Values underpinning CAIRO

Aspirational and empowered. Aiming for a positive climate in your team is like aiming for a moving target. Like with many other worthwhile goals, it can always feel just out of reach. This keeps us ambitious, pressing forward for continuous improvement rather than relaxing after passing a particular milestone. The audits are designed to stimulate discussion and continuous reflection and improvement, rather than complacency. CAIRO is based on the idea that the team can change its own culture.

Not the only thing. Like other useful ideas, establishing a great climate in your team works best when you keep other goals in mind too. Ensuring you keep people safe whilst creating real opportunities is important, but so are the needs of the community.

Local ownership. It is common for mental health team leaders to be asked for data but excluded from the analysis or discussions of the implications. Where data is collected, staff can fear that it will be used to criticise their work rather than to celebrate their efforts to provide a good service. CAIRO allows teams to control the decisions about whether to do the audit at all and when to do it, to collect their own summary data and interpret it for themselves.

Conversation is more important than scores. Staff consistently told us that they were nervous of assigning scores at all, due to their negative experience of performance management through the punishing use of numerical benchmarks, rather than a shared search for real service quality. Because of this, we are eager to underline that the true value of CAIRO lies in the conversation, action planning and service improvement that follows its use, rather than the scores on their own. Staff who feel safe and supported will be professional, reflective and aspirational; staff who feel constantly criticised will not. Here is the strength of a self-audit approach – it supports the team in taking ownership of the agenda, applying creativity to solving the problems they themselves identify and holding one another to account.

Survey and benchmark. CAIRO guides you through conducting a survey and obtaining a chart showing your results compared with a benchmark.

Strengths and weaknesses of self-audit. CAIRO uses self-audit. This approach is a weakness if you either over-rate or under-rate your team. You might under-rate if you are suffering from low morale or if you are highly ambitious and are determined to keep improving the service until everyone gets a brilliant life. You might over-rate if someone has said that you must, or you want to gain competitive advantage over another team or obtain managerial approval. Truth is best.

One size for all? Over the years we have received feedback from some people who wanted a tailored version for their own group, professional discipline, service sector or role. For example, some have asked for a specialised version of CAIRO for inpatient areas or for Peer Support Workers. While the questionnaire does not come in different versions, audit managers can issue team codes as they see fit in order to look for similarities and differences in the responses received.

Acronym. CAIRO was selected as a name for this questionnaire as the acronym works well – Climate Assessment Inventory for Risk and Opportunity. The fact that this word is also a city name is incidental and no significance should be placed on it.