We've got some great news to share...
We’re really pleased to announce that Conexus Healthcare has achieved the We Invest in People accreditation at the Developed level in our very first assessment. This achievement reflects the dedication, hard work and commitment of colleagues across the organisation. It also provides valuable insight into what’s working well and where we can continue to grow, helping us create an even better experience for everyone involved in delivering General Practice across our city and surrounding communities.
Investors in People is the international standard for people management, built around nine indicators that cover everything from leadership and values to recognition, performance and continuous improvement. Achieving accreditation at our first attempt is something we are proud of, and it tells us that the foundations we’ve built as an organisation are working. It also gives us a clear, evidenced starting point to track our progress when we’re reassessed in three years’ time.
Why we ran two surveys
One of the things that made this assessment particularly interesting is that Conexus doesn’t operate as a traditional, single-tier organisation. We have a core Conexus team, a wider group of roles employed by Conexus but locally managed within Primary Care Networks (PCNs) and Practices and funded through the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS), a group of sessional staff who sign up to shifts on our out-of-hours GP Care contract, and a further wider network of Practice colleagues who work alongside our ARRS staff day to day, even though they aren’t directly contracted by Conexus.
This means that our people experience Conexus in quite different ways depending on their role, and therefore our assessment needed two separate pieces of work to properly reflect that. Our formal accreditation assessment covered our core staff, our PCN employees and our ARRS staff. Alongside this, we also commissioned a separate survey diagnostic looking specifically at our sessional workforce. This second piece wasn’t part of the formal accreditation itself, but it gives us valuable insight into how that part of our team experiences working with us.
What both surveys told us
Encouragingly, the two surveys tell a consistent story in several important areas. Across both groups, our people feel strongly that Conexus values them regardless of who they are. In our core assessment, 86% of people believe Conexus values the contribution of employees regardless of sexuality, alongside strong results on race and ethnicity, social background and gender. Our sessional colleagues echoed this just as strongly, with 88% saying they share Conexus Healthcare’s values and 84% believing we have a positive impact on society, with similarly high scores around inclusion.
Both surveys highlighted a common theme that will help shape our next priorities: ensuring colleagues feel appropriately recognised and rewarded for the contribution they make. While this area scored slightly lower than others across both the core assessment and the sessional diagnostic, the feedback showed that there is an opportunity to build on existing approaches and ensure recognition is experienced more consistently and in ways that are meaningful to different individuals. These insights are invaluable and will help inform the next steps in our ongoing commitment to making Conexus a great place to work.
Where the two groups differ
Alongside these shared themes, some genuine differences emerged, and they’re just as useful to us as the similarities.
Our core assessment’s strongest area was structuring work, reflecting how roles are designed and how autonomy and collaboration are built into day-to-day working. For our sessional colleagues, the standout strength was living our organisation’s values and behaviours, the highest-scoring theme of their entire survey.
Interestingly, our sessional staff reported even higher trust in leadership than our core teams, and were considerably more likely to say that Conexus is a great place to work. Given that sessional colleagues often experience Conexus quite differently to those in core or PCN roles, working flexible out-of-hours shifts rather than being embedded in a single team day to day, this is a lovely thing to hear, and it tells us something about the strength of our culture that carries through even for people who aren’t with us every day.
At the same time, the sessional diagnostic highlighted some specific areas where this part of our workforce would value more support, particularly around having a voice in how out-of-hours working is run, and around access to appraisal, supervision and development conversations. These are naturally harder to embed consistently for a workforce that works flexibly across shifts, and it’s an area we’ll be exploring further.
What happens next?
Achieving this accreditation is the beginning of a structured journey. We’ll be using the recommendations from both reports to shape our priorities over the coming months, with a 12-month review meeting already scheduled to check progress. Given the scale and complexity of our structure, spanning a core team, PCN and ARRS roles, and a sessional workforce, we’re proud that this first assessment has given us such a rich and honest picture of where we’re doing well and where we can keep improving.