SHBC1626

S.Y. HOI¹, L.N. LEE¹, Y.H. TAN¹, X.J. TOH APPLE¹, L.W. LIU¹, J.Z. LIM MARCUS¹

Tan Tock Seng Hospital¹

Leadership engagement by senior leaders is one of the keys to building highly engaged leaders who in turn drive positive work performance and quality patient outcomes. In face of the current COVID pandemic, one of the challenges was enabling ground leaders to align with new directions to lead their staff to adapt and keep pace with changing COVID measures in the fast-evolving outbreak.

The monthly Chief Nurse engagement (physical meetings in pre-COVID) sessions with nursing supervisors incorporates a question and answer (Q&A) format, active follow up, read back and posting the Q&A as FAQ on the hospital’s Facebook. It uses the “Slido”, a digital mobile application which provides psychologically safe Q&A through anonymous postings. Slido was eventually used for continuous 24/7 engagement with middle managers, i.e., supervisors.

The dialogue sessions were well attended. Participation rates on the Slido continued to increase over time, with 77 posts over 10 months from August 2020 to June 2021. The topics of engagement ranged from COVID-19 control and containment measures, sustaining staff morale, and building resiliency in pandemic to uniform change, clinical practice, performance management, etc.

The regular leadership engagement provided a platform for supervisors to clarify operational processes, discuss implementation challenges or staff responses to new initiatives, inter-disciplinary sharing as members come from all settings. The results also revealed an increasing willingness to trust leadership engagement.

Collective leadership engagement with supervisors require multi-faceted skills of  leading one-to-group, and include problem solving, facilitating dialogue, and managing conflict.