Dean Royles

DeeDee Doke spoke with the outgoing chief executive of NHS Employers
July 2014 | By DeeDee Doke

FROM JULY 2014’s RECRUITER MAGAZINE

DeeDee Doke spoke with the outgoing chief executive of NHS Employers

Three-and-a-half years into his role as chief executive at the NHS Employers organisation, a seemingly out-of-the-blue announcement emerged on 7 July that Dean Royles was leaving for a new job. From September, Royles will join Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust as director of human resources and organisational development.  

The genial Yorkshireman is likely relishing this new opportunity, which puts him squarely at the coalface of the Leeds hospital system’s workforce transformation. And Leeds is among the NHS centres of care which are very much under an unrelenting spotlight at the moment. Revelations of entertainer Jimmy Savile’s trail of rampant sexual abuse of children, staff and vulnerable adults across Leeds hospitals forced the Trust to spend £1m on an in-depth enquiry, it was disclosed just three days after Royles’ new appointment was announced. However, staffing and staff values throughout the NHS continue to be under the most intense scrutiny after appalling human failings in patient care at the Mid Staffordshire [Mid Staffs] Foundation Trust came to light. And at the same time, the NHS faces massive downward pressures on staffing budgets and on its costs overall.

This is clearly no time for the faint-hearted within the NHS. But Royles, as pleasant, smiling and welcoming a host to his Leeds office as he was in June, is not the faint-hearted kind. So when the announcement of his new appointment quoted Royles as describing his new job as “a fantastic opportunity to be joining … at such an exciting time” and “a huge privilege”, this was undoubtedly his genuine reaction, and not mere PR speak.

At NHS Employers, Royles has been leading an organisation that calls itself “the voice of employers in the NHS”. He has also been a director of the NHS Confederation, the membership body for all organisations that commission and provide NHS services. And at the onset of our conversation in June, Royles was keen to clear up common misconceptions about the NHS today as he drank from an NHS Employers mug in a room where writing on the walls seemed to be standard.

“I think when you look at the NHS, it is very easy to see it as one organisation,” he suggests in a 90-minute interview with Recruiter. Instead, he says, it’s necessary to see the vast healthcare service as a multi-faceted industry, and not a ‘one size fits all’ service provider, “where you can have different solutions developing in different areas. So when we look at the workforce in those terms, if we think ‘industry’, then we start to be more imaginative and creative about what the answer of the ‘possible’ is, rather than being fixated on an organisational mindset”.

But at the same time, while different geographies and facilities within the NHS may experience unique staffing needs and require different kinds of solutions, the realisation has dawned that the values of NHS staff must be non-negotiable. To embed the values of a care and compassion-focused culture, Royles contended that one part of the solution is to start from scratch with future NHS staff members when they are first accepted by universities for their training.

“One of the things we are looking at … on the back of Mid Staffs is, how can we look across the industry and that there is a common set of values here?” Royles explains.

“We might describe them slightly differently in different ways,” he acknowledges, “but we want universities to be working with local employers to make sure they [the universities] are recruiting people with the right values in the first place. As they go through their education and are looking to get into employment, and local [NHS] employers are looking to employ them, then testing on those values that they’ve agreed ahead of time. Then as they come into roles, we see how they perform, we are testing them on living those values and then supporting them with that through training, development and access to further education to do it.”

This, he says, is key to how the NHS can potentially have this “broad understanding” of core values “so that we are all looking similarly. People move around the NHS, so their understanding of expectations becomes common in different parts of the system”.

However, he adds, “you can’t just deal with one bit of it” and simply hope that “eventually in 40 years — if we just relied on the tap dripping in — everything changes”. 

Because large segments of the NHS workforce are also recruited straight from the local communities the facilities serve, some NHS organisations are also looking at how to best put situational and judgment testing into their recruitment practises. “How can they measure the people who are coming in? With scenario planning, case studies, group work, exercises, psychometric testing and all those sorts of things,” he explains.

He offers a success story example of an NHS organisation that was experiencing high turnover of healthcare assistants that turned the situation around through their recruitment process. Healthcare assistants support registered staff to deliver care with “very hands on” responsibilities. For instance, they might be called upon to hold the hand of a dying patient, Royles explains, “and there will be things that [they] have to do around blood and vomit and faeces and urine. The question potential healthcare assistants must ask themselves is, ‘[am I] comfortable to be able to do that in a way that offers a patient dignity?’ ” he asks.

To combat the high turnover and give potential healthcare assistants a ‘warts and all’ look at what the job requires, the organisation launched orientation days as part of the recruitment process. Only people who participated in an orientation day are ultimately considered for the jobs. Some candidates subsequently self select out of the running, and others go on to undergo further interviews and assessment in terms of the values. Since the orientation days were added, the turnover of hired healthcare assistants who leave has dropped, Royles says.

“It’s a win-win-win,” he said. “The patients benefit because they are getting people with absolutely core values that are helping and serving them. The organisation wins because they have staff that are respectful, and people talk about the sort of treatment they get, and of course in terms of reducing turnover it is less expensive. So the money that is spent on training, development and recruiting is more focused in a way.”

But for staff not directly employed by the NHS, agencies’ recruitment and values measuring methods come into question. And the answers must be tied up into an overall workforce planning vision, Royles opines.

“I think this will drive a much more strategic approach about working with recruitment agencies. It is not just all about reducing costs of the agency spend, but recognising a more strategic relationship, saying: ‘How can we be sure that the people you are bringing in, that we are using, align with the sorts of values and the care that we want here?’”

Referencing the framework agreements on which many recruitment agencies are contracted (“and there is an ability to go off framework as well”, he adds): “How do we work with those agencies on the framework so we’ve got a better understanding of the expectations in terms of values and not necessarily just about CRB [Criminal Records Bureau, now replaced by Disclosure and Barring Service checks] qualifications and registration with an appropriate professional body?”

He went on to say: “I think at the moment the relationship is typified by saying ‘we have these stopgap opportunities that we need you to send people in for with short notice, and we want you to be able to do that at the drop of a hat. And we want to drive down the costs of you being able to do it.’

“Now a more strategic approach will allow us to be more creative in our planning about, what is a reasonable expectation of the agency workers we are going to need. And how we work with people to be assured that the people we’ve got coming in have the right values? And can we be better at planning and plotting that?”

In the aftermath of his appointment, we asked Royles what he thought his legacy as NHS Employers’ CEO might be for recruitment. Values again was his theme. “I would like to think that we have shifted the dial in two important areas,” he said. “The first is on recruiting staff for values. The second area is the growing awareness of social media in recruitment, and I’m sure this will be significant in the next few years.”

There’s a big job ahead for Royles at Leeds Learning Hospitals. But this looks like a case of the right person for the right job at the right time.

ROYLES’ PHILOSOPHY OF RESOURCING

“Getting the right person in the right job and giving them a more fulfilling job and career. If they are more fulfilled in it we get better patient care. That should be the starting point in the way that we engage with employees. Because if we get that relationship right, then lots of positives flow from it”

ROYLES’ SECRET OF SUCCESS

“Very strong and supportive family connections. The relationship with my immediate and extended family is hugely important to me, and they have been fantastic supporters of what I do and have encouraged it”

DEAN ROYLES' CV

From Sept 2014: Director of HR and organisational development, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

Dec 2010- present: Chief executive, NHS Employers

Dec 2007-Dec 2010: Director of workforce and education, NHS Northwest

Apr 2006-Dec 2007: Director of HR and comms, United Lincs Hospitals NHS Trust

Apr 2003-March 2006: Director of HR Capability and Capacity, DoH

Apr 2001-Mar 2003: Director of HR, East Midlands Ambulance Service

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