This episode of the Care CEO Success Stories podcast features Rebecca Pearson, General Manager of Bupa Care Services in the UK and part of the Bupa Global, India and UK (BGIUK) Market Unit which is comprised of 122 care homes and 10 Richmond Villages.
Rebecca has been with Bupa for over 25 years, having previously been Operations Director for Bupa UK Care Services for eight years and prior to that worked for Bupa UK Insurance, where she held positions including Head of Operational Sales.
With a team of 10,000 people caring for around 7,000 residents, engagement from the team is vital.
On this episode, Rebecca discusses how to secure such engagement, including:
- Appreciation of how important engagement and connection is with your care team who deliver care to residents.
- How to drive forward quality and outcomes relying on a direct connection with those delivering care on the front line.
- Answers to challenges encountered when developing a care business often lay with people working on the front line.
- Asking questions of front line care staff to discover what makes the job difficult and how things can be improved, and using that information to inform boardroom decisions through a continuous feedback loop.
- Establishing ways to support your care team in making things easier and more rewarding that ultimately improves resident care.
- Being able to adapt standardised practices for communication to suit the needs of different groups of people to ensure constant engagement with the team.
- Using “engagement champions” on the ground at each care home who feedback information from the frontline to the board room through monthly meetings as well as disseminating information to the team itself about improvement.
- Utilising feedback on changes to ways of working to improve the delivery of those changes and ensuring they are working for the team on the ground.
- The benefits of using engagement champions in homes to discuss how things are going with the team and enabling them to ask questions directly rather than through the management team.
- Hosting events to discuss what has been achieved and things to celebrate as well as anything coming in the pipeline where openness and honesty are actively encouraged.
- How “loving work” has become a mantra for Bupa internally – and how changes to the business are made with this in mind.
- Building confidence in the team that they can be open, as well as crating a culture where everyone feels happy and comfortable.
- Using a biannual survey to gather information on how everyone is feeling being a part of the team and what changes can be made to drive continued improvements.