I wanted to highlight to you a course that I am running via Proficio. I’ve been running this course for a number of years and I’m delighted that in 2022 we will return to the original one-day, face to face format after offering this as a shorter webinar for the last two years.

The course is run through Proficio, but is open to both University of Essex postgraduate student and external participants. If you would like to sign up for the course, you can do so at this link: 

A Practical Guide to Conducting Qualitative Research Interviews (6^th May 2022)

This course aims to provide a practical and supportive guide for those wishing to use research interviews to collect qualitative data. Research methods courses and texts offer a wealth of information to students on types and uses of interviews and the advantages and disadvantages of their use, but there is little guidance for those new to interviewing on how interviews can be conducted in order to reveal high quality and usable data for your research. Simply turning up with a list of questions is often not enough to achieve the depth of insight which you require.

The session will facilitate discussion on the following topics:

• How to arrange and prepare for interviews
• Asking the right questions and getting to the truth
• Robust and ethical practice for interviewing
• Building trust and dealing with difficult interviewees
• What to do after the interview and how to handle your data.

There is a focus on practical practice exercises which prepare students who might be interviewing for the first time to enable them to get good quality data. There is a focus on overcoming challenges and hurdles as they come up. This will be combined with additional learnings from more recent experiences of how to adapt interviews to unconventional circumstances.

For more information see: https://shortcoursesgateway.essex.ac.uk/Course?courseref=EBS%3aPGQ&dates=0

This summer I will be running a three-part series on improving your writing mindset via Proficio.

Writing is hard! Creating draft after draft, editing, responding to feedback – none of this is glamorous. Rewards are distant and producing good quality writing requires deep concentration and focus. Yet, our academic careers and reputation depend on our ability to produce manuscripts, a thesis, books, grant proposals and other forms of writing to communicate our research and contribute to a growing body of knowledge within our discipline.

The aim of this webinar workshop series is to provide a safe space to think about your writing goals, where successes and failures are part of the process. We encounter many challenges in our writing. These challenges often stem from psychological barriers which prevent us from moving forward.

Aims

Academic careers today are often dominated by performance measurement and a culture of long and unsociable working hours, constant rejection and a ‘publish or perish’ mindset. Whilst acknowledging that these systemic pressures exist, it is important to prioritise our mental health and wellbeing.

Each workshop will be useful on its own, or you can sign up to all three sessions via the links below:

25^th June 2021: Writing Mindset Series (1): Overcoming psychological barriers to academic writing

In this workshop Dr Danielle Tucker will share her experience of overcoming psychological barriers to writing. We will use a cognitive behavioural coaching approach to help you avoid procrastinating, overcome perfectionism, become more resilient to writing setbacks, and manage stress.

Benefits of Attendance:

• Help you create a nourishing writing mindset which positions writing as a top priority for your career, but does so in a why that is empowering rather than threatening.
• Sharing the experience of writing with others demystifies the process of writing. It is an opportunity to share challenges and overcome barriers experienced by many.
• Help you develop resilience-building strategies to help you stay on track with your writing journey

23^rd July 2021: Writing Mindset Series (2): Developing resilience in academic writing 

As a junior scholar, one professor once told me that the secret to publishing a lot was submitting a lot – the more you share you work with others, the faster you will improve and find what works. Putting our writing out into the world is hard. Whether that is submitting a paper to a conference or journal or sending it to a supervisor or peer for feedback, the process makes us vulnerable. It opens us up to the prospect of rejection – that someone will tell us that our work is not good enough, that we are not good enough! This is an intimidating process, and an emotional one.

In this workshop we will explore resilience as a process of managing emotions. Using cognitive behavioural coaching techniques, we will examine some of the thoughts we have about rejection and criticism and why these impact us so profoundly. This workshop will help you to develop your own resilience-building strategies to help you to increase your tolerance of dealing with frustrations and stay on track with your writing journey.

Benefits of Attendance:

• Increase your tolerance of dealing with frustrations without the threat of failure.
• Sharing the experience of writing and receiving feedback with others demystifies the process of writing.
• Help you develop resilience-building strategies to help you stay on track with your writing journey

20^th August 2021: Writing Mindset Series (3): Creating habits and routines to support your writing

Writing goals require persistence and consistency. This is challenging because progress can be difficult to see and after a while, our motivation wains. In this session we will explore why the way we feel about these small actions (habits) may not be doing justice to the power that they have over our ability to achieve.

There are many schools of thought on what constitutes a ‘regular’ writing practice but we all have different constraints on our time, space, resources and level of focus. This workshop will explore a range of different strategies for building writing into our everyday lives (not necessarily every day or even every week). Building and sustaining impactful habits and routines, not only for writing, but to support our mental and physical well-being, will improve personal effectiveness and boost self-regulation.

Benefits of Attendance:

• Help you develop routines that are rewarding and inspiring to maintain a consistent and regular writing practice.
• Increase self-awareness of how to develop time management strategies which work for our own individual lifestyles and constraints.
• Identify thoughts and emotions which may drain your willpower, so that you can develop routines which better reflect your values and feel rewarded every time you complete them

Further information

This course is run and managed through Proficio, at the University of Essex. This platform hosts short courses open to postgraduate research students, academic staff and professionals at universities and other organisations around the world.

This session is applicable whatever career stage you are at. As you will come to see the ‘writing process’ contains many parts, so whether you are a PhD student working on your initial ideas, reviewing literature, in the final stages of writing up your thesis, or a postdoc working on future journal articles and grant proposals, you can benefit from this session. 

Integrated care is a key feature of the future of health and social care in the UK with the NHS Long Term Plan targeting all regions of the UK to operate Integrated Care Systems by August 2021. Successful integration also needs to include social care providers and private and voluntary providers of social care. Becoming integrated is a key challenge which has not received enough attention.

Essex Business School is seeking a research assistant to join the Mid-Essex health and care integration research project. This is the latest phase in a longitudinal project examining an example of a ‘place-based’ integration of single services and pilots, with a longer term aim for integration to be a cultural shift for all workers in health and social care, at all levels, across all services and in all that they do. This project is looking to understand how multiple stakeholders within the health and social care context can create a shared vision for care integration through storytelling and sensemaking.

The main responsibility of this role is to analyse a variety of data from an ethnographic study of health and social care integration in Mid-Essex. You will systematically analyse interviews, documents and observation notes, through a lens of storytelling and narrative development. You may also be asked to undertake other administrative duties relating to the project.

The successful candidate will have good qualitative analysis skills (demonstrated by previous academic and empirical research experiences e.g. student or commercial projects). As the post requires the post holder to understand various stakeholder perspectives in a complex and emerging health and social care context, critical thinking skills and excellent data management are required. The work will be carried out remotely and coordination with the research team will be via virtual meetings. The candidate should have access to their own computer and will provide their own workspace. There is considerable flexibility in working hours which can be arranged around the candidate’s own schedule.

The post could be most suited to those wishing to develop a future academic/research career, who can use this opportunity to develop a good understanding of the academic discipline of organisation studies and management. It would also be suitable for those who have an interest in health and social care integration or policy implementation. 

This post is for a fixed term, part time (approx. 0.2FTE) for 3 months – 8 hours a week.

If you would like to apply for this position, please send a copy of your CV and brief cover letter outlining how you meet the criteria for this role to dtucker@essex.ac.uk by 12noon on Tuesday 6^th April 2021

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

The main duties of the post will include:

1. To analyse interviews, documents and observation notes from an ethnographic study of health and social care integration in Mid-Essex.

• To identify the evolution of important narratives used by stakeholders in creating a shared vision for integrated care.

• To discuss these findings with the research team and iteratively develop core themes and mechanisms used over time.

• To write a report detailing an overview of findings from the study and to contribute to papers, articles, reports or other publications as appropriate to career stage and discipline norms.

MAIN DUTIES OF THE POST

Research

• To independently perform an initial analysis of interviews, documents and observation notes from an ethnographic study of health and social care integration in Mid-Essex.
• To work under the direction of the faculty members involved in the project to create and apply a theoretical lens to this analysis which will address research objectives set out by the research team.
• To contextualise the analysis within a complex, multi-stakeholder policy context
• To ensure that the analysis is methodologically rigorous and ethically appropriate
• To organise and present data in a summary format which reflects the key findings of the study (for example, identifying illustrative quotations, data structures or key examples of themes). 
• To produce a brief report detailing the data analysis process and an overview of findings from the study.

Administrative

• To attend regular research meetings with the project team and summarise research progress.

Leadership and Citizenship

• To engage in discussions with the wider project team about future research ideas, publications and funding applications.

These duties are a guide to the work that the post holder will initially be required to undertake. They may be changed from time to time to meet changing circumstances.

Tucker, D., Hendy, J., & Chrysanthaki, T. (forthcoming) How does policy alienation develop? Exploring Street-Level Bureaucrats’ agency in policy context shift in UK telehealthcare. Human Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267211003633

Abstract

Policies can fail when frontline staff feel they have limited influence on policy implementation (powerlessness), or that policy has little or no personal meaning (meaninglessness) – they become alienated from the policy. But, how does this alienation develop? In this paper we ask whether policy alienation might be viewed as a process that develops over time: a process that ebbs and flows, interacting with the policy landscape as it shifts, rather than a psychological state. Feelings of alienation can be shared across groups of actors, as they collectively shift and initiate change. This study uses participant observation and interviews with front-line employees as they navigate a UK Government Policy introducing telehealthcare to improve health management of patients with chronic conditions. We find: i) cumulative misalignment between different policy implementation contexts allows policy alienation to develop over time, ii) the shared experience of alienation in co-worker groups contributes to further misalignment, iii) front-line staff use their discretion to respond to policy alienation, which has the power to enhance or destroy policy implementation. We offer an alternative perspective for understanding how policy alienation can be prevented and policy implementation can be enhanced.

Keywords Public policy, implementation, alienation, telehealth, telecare, street-level bureaucrats, Qualitative

Originally published on Essex Blogs on the 19th January 2021

A key issue on the interface of health and social care service delivery is integrated care. Care integration has been a key policy focus for successive governments (Health and social care act, 2012, NHS 5 year forward, NHS Long term plan). However, full integration has not yet been achieved. The UK government has invested substantial resources into developing integrated care systems (e.g. Vanguard sites, ICS frontrunners) but progress may be limited if momentum is lost. COVID-19 has meant health and social care organisations are facing sustained pressures and have understandably had to focus on ‘firefighting’ during the crisis.

Prior to the pandemic, localised systems across England were rolling out programmes of work aiming to achieve better care integration. This is an incremental process focused on consistently building collaborative relationships between organisations with different cultures, discourses and priorities. Moving beyond organisational silos requires persistent cultural long-term change. However, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic has required organisations to redeploy resources and personnel, create and maintain crisis support services and create systems to prioritise the most vulnerable patients. Health and social care workers are exhausted and working under highly stressful conditions. We do not yet know how significant the disruption to the long-term change agenda of achieving integrated care will be and how long it will last. How will short-term virus control measures (e.g. social distancing) affect integrated practice, and how will perceptions of integration and what this might look like be irreversibly changed by long-term system changes?

Our research studying policy content evolution in UK telehealthcare (Tucker and Hendy, 2020) suggests that the impact on policy implementation could be momentous. Disruption of organisational routines can change the way that employees make sense of strategic objectives and over time may change the way that integrated care is conceptualised by those who implement it. As policy contexts shift, this can lead to misalignment in policy implementation and could lead to a scenario where frontline care workers become disconnected from an integrated care policy agenda which was previously widely supported.

To understand how and to what extent this is happening, we need to study closely the shared meaning of organisational members. By capturing and understanding these changes and understand the new shared visions for integrated care which emerge, we can bring together policy makers and policy implementers to avoid policy disillusionment and keep integrated care on the agenda of health and social care partners as they adjust to new ways of working. This is key in helping to understand how policy should change to accommodate for any shift that may have happened during the COVID 19 pandemic.

You can find out more about my current research project understanding the shared vision for Mid-Essex Integrated Care on my website

Originally published at by Nutcracker Collective on the 10th January 2021

Guest blog for Nutcracker Collective 2021 goal setting programme

At this time of year, setting goals for the New Year is a process many of us undertake. A lot of goal setting experts will teach you about SMART goals. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebound (Doran, 1981). It is true that a lot of goals benefit from being more specifically measured. For example, if you want to lose weight you might measure calories or if you want to write a book you might commit to writing a certain number of words a day. As long as the way you measure a goal is within your control this can be a great system (Latham & Locke, 1991).

However, sometimes focusing on measuring a goal can seem artificial and counterproductive to making progress. Arbitrarily quantifying behaviour, tracking and setting targets can sometimes become a distraction and can feel constrained. Research shows that in some circumstances an increase in extrinsic measurement of a goal using targets and reward systems can lead to a decrease in intrinsic motivation to work towards that goal. This is referred to as the crowding-out conjecture (Frey and Jergen, 2001).

Qualitative Goals

In 2020, I experimented with setting some more qualitative goals alongside more traditional ones. One career related goal that I had going into 2020 was to increase my visibility as an academic expert in my field. I wanted to do this so that my work can have more impact and reach a wider audience. I considered several ways to quantify this including counting my social media followers and the number of citations on my papers, but none of these felt right. From previous experience I had found that attempting to quantify my reach in this way lead to micro behaviours which are short-term and insincere. 

I experimented with different wording of my goal and eventually settled on setting a goal to build my academic reputation. I chose ‘build’ over other verbs such as ‘create’ or ‘increase’ because it symbolised for me laying a clearer foundation for my reputation and therefore behaviours that would consolidate work I had already done in the last 10 years. It also represented creating a framework for new projects to move forward with throughout the year. One of the key purposes of goals is to direct activity toward the goal and away from activities unrelated to the goal(Latham & Locke, 1991) and in this way, the goal served as a grounding to me on what was important and helped me decide what to say yes to and say no to as the year progressed. 

Sitting here in January 2021, how do I know if I achieved this goal of building my reputation? The answer is that I can ‘feel’ the progress that I have made. I can observe that the number of opportunities which have come my way has increased from last year – which means that people know who I am and what I do more than they did last year. I can also reflect that I have a much clearer sense now of which of those opportunities I should prioritise, and I feel more comfortable saying ‘no’. This is not because I have become more assertive at refusing requests, it is because I feel more confident in the choices that I make – knowing what will help me make progress on this goal and what will not. All of this shows me, in a qualitative way that I made significant progress on that goal. 

So if you want to set some more qualitative goals in 2021:

• Give careful consideration of phrasing and meaning. Pay attention to the choice of verb you use to articulate your goal. It might be helpful to practice some visualisation, think about what would achieving this goal look or feel like for me.
• Adopt a proactive and action orientated approach – not every goal needs a quantitative measurement, but making progress in a focused direction requires an action plan. This may not be a linear journey but taking steps to make progress is key. 
• Review your goal progress. Qualitative goals require regular review, and this review will look different to how we track measurable goals. Reflections might be more emotional and might require a deeper critique of our values.

Support Going Forward

If you are interested exploring with us a more values centred approach to goal setting in 2021, and a safe space to work on your goals where successes and failures are part of the process, you might consider joining our 2021 Goal Setting Programme and Community by:

• Following Nutcracker Collective on Eventbrite
• Registering for the 2021 Goal Setting Programme – Identifying Your Values Workshop
• Registering for the 2021 Goal Setting Programme – February Monthly Subscription
• Joining the Nutcracker Collective Community group on Facebook
• Booking a free consultation with Nutcracker Collective to talk through coaching and training services
• Contact details for Danielle Tucker (@datucker on Twitter or email: dat21@hotmail.co.uk)

References

• Doran, G. T. (1981). “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives”. Management Review. 70 (11): 35–36
• Frey, B. S. & Jergen, R. (2001) Motivation Crowding Theory. Journal of Economic Surveys. Vol 15(5): 589-611 
• Latham, G. P. & Locke, E. A. (1991). Self regulation through goal setting. Organizational behavior and Human Decision Processes. Vol 50(2) 212-247
• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (1990). A theory of goal setting and task performance. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall
• Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

Originally published on 20th October at EssexBlogs as part of the Influencing Change in Business series

In the context of organisational change, identifying and organising the various roles of change agents remains a challenge for practitioners and scholars alike. Our recent research findings underline the importance of designing a coherent system of agents, determining their role during the process, and how this may need to change as projects evolve. To understand better the role that change agents currently play in your organisation, why not ask them the following questions?

1. What do you think your role is?

Much of the difficulty in understanding how to utilise change agents effectively lies in the many different interpretations that the role could play in managing change. The complexity of this role is often underestimated. This results from a lack of understanding of how organisations and individuals in the role make sense of their responsibilities and positions in the change process, especially when these positions are temporary or as a side-project to their main job load.

Some change agents may see their role being to promote innovation to others and motivate others to adopt new technology or practices, others to offer their expertise in local decision making and become an influencer at a local level, still others may see themselves as bringing together disparate groups and facilitating cooperation across organisational boundaries. Whilst all of these are valuable, the activities and measures of success for these roles are different and if you are not on the same page, there may be disputes over their perceived effectiveness.

2. Who are you working with?

Understanding the relationships that change agents have with others in their organisation can help you to define their role and maximize their impact. Our research found that if a change agent has more vertical relationships, they may be a useful influencer within the organisation. They will likely be successful at making recommendations about what will work and what resistance change will face. A change agent who has more lateral relationships may be most effective at encouraging cooperation from different groups, and to communicate across boundaries. This is helpful in the implementation stages of change management to bring together disparate groups to solve problems.

3. Where do you want to go next?

Our ongoing research examines the career paths of change agents, to understand how a secondment or project-defined role can enhance, redirect, or stall an individual’s career progression. Our early findings suggest that for some change agents, the role represents a shift from an area of technical expertise (e.g. clinical practice) to a career in project or change management – they seek out opportunities to become a ‘career project manager’. This requires a shift in their personal identity and may require coaching and support. Others choose to return to their former role but hope to garner more influence within their organisation, becoming a knowledge resource for understanding the change history and philosophy – a legacy building approach. These individuals would benefit from having formal opportunities to transfer their knowledge to others in their future work placements.

The above is based on work published in the following:

Tucker, D. A. &  Cirella, S. (2018) Agents of Change: Insights from Three Case Studies of Hospital Transformations. In Research in Organizational Change and Development, edited by Noumair, D. & Shani, A, Vol 26: 307-340

Find out more about our MSc Organisational Change Management

Article published in BusinessTime in Essex, on 1st June 2020

Dr Danielle A. Tucker

As the COVID-19 pandemic has rocked the world of work in recent months, HR professionals have been working tirelessly to implement new policies (e.g. Furlough, remote working), but as we begin the return to work there is a need for HR to turn its attention to the impact of COVID-19 on the future workplace. Based on my experience of working with organisations and educating HR professionals, here are my top three priorities for HR professionals to think about.

1. Ensuring equality in the treatment of employees

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many inequalities and inconsistencies within society and the way we work. School closures have placed a heavier burden on parents, those with physical or mental health conditions may be struggling more with isolation. Every employee will have experienced challenges during the pandemic, but these will be different for each of them. Likewise, the coping strategies which employees have available to them will be varied. HR professionals are in a unique position of being able to see the scope and variation in these challenges, but it is crucially important that they avoid the urge to compare or make judgements about the impact severity of one person’s experiences over others. What may seem like a minor inconvenience to one employee could be a significant stress trigger for another. Each challenge needs to be viewed within the context of that employee’s whole life circumstances, which they may or may not openly disclose.

What does this mean for reward systems and performance management? Many organisations may have set monthly or annual performance targets for employees which may no longer be achievable. Where these targets are linked to reward or promotion, it is important to ensure that individuals or groups are not adversely disadvantaged. This may mean that a performance/reward system needs to be temporarily abandoned or altered in some way. It will be important to listen to employees and be responsive to reports of these systems placing undue stress on individuals. There are lots of limitations to performance related pay systems under normal circumstances, the pressures of the pandemic may have exaggerated these problems further.

2. Managing change

Over the last couple of months, workplaces have likely seen more changes in work practices in a concentrated period of time than ever before. For some workplaces this may have been the move to remote working, for others it could be pauses in production or loss of links with suppliers/customers. But also, potential new opportunities may have arisen. The pandemic may have acted as a catalyst for change, created a sense of urgency, enabled outdated processes to be replaced with little opportunity for resistance. But now, it is important to take some time to reflect on these changes and organisations will need to decide which changes should remain, and which were temporary. Moreover, change in one area of an organisation will often trigger a need for change in other areas – so now other parts of the system need to catch up.

Now is also a time to review and examine alignment between work practices and strategy. It may be that adjustments to organisational strategy will be needed as we emerge from these disruptive times, and these changes need to be reassessed in line with the HR practices which already existed, and those which have emerged or been adjusted during lockdown. Maybe there have been unexpected implications, perhaps your employees have surprised you with their innovativeness or adaptability, new ways of working have been adopted and efficiency savings have been realised. Making change happen in a crisis is one thing, making those changes stick will require HR to be responsive to changing organisational needs, bringing systems inline or creating new ones in a new reality.

3. Retaining talent by supporting employee well-being

As we begin to emerge from lockdown, attention will be paid to how organisations treat employees with physical safety and social distancing in the workplace being key priorities. In the longer term, however, employer concern for the well-being and mental health of employees will be a key scrutiny point for existing and potential employees. Organisations who have supported employees well will find it easier to retain existing talent and attract the best employees to work for them.

Looking to the longer term, the pandemic may have led to significant changes in people’s lives (for example, they may have lost a relative, they may have new caring responsibilities, or may be re-evaluating their work/life choices). Talented employees may be seeking something different or something more from their work and if employers wish to retain this talent then they need to be accommodating. Employers may need to be more open to flexible working requests, consider providing new learning and development opportunities, or restructuring roles, in order to retain valuable knowledge and skills within the organisation.

For HR professionals, the challenges of COVID-19 do not stop when employees return to work, the repercussions of the pandemic and the impact it has had on all our lives will be a focus for many months and years to come.

If you (or your employees) are looking to enhance your career prospects and to take on a role at the forefront of human resource management, you can find out more about our CIPD accredited MSc Human Resource Management. The programme is available full time or part time and is accredited by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).