To keep the best you've got to be the best
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 new blog mini-series, a collaboration with Andrew Burridge, NWADASS, I’m going to be 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.
So far in this mini series we’ve explored how to attract and recruit the best people into social care and I’ve shared some practical tips to help you increase your success rate (Give applicants a great experience and improve recruitment results — Kath Smythe Collective). Just as important - if not, even more so, is how you keep hold of really good people once they are working for you. I’ve spent a lot of time working alongside social care services who experience high turnover and there are common reasons that are nearly always at play. Get these things right for the people who work for you and you’ll be rewarded with loyal, committed high performing staff who go the extra mile because they know they’re making a difference.
Without a doubt, the things that make the biggest difference when it comes to retention in social care are:
Great management
Feeling part of a team
Feeling able to make a difference to people’s lives
Opportunities to develop
Work/life balance
The “basics” being right
I’m going to explore each of these in turn to help you to self-assess what you’re doing in your workplace to keep hold of your talent.
Great Management:
There is a saying amongst workforce professionals “People leave managers, not organisations”. Think about your own experiences - when you feel well led, valued and supported with opportunities to be your best self, you’re much less likely to think about leaving a job. Many of our managers in social care progress from front line positions. With that come strengths, passion and commitment. I was talking to a team manager recently who spent years in a front line role before progressing to a management role. She absolutely knows what matters, knows how to make a difference to people’s lives and understands front line practice inside out. And yet, she talked about how difficult she finds it when she has to have a challenging conversation with a staff member. “I bet you’re really skilled at having challenging conversations with families?” I asked her. She agreed and said it’s different with team members because it’s “my team and that impacts on how I feel in myself”.
People who manage front line teams have the potential to make the most difference and at the same time, they’re in a challenging place: in charge of making the wishes of more senior managers happen whilst at the same time managing the sharp end of service delivery and people management. There is no doubt in my mind, when you have a great team supervisor/leader/manager, you have a high performing team. And yet, how are we supporting people to make the transition from team mate to team manager. A different manager I’m currently working with said, “I’ve gone from team mate to team manager and I don’t know how to be with the people I manage”.
“I’ve gone from team mate to manager and I don’t know how to be with the people I manage”
Investing in development for our front line managers is crucial and the benefits you’ll get back in terms of quality and performance will more than pay for the investment made. If this feels hard because you’re an SME and don’t have the right capacity or skills in your organisation to make this happen, consider reaching out to other SMEs locally to see if there’s something you can do together, or try reaching out to one of the larger social care providers operating locally to see if you could work together. It’s in everyone’s interests for the sector to thrive so people may be more willing to work with you on this than you might at first think.
A Great Team Leader
Can make the difference as to whether your staff stay or leave
Feeling Part of a Team
Feeling part of a team is a really important part of going to work for most of us and if you think about it, social care people tend to be “people people” and have a need to spend time with others. For some jobs in social care, particularly care workers, this can feel like a real challenge. Margins are tight and the pressure is on to get through the daily visits. A small change can make a huge difference. Bruce Daisley in his book “The Joy of Work” cites research showing that coordinated tea breaks result in a 23% uplift in engagement and performance. That's the equivalent of a whopping 10 years experience of working together!! Improvements achieved by giving people informal time to share experiences and discuss day to day challenges. Surely it has to be within our collective gift to enable staff to meet up on a regular basis for some informal time together.
Feeling able to make a difference to people’s lives
Over the years, I have engaged with literally hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of people who work in social care. The number one motivating factor is a desire to make a difference to people’s lives. Sometimes in the day to day grind of work, we can lose sight of the impact we are making and forget what brought us into doing what we do in the first place. Finding ways to reconnect people to their sense of purpose and the difference they are making will improve motivation and engagement levels. I think it’s a very British thing that we’re not great at giving feedback. I often ask people what their strengths are and never fail to be surprised by the number of people who don’t know and often go on to say they have no way of knowing what they’re good at because they rarely get any feedback.
Knowing we’re doing a good job and knowing we’re making a difference makes a massive difference to our motivation levels. Go out of your way to notice when people are doing a good job and tell them so. Ask people for feedback about the staff supporting them and share it. Encourage staff teams to recognise each other’s strengths and impact. And if you’ve got someone who’s not doing a great job, tell them!! If you don’t tell them, how will they know to improve. We so often shy away from these difficult conversations but to quote the brilliant Brene Brown “clear is kind, unclear is unkind”.
Opportunities to Develop:
We all want to keep growing, right? We want to be the best we can be. We want to enable people to live their best lives. To do this, we need opportunities to continue to develop our knowledge, skills and approaches. “Develop” doesn’t necessarily mean progress up the line. I often hear people talk about colleagues who work in front line roles and have no aspirations to move into management. For them, develop might be the opportunity to develop more specialist skills, or to support others with their development, or to learn about new approaches to care. For those who do want to progress, development is essential to help them successfully move into different roles with new responsibilities where they will need to navigate different relationships and new expectations. Without development, we risk stagnating and when we stagnate, we don’t give our best. Investment in development will help you secure your talent in your workplace.
Growth Development
Without it we risk stagnating which means we don’t give our best
Work Life Balance:
In my experience, because social care workers are motivated by helping people live their best lives, they tend to work really hard and frequently go “above and beyond”. When things are stretched and we’re under pressure, we can sometimes rely too much on this good will. It’s so important for retention that we enable staff to have a positive work life balance. I find it really interesting when I talk to social care providers that some do everything they can to promote and accommodate flexible working practices whilst others tell me flexibility in social care isn’t an option. The reality is that if we don’t find ways to adopt flexible working practices, staff will vote with their feet and move to work for providers who do. If you don’t know where to start with managing rotas to accommodate flexibility, reach out to a provider who has more experience and ask if you can have a chat to understand more.
People are generally much more aware of their own mental health and well-being and it’s important to them to feel healthy and well in work as well as being able to access support and advice should they need it. Is it OK for people to say they’re not OK in your workplace? If they do, what response will they get? How will they be helped to access support? We all go through tough times, whether the cause is work-related or personal. How our employer responds makes a huge difference and if we feel supported, that creates loyalty and people are more likely to stay for the long term.
The “Basics” being right:
Sometimes it's the little things that make the most difference. Is it easy for me to know what’s happened since the last time I saw the person I’m supporting? How easy is it for me to record what’s happened so others can pick up from where I left off? When I’m on a break, is there somewhere nice I can go to get some time out? If I’m working on my own, does someone check that I’m safe? If my uniform is damaged, how do I get a replacement? Do the people I work for know my name and take the time to get to know me? If my child is ill and I need to look after them, what response do I get? Making sure the basics are there goes a long way. Not just because these things are important in their own right but because they convey a much bigger message - we care about you - and when we feel cared for by our employer, we’re far more likely to keep working for them.
Getting the things right that make the most difference to retention isn’t easy. It requires a relentless focus on making sure the right mix of things or “organisational conditions” are in place and that people consistently experience them. The right conditions drive the right culture and spending time on your culture ensures people who work for you understand why these things are important and what they need to do to ensure they happen. Get it right and retention levels will rise because your workforce will be more engaged and feel happier which means higher quality services and improved performance. Ultimately, that’s got to be the best outcome for everyone.
Andrew says:
In NW ADASS we’ve worked closely with Kath during 2021 as part of a Task and Finish Group looking at immediate workforce pressures. As part of this work we mapped recruitment and retention initiatives and spoke with care providers to understand retention from the provider perspective. Alongside partners including Skills for Care, local authorities, and providers, we want to provide better insight into the adult social care workforce.
While we cannot avoid acknowledging pay as a key factor, we want to explore these important additional areas that Kath discusses. We plan to carry out research with the labour market and providers to produce employer guidance on these areas.
We also know that local authorities are due to receive their Recruitment and Retention Grant. This is a one-off grant to support adult social care workforce from November 2021 to March 2022. We know from feedback on an earlier version of the grant that focusing upon retention is just as important as recruitment. We plan to map councils’ use of the grant and will be particularly interested in any initiatives that support employers to “get the basics right”, help staff feel part of a team, support wellbeing and help staff feel able to make a difference to people’s lives.
We’ve spent the last few weeks digging into practical things you can do to improve your success with recruitment and retention. I guess it’s come from a place of helping you to focus on the things you can control. Moving forward we’re going to get into some of the longer term, more transformational changes that will help put social care on a stronger, more sustainable footing. Not only is this good for people who use social care but we believe will make social care a sector that is more able to attract a greater number of people to work in it.
