agiLab

Through agiLab, National Health Service (NHS) managers are learning from expert academics as well as a wide variety of frontline healthcare staff about how to design and deliver customized and responsive working arrangements that better meet service needs and improve access to good work.

Call to Action

During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, the NHS was suddenly forced to introduce agile working practices for many of its 1.5 million workers. Given the size of the service and the complex nature of healthcare roles, agile working in the NHS is far from simple.

Having read the work of Emma Russell, a Reader at the University of Sussex Business School who studies agile working practices, a human resources leader in the NHS approached Russell to find out more about how agile working could function in the health service.

Later that year, the NHS published its People Plan, a guiding document for how it supports the working lives of NHS employees. In it, the plan proclaims a strategic commitment to supporting more agile working practices: “To become a modern and model employer, we must build on the flexible working changes that are emerging through COVID-19. This is crucial for retaining the talent that we have across the NHS. Between 2011 and 2018 more than 56,000 people left NHS employment citing work-life balance as the reason. We cannot afford to lose any more of our people.”

In 2021, agiLab—a unique collaboration between the NHS, Russell, and her research team at the business school—was created to help the NHS achieve this strategic goal. The partnership brings together academics undertaking cutting-edge research on agile working practices with colleagues across the NHS who have real experience with what does and doesn’t work on the ground. The purpose is to share academic knowledge and best practices so the health service can implement agile initiatives that really work in the organization.

Innovation Description

agiLab is the co-creation of Russell and her research team at the University of Sussex Business School, NHS Employers, and NHS social partnership forums. Run by a steering committee of NHS decision-makers and practitioners and the academic team at Sussex, it is now part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit).

Through agiLab, Russell and team undertake and share research about agile, flexible working to ensure that the NHS can learn from the latest findings. Academics also learn from workers on the frontline about the issues and obstacles they are facing and how these can be overcome.

Over the past four years, agiLab has held 12 knowledge-sharing conferences with NHS workforce leaders, social partnership forum representatives, members of the medical royal colleges, and other NHS stakeholders. Representatives from over 200 NHS trusts and organizations have attended these events. Each conference includes research insights from well-known academic thought leaders across Europe, a focus on future issues, and best practice exemplars presented by NHS colleagues.

Research projects funded by and co-designed with the NHS have explored solutions to some of the challenges presented by implementing agile work in a complex organization like the health service. These include how to ensure that requests for agile work by employees from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are heard and acted on, how to lead a temporally and spatially dispersed workforce, and how to manage conflict between groups with different agile arrangements.

agiLab has generated a variety of resources, including “how to” videos and reports, to help practitioners implement agile working initiatives. These are published on agiLab’s website, which has around 300 members, and on the NHS Employers website.

Innovation Impact

agiLab has grown since its inception as a small regional forum in the southeast of England to a national concern, engaging and influencing NHS trusts and organizations across the U.K. It has provided advice and guidance to the Department of Health and Social Care and the U.K. government.

The agiLab partnership has demonstrated that agile working in the NHS can benefit staff and improve service delivery, especially when employers are able to go beyond simple work-from-home solutions. By exploring the needs of different groups of staff at different levels in the NHS, agiLab has given workers a voice and enabled easier access to good work in the NHS for previously marginalized groups.

Thanks to agiLab, evidence about agile working practices is now better understood and more widely disseminated across NHS networks. This understanding has helped individual NHS trusts develop evidence-based, equitable agile working policies and good practice.

Most recently, the agiLab team has been commissioned by NHS Employers to work on new policy implementation guidance to feed into the 10-year plan. The team is currently working on this project as part of the NHS reform shifts that Parliament member Wes Streeting is driving.

Reference Links

• “agiLab,” agiLab website