Royal Berkshire NHS: Revolutionizing Internal Comms for Hospital Employees

Moving healthcare comms from company-wide emails and Facebook groups to a secure and engaging employee app with Workvivo

84%

Of employees registered on Workvivo

83%

Active on Workvivo every week

73%

Active on Workvivo every month

As one of the largest general hospital foundation trusts in the UK, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust serves a local population of around 1 million people.

With over 7,000 employees, it’s the main provider of acute and specialist care services for Berkshire West.

People

7,000

Industry

Healthcare

Location

We hadn't seen anything quite like Workvivo within the NHS before

Niall Norbury

Campaigns and Marketing Manager

Before Workvivo

Shortly before partnering with Workvivo, Royal Berkshire decided to rethink its intranet alongside the redevelopment of its website.

Niall Norbury, Campaigns and Marketing Manager at the trust, said the goal was to move to a platform “that could combine a lot of things we were doing separately at that time”.

For example…

Internal comms relied on general company-wide emails
Employee conversations took place in a staff Facebook group
A static, outdated intranet that wasn’t conducive to open communication

All three of these channels were separate and time-consuming. “We had a real issue where each of them put up a lot of barriers to staff,” Niall shared, the main challenge being the lack of computer access in a hospital and healthcare setting.

If you're a porter, if you're a housekeeper, if you're security – you don't really tend to have a computer. Similarly, a lot of doctors and nurses, they're not practically going to be sitting in front of a computer.

With the staff Facebook group, I never quite felt comfortable with the fact that people had to use their own personal accounts to access work information. For me, we want people to be able to put the barriers where they want to; to be able to say ‘this is where my work starts, and this is where it stops’.

Balance was crucial to building a better culture at Royal Berkshire. “It was a mixture of enabling people to put barriers where they wanted while reducing the barriers that we'd accidentally created for them.”

With that in mind, Niall and his team went out to tender for a tool that would streamline and unify their communication and engagement channels. From early on in the process, Workvivo stood out.

I think that was partly because it made us think about comms in a way we hadn't really before. We still had quite a traditional view of internal communication, between the static intranet with maybe a few updates, the separate forum, and then email.

Workvivo got us to think a little bit differently, and we felt that the tool could be a new way of communicating as a whole.

Why Workvivo?

Why did Royal Berkshire decide on Workvivo? For a start, Niall said it ticked all his team’s boxes:

It would enable them to reach more staff
It would give employees more control and capacity over what they see
It was “a much more attractive, intuitive offer”

We hadn't seen anything quite like Workvivo within the NHS before. There were a few platforms that had elements similar to Workvivo, but it just seemed like a much more comprehensive, cohesive package.

We felt that with the other offers, we would have just gotten a nice version of what were doing already. With Workvivo, we felt we could rethink our whole approach to how we send communications out to staff and how we could involve employees in that communication.

Security and compliance

Intranet security is a major priority for virtually every company, but the risks are even greater for a healthcare institution. Niall shared how Workvivo met Royal Berkshire’s security and compliance requirements with ease.

Our cyber team had to check it was okay and safe from a purely security perspective. Then our information governance team also had to consider the impact of essentially creating a bit more of an open platform than we were used to, but still making sure it didn't lead to cases where you might have staff being able to leak stuff outside of the organization.

In both cases, it passed quite comfortably. There was a little bit of a culture change, and I think there were some anxieties going into it, but we've not had a single incident to my knowledge since we've gone live of a staff member taking something from Workvivo and moving it externally.

The staff Facebook group was actually a bigger security risk. A big problem with that was it was very difficult to manage removing people from the space. So, you might have someone who has left the organization months ago, but being in a large employer in the NHS, which is locked to temporary contract workers, we would have to maybe remove a hundred people a month, which was really difficult to keep track of.

With Workvivo, yes, it does have elements of a social media platform, but people still feel that it's quite distinct from other platforms. So we've not run into any kind of issues from that perspective.

Connect and engage your entire organization in one place

The Workvivo effect

Since launching for the Royal Berkshire workforce in April 2023, Workvivo has made waves across messaging and information dissemination, personalization, productivity, satisfaction, survey participation, and more.

“For us as a comms team, it’s been fantastic. The way we work is completely different. We barely send out emails to staff at all now. We have so many more tools at our disposal. With the Workvivo app, we can instantly send push notifications when we've got something that's a really important alert about a change in policy or medical update.”

“We can limit access to certain things, but we can also give people access to platforms which before they had to be on the trust network to receive, but now can access from home.”

I think for the trust as a whole, what's been really good is people have much more control over what they do and don't see.

Before, we would have had to give the same priority to an update about something that was non-critical but interesting for people to know, and an update that was really important for every person to see.

And with Spaces, if you're really interested about learning and training opportunities, for example, you can go and find about them. But if you don't want those in your feed, you don't have to.

Same goes if you're interested in this work we do about sustainability as an organization, which we're really proud of.

Before Workvivo, a lot of comms would go out from a faceless account. Now, because we have to put a face to communications, it’s really helped leadership accountability and visibility. Getting them to come and engage with staff directly through comments, and giving employees a place to ask the CEO questions, for example, has reinforced that open culture we’ve got.

The Workvivo effect

“We can limit access to certain things, but we can also give people access to platforms which before they had to be on the trust network to receive, but now can access from home.”

I think for the trust as a whole, what's been really good is people have much more control over what they do and don't see.

Before, we would have had to give the same priority to an update about something that was non-critical but interesting for people to know, and an update that was really important for every person to see.

And with Spaces, if you're really interested about learning and training opportunities, for example, you can go and find about them. But if you don't want those in your feed, you don't have to.

Same goes if you're interested in this work we do about sustainability as an organization, which we're really proud of.

Before Workvivo, a lot of comms would go out from a faceless account. Now, because we have to put a face to communications, it’s really helped leadership accountability and visibility. Getting them to come and engage with staff directly through comments, and giving employees a place to ask the CEO questions, for example, has reinforced that open culture we’ve got.

With Workvivo, we felt we could rethink our whole approach to how we send communications out to staff

Niall Norbury

Campaigns and Marketing Manager

Spotlight: NHS Staff Survey

From September to October 2023, Royal Berkshire employees were invited to take part in the NHS Staff Survey. For the first time, Niall and his team ran the survey almost exclusively through Workvivo.

We had the highest response rate we've ever had.

Normally, we might try and offer financial incentives to people. But the big thing we did was just host it through Workvivo, and actually I think we had one of the highest response rates of an acute trust in the country.

Royal Berkshire improved upon every single one of its scores from the previous year:

75% of staff feel empowered to make suggestions for improvements
89% are confident in what their responsibilities are
92% feel trusted to do their job
69% feel safe to speak up about workplace concerns
64% feel they can access the right learning and development opportunities
73% are happy with the respect they receive from colleagues
82% enjoy working with their colleagues
20% will probably look for a new job in the next 12 months
75% feel supported and encouraged by their immediate manager

What was also really useful was the ability to segment audiences. Previously, we would have to send out broad comms to everyone in the organization. But we knew that some departments were really engaged, and we didn't need to do any work with them, and then there were other ones that might have no engagement at all.

With Workvivo, we could send a specific message to our catering department or our emergency department, for example. We know that each department has its own peculiarities; some are dealing with people walking in through the front door while others are dealing with GP referrals. Some are really busy during the day, some busy during the night. To be able to tailor the message for a doctor differently to the message for admin staff behind the desk has been really helpful.

Spotlight: Recognition

When it comes to employee recognition, Niall said Workvivo has created a “virtuous circle” – something that’s worlds apart from the organization’s old staff Facebook group.

I think people here are genuinely shocked that this is how a space, which in some ways functions quite similarly to that Facebook group, can be so different.

I think a lot of that is down to how Workvivo prompts you to engage with the platform; how it encourages you to post positive things like shoutouts. We see people who use it as a way to highlight departments who have been really good at helping each other, and saying thank you to departments has been good for them.