Sheffield Children’s shortlisted for national award

The Communications team at Sheffield Children’s has been shortlisted for two campaigns in the ‘Internal Communications and Staff Engagement Award’ category of the national The NHS Communicate Awards.

This award acknowledges the successful and sustained use of internal communications to engage staff, drive organisational change, or change an organisation’s culture.

The Trust’s ‘Thank You Fortnight’ campaign in January 2022 was last week announced as a finalist in the health and wellbeing category of the awards and has this week been announced as finalist in the internal communications and staff engagement category.

We covered the key elements of this campaign in our previous news article about the health and wellbeing award on our website.

This time, we also made the shortlist with a second campaign around our successful appraisal season in 2021. We exceeded our campaign target in 2021, with 94% of our colleagues receiving an appraisal. The second season in 2022 maintained a high completion rate of 90% and was accompanied by an even stronger focus on the quality of the conversation between colleagues and their managers, to ensure we were making the most of this opportunity to support the wellbeing and development of colleagues.

Ruth Brown, Chief Executive of Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We established an Appraisal Season in 2021 to give a more intensive focus to appraisals and their importance – with the aim of increasing the number of colleagues with a recent appraisal.

“Appraisals are a part of regular conversations with all our colleagues and so important as an opportunity for our colleagues to more formally reflect, learn, discuss wellbeing, plan objectives for the year ahead and identify training needs to support their development.

“Our Communications team brought this aim to life with an extensive communications campaign that supported our Learning and Organisational Development team to go above and beyond the 90% target.”

2,870 (94%) of eligible colleagues received an appraisal during the season and we received 10,659 hits on our appraisal intranet page – equivalent to more than three visits for every Trust employee.

Sheffield Children’s will find out whether they have won at the online awards show on Thursday 15 September.

The NHS Communicate Conference and Awards is delivered in partnership with NHS Providers, NHS Confederation and the Centre for Health Communications Research (CHCR).