workforce planning tips

Interview with Janet Reed, Manager, Care Watch Southend

Tell me about the size and nature of your business?

"We are a domiciliary care provider that's been in business for 12 years. We have a three star excellent rating by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). We deliver 6,500 hours of care per week in the Essex and Southend local areas.

Our total workforce includes: 280 care workers part-time (equivalent to 205 full-time workers), a registered manager, two care managers and nine admin. support workers."

How do you workforce plan? How does this fit with your business plan?

"Our workforce plan depends on our business plan. I prepare the business plan first and then agree what needs to be done to have the right people in place to make it happen. We invest as much we can in training and this has never been wasted yet.

Our business plan and workforce plan are in one document because we find this easier."

What are your key workforce challenges?

"Selling a career which is not highly paid - we offer the best package we can to encourage people to come work for us, and consider care as a career"

What do you do to retain your workforce?

"Our retention rates are high. This is partly down to a good induction programme which is nine days face to face contact in total, but spread over a two to three week period. We use the Common Induction Standards to the letter and also include practical half day workshops on Dementia Awareness, Continence Care, Stoma Care, and Person Centred Care.

New people can feel quite 'dizzy' with the amount of information they have to take on board so we have found this approach works best.

We also have a 'buddy' system for new recruits so that they can get telephone advice from those already working in the field. This is staffed by some of our more experienced care workers. One person is on 'on call' each day from 8 am to 12 noon and we pay them according to how much time they spend giving advice.

The induction and 'buddying' seem to really help to build people's confidence in the first month or so at work.

Once people have come to work with us we offer as much work flexibility as we can and do our best to help them get job satisfaction and feel fully supported.

Workers also get paid a quarterly bonus based on a percentage of their earnings.

All of this, with good access to training, seems to work pretty well and people tend to stay with us."

How do you train your workforce?

"A lot of our training is face to face - we do sometimes use DVDs or videos but only short excerpts. We run training in-house to cover topics that we can't access elsewhere.

We take full advantage of all of the training and training allocation funds provided by the local authorities in our local areas. There is not a course running that does not have at least one of our workers there if we have access to it!

Sixty per cent of our workers have an NVQ and we continue to invest in the NVQ programme as much as we can."

What difference has workforce planning made to your business?

"Workforce planning means that when there are 'new hoops to jump through' we can usually do it.

It means we can continue to provide a good service even when there are changes because we are always one step ahead."

What tips can you give to other service providers about workforce planning?

1. "Keep in very close touch with your local authorities so you know what is going on and you can then plan ahead.

2. Go to every meeting with local authority commissioners and brokers to find out what's new.

3. Check local authority websites regularly for new information.

4. Whenever local authorities ask for a service provider rep or input to meetings make sure you volunteer.

An example of how this helped us was about a year ago when local authorities were considering amalgamating mental health with the mainstream service. I put this as an action on the business and workforce plan and then enrolled 30 of our care workers on the level 2 NVQ course. This means that we are now ready to offer this service as and when needed.

We are currently looking at how we can train care workers to assist Occupational Therapists and Physiotherapists to support Reablement."