looking after my team, but equally, it means a lot to me when they ask me how I am; that has quite a big impact, especially as managing staff can be tricky and sometimes people forget that you are a person, as well as a manager. ?Kindness for me is so critical and so key to everything we do.

We know that offering flexible working options makes working at UHB more attractive, so we decided to do a focus on that this month and came up with the idea of Flexi February!

Flexible working isn’t a new concept but it’s still one that comes up frequently, with staff and managers asking how it works and how they can implement it. It’s a subject that is mentioned in our exit interviews and we want to make it as simple as possible to implement. So we offer managers training around the different types of flexible working, and support to think differently about it. ?

We know that flexible working can really have a really positive impact for our staff. However, there are also lots of misconceptions about flexible working. For example, it’s not just about working from home. Homeworking is just one of many other options that are considered to be flexible working. We hold drop-in sessions for managers, to help them to support staff who are requesting flexible working.

Flexible working is going to be something that we will continue to talk about at this Trust. It’s important to listen to those for who working flexibly has had an impact on their working lives and their ability to manage those pressures outside of work.

It’s about recognising that one size won’t fit all – some people thrive on day-to-day interaction with colleagues at work while others might prefer a mix. We want to help staff and managers to find that balance which works for everyone.

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