Systems and processes: making sure that everything works together
Last updated: 9 Jun 2025
An organisation’s systems and processes should all promote positive cultures, and work with the five principles.
They should be relevant, intuitive and support everyone who uses them.
Listen to Taryn talk about supporting systems and processes in a positive culture.
What are systems and processes?
Systems and processes are policies, arrangements, or ways of working.
They support us to run sustainable services that meet the needs of our staff and the people we care for or support. Systems and processes include:
- national and organisational policies
- how we commission services
- how we record and keep track of the quality of services and their impact
- who we involve when we evaluate our service
- how we make sure we’re including supported people, teams and partners when we design care and support services, or decide how they’re managed
- understanding the kind of care or support someone needs to achieve what matters to them
- safeguarding someone’s rights, health and well-being so they can live free from abuse, harm and neglect.
We can design and use systems and processes to create positive cultures in our organisations.
We can also use them to create wider positive cultures when we work with our partners in other teams, organisations and sectors. This is sometimes called a ‘whole-system approach’.
How do good systems and processes support positive cultures?
A whole-system approach supports positive cultures by:
- helping everyone involved to understand what matters to people and communities, including:
- their strengths
- what they need
- their opportunities
- what’s expected of them
- their resources and support.
- encouraging strong relationships, more trust and support for partnership working, which includes working with:
- the private sector
- the public sector
- the voluntary community
- social enterprises
- grass roots organisations or user led community groups
- experts by experience
- organisations that represent ethnic minority communities, including race and equality.
- making it easier for us to work together to share skills, knowledge and resources so they’re used more effectively
- creating opportunities to share new ways of supporting culture change
- creating opportunities to share new ways to satisfy what people and communities need to achieve a life with good well-being
- creating the right working environment, behaviours and attitudes for us to shape and develop policy, or plans, to change things for the better.
To succeed, we all need to work together to a common purpose and recognise our individual roles, strengths and contributions.
In a whole-systems approach, those roles may look like this:
- people with lived experience
- Having a voice and being able to shape and co-produce care and support services to better promote their health and well-being.
- people who work in social care
- Feeling able to be creative and empowered to make changes when they see barriers in the system.
- Having opportunities and support to change systems that don’t help the people and communities they support to achieve what matters to them.
- policy leads
- Using the principles of positive culture when they develop policies or make decisions about policies in Wales.
- Holding conversations with different people and organisations with practice and lived experience, to help everyone understand the challenges and the things they need to do. This is also called ‘co-production’.
- Collecting data and monitoring the impacts of change.
- commissioners
- Making sure they commission services from organisations with positive cultures.
- Including the principles of positive cultures in contracts and service specifications.
- regulators
- Inspections consider if there’s evidence of a positive culture and reflect the findings in inspection reports.
- Making sure descriptors of ratings reflect positive cultures.
- leaders in social care
- Working with people to understand what prevents people from achieving what matters to them and working with staff and partners to change those things.
- Making sure organisational systems and processes support a positive culture.
- Taking proactive and positive actions for change.
Where to find out more
Here are links to information and resources to help you start thinking about how your systems and processes support a positive culture.
Some of these links may not be available bilingually or in an accessible format. We’re not responsible for content produced by other organisations.
Your well-being matters: workforce health and well-being framework – Social Care Wales
This framework includes prompts and links to resources for managers, organisations and workers in social care, and early years and childcare to put systems and processes in place to improve well-being at work.
Working with communities framework – Social Care Wales
A guide for public sector organisations, support organisations and anyone who wants to work with communities.
Co-production: what it is and how to do it – SCIE
Resources to support co-production with teams, commissioners, and communities