Bringing to life the ‘Looking After Your Team’s Health and Wellbeing Guide’

When NHS England refreshed the Health and Wellbeing Framework in 2021, people asked for a guide that would support them to grow wellbeing in their teams. The guide was then co-created with colleagues across health, social care and voluntary sectors to support teams across a range of organisations on a journey to grow their team wellbeing culture.

With all of the insight gathered to create the guide, NHS NWLA needed our design skills and expertise to bring the document to life in a way that was engaging, accessible, interactive and provided a seamless and flexible user journey for their audience.

We first worked with the teams at NHS England and NHS NWLA to go through the insight gathered from the pilot teams who had been invited to use the guide and providing their feedback. From this, we understood that the guide was to be designed as a journey that can be navigated in any way the user chooses, with no time pressures or requirements to complete the guide in a chronological way.

With this in mind, the Cynergy team worked to develop a simple navigation diagram on ‘Ways to use the guide’ that users could use to discover the best approach for them as a team moving forward, and also refer back on to complete the guide in a different way depending on their needs at that particular point in time.

Here we broke the guide down into six approaches:

1. Quick wins approach
2. Linear approach
3. Collective approach
4. Planned approach
5. Themed approach
6. Self-assessment approach

As this was becoming a large document of valuable tools and resources, it was decided that it should be split into separate guides. So to distinguish each of these individual guides from one another, Cynergy created icons and incorporated the NHS People Promise into the design and style of the entire toolkit, as well as using iconography to help people navigate the guide and identify the different activities and resources available to support their team wellbeing journeys.

To complement the guide and promote its purpose and benefits for teams in growing their own wellbeing culture, Cynergy also co-ordinated and developed talking head recordings with Suzanne Douglas, Senior Associate Director at NHS NW Leadership Academy and Adam Turner, Improving Health and Wellbeing Lead, NHS England. Utilising our skills as narrative composers, we then pulled out the key information to create a montage of Suzanne and Adam sharing the story of the origin and co-creation of the guide as well as what teams can expect.

The guide is now available internally for teams across the North West to access and we hope those using the guides are finding that it is empowering their team members and helping them build a positive and sustainable team wellbeing culture.

Need support bringing to life your engagement resources through smart and intuitive design? Get in touch with a member of our team at info@cynergy.co.uk.