Case Study: Workplace review, engagement & strategy

St Peter’s Hospice is a Bristol based charity that provides care and support to those with an incurable illness. It has a diverse workforce of medics, nurses, operational staff, office and retail workers.

The challenge.

Their In-patient Unit had been extended and refurbished in 2018 but its offices, meeting and training rooms were not reviewed at that time and were requiring attention in terms of condition and layout. An additional office in Long Ashton houses the marketing, fundraising, and retail teams.

The organisation introduced hybrid working for office based employees during the pandemic and they currently work from home approximately 50% of their working week. However, the office is still set up for traditional ways of working with assigned desks, and does not adequately support hybrid working.

What we did.

• Bespoke all employee workplace survey

• Office utilisation observation

• One to one interviews with senior leadership

• Employee focus groups

• Senior leadership visioning seminar

• Workplace strategy recommendations and roadmap

• Recommendations for interim physical and behavioural workplace amendments

The result.

We found that the organisation has a strong shared sense of purpose and culture which is a fantastic basis to work upon. The current offices struggle to accommodate their workforce and provide the flexibility and variety of settings that hybrid working requires. The use of assigned desks and individual private offices can cause problems due to frequent low occupation levels, when other spaces are at a premium. Some wellbeing and productivity aspects such as noise levels, privacy and lighting need to be addressed.

We recommended a schedule of physical and behavioural changes required for their offices to enable a cohesive and collaborative culture, to attract and retain talent, to improve cost and environmental efficiencies, and to increase diversity and inclusion.

"Workwell worked with us on a project to review our offices & ways of working to help us understand our needs and how we might plan for the future in order to attract and retain talent. They took the time to understand our diverse organisation, but backed up with their knowledge and skills they were able to challenge us in the right way to think about things differently. They held employee focus groups and surveys for us which resulted in a vast amount of information being distilled down into a detailed report with clear recommendations and a road map of things we could consider. They were a pleasure to work with and with regular updates, the project was managed well within the timescales set out.”

Hayley Pirouet, Director of People & Support Services, St Peter’s Hospice