Communications Team

Creating Time to Invest in Improvement and Growth

Creating time to invest in improvement and growth

The Communications and Engagement team is a small team of nine which works to provide an internal and external corporate communications and engagement service for NHS Tayside.

The team has dealt with a range of high profile, organisational reputation issues over the last two to three years which have included periods of highest level scrutiny and an enforced change of leadership.

Our iMatter journey allowed us to recognise that whilst these periods of intense and high profile activity meant that we developed key skills such as being able to work at pace, meeting demanding deadlines and prioritising the needs of the organisation, it was at the expense of more focused learning and development for our team members.

In our iMatter Action Plan we identified what we do well (that was the easy part!) such as supporting each other, finding solutions as a team and always trying to present the organisation in a positive light.

We then thought about what our areas for improvement could be and the focus was to invest some dedicated time and resources in our team to upskill in areas such as digital technologies and multi-media content, which were being requested more and more by the organisation.

Within the confines of our allocated budget, together we came up with the idea of ‘Buddy up Fridays’ where team members with particular skills such as video editing, using design software or working with our public partners offered tutoring sessions for other team members. We will expand this to other colleagues outside of our team who have skills we would like to develop. We have also re-prioritised our wider monthly team meetings, often the first thing to be postponed when other competing deadlines prevail, to build in time for us to forward plan and share our learning.

We have created a poster with our iMatter Action Plan which is displayed in our office and on our office door so other colleagues can see our team goals.

Going through the iMatter journey has enabled us to take time as a team to focus on our own learning and development and build in opportunities for us to continue to improve.