It really is all about people - Adults Social Care Workforce Pressures
If our workforce really are our most important asset in social care, it’s time for a rethink. You can’t have failed to hear about the crisis in social care and the large number of vacancies that are exacerbating pressures in the already overstretched sector. In my blog mini-series, a collaboration with Andrew Burridge, NWADASS, I have been examining why there’s a problem in the first place and providing some practical advice and solutions for changes we can make right now, as well as in the longer term, to recruit and retain more of the right people to work in social care. In this final blog of the series, I step back and reflect on the big themes that have emerged.
In the first blog in this mini series, I took a dive into some of the reasons why social care is experiencing workforce pressures. I began with a very subjective profile of people who work in social care based on many years of experience of working in and alongside the sector. I said that in my opinion, people who work in social care are some of the best people you could possibly hope to meet. They genuinely care about people, they’re motivated to make a difference to peoples’ lives, they’re driven by values like compassion, kindness and positivity that make them a pleasure to be around and they’re true grafters. In many ways, I’m going to finish where I started because, having taken time to examine the range of issues impacting on the social care workforce as well as the short and longer term actions we can take to address them, the biggest, loudest, strongest message that comes through everything is that it really is all about people.
Shared Values
Care, compassion, kindness & positivity
Don’t get me wrong. There is no simple solution or silver bullet because it’s a challenge impacted by a complex range of circumstances. That said however, we probably have more control than we think we do.
When we talk about recruitment we can soon sink under a plethora of policies, processes and procedures which push us towards an approach centred around what matters to the recruiting organisation. If we turn that on it’s head and start from what matters to people interested in working in social care, how does that help us to rethink our recruitment approaches? Do we understand enough about what motivates people to come work in social care? Are we explicit in understanding their values and testing for how they align with ours? How are we opening up social care and showing what it’s really like, not what the stereotypes tell us it’s like? How are we being deliberate in building engagement, commitment and understanding within applicants right from the very start?
It’s a competitive employment market out there as we know and we can’t compete on pay and arguably even if we could, we shouldn’t. We are in the business of recruiting people people and to be most successful, we should take a people-centric approach to recruitment. That doesn’t mean that people who work in social care shouldn’t be paid a good salary and have great working conditions, it just means that if money isn’t the key motivator, there are things outside of raising pay that we can do. So in the series, I’ve provided guidance and tips to help you to sense check your recruitment practises and ensure they will give you the biggest chance of success. It doesn’t mean you won’t continue to lose out on people lured into the likes of Amazon with hearty “golden hello” payments but it does mean you can be confident that you are doing everything you can to increase your chances of success and that the people you do recruit are more likely to be the right people and therefore more likely to stay with you for longer.
It’s not about the money
In Adults Social Care we can’t and shouldn’t try to compete on pay
A people-centric workforce approach to how we do things doesn’t just extend to how we recruit. I believe it should extend across every part of how we work - how we recruit, the experiences our workforce have of working for and with us, how we work with other social care organisations and the relationship between commissioners and providers. If we take a strengths-based, people-positive approach to everything we do we will get better results.
Someone once said never let a good crisis go to waste. It’s scientifically proven that when we are in challenging times, our minds become more malleable to change, the art of what’s possible shifts. What better time to rethink what we do and how we do it. If we start from a place that says our workforce want the best for social care and the people who access it, just like we do, and so can be trusted, what opportunities does that give us to think differently:
Where and how can we flex rigid job descriptions and role profiles to enable us to play to individual strengths?
Why don’t we empower teams to feel more autonomous in determining how they do what they do - and who does what?
Where are the opportunities to step away from tight processes that box us in and limit our imagination and creativity for doing things differently?
How do we enable and incentivise social care organisations and services to work more closely together and collaborate to tackle some of our most challenging issues rather than setting them up to compete?
The social care system might be creaking but it’s still full of amazing, talented, committed people who want to make a difference. And there’s a whole load of other people out there who share our values but don’t yet know that social care is for them. Our challenge going forward is how we take the principles we apply when we support people who access social care and go large on applying them to how we work with each other.
Why can’t we turn the narrative that social care is a low paid, low status job that’s only about personal care and position ourselves proudly as the place to work if you want’ to make a difference to peoples’ lives, want to be enabled and empowered to play to your strengths and want to work in a job that is fundamentally all about people? I think we can and should and maybe 2022 will be the year to do it.
Andrew says:
2021 comes to an end echoing how the year began, with attention focused on the pandemic, availability of care and workforce shortages. During another difficult year the workforce challenges sharpened with competition for other parts of the labour market and increasing demand for assessments and care packages.
Much like Kath in our regional work we continue to be inspired by the creativity and commitment of the adult social care workforce. Every day tens of thousands of people are supported by the most important asset within adult social care – the workforce. We could not manage without them.
In 2022 longstanding challenges around workforce recruitment and retention will remain, but we are looking forward to making our contribution to addressing these. We will continue to develop the regional recruitment campaign and have ambitious plans for a NW ADASS recruitment “brand”. We want to work with NHSIE NW, Skills for Care and Health Education England to explore joint career pathways. Most of all, we want to continue to learn from those innovative providers who support the regional work programme.
This programme of blogs has been an extremely helpful exercise to help us inform our thinking. We want to continue the conversation in 2022 and draw on the ideas within the blog series to help communicate the workforce challenges and the practical approaches available to the sector.
We hope you have found this mini series interesting and that it’s sparked some different thinking for you. If you’ve missed previous episodes, click here to check them out Organisational change news, tips and analysis from Kath — Kath Smythe Collective
