What makes you decide to move on?

Recent news stories bore the grim statistic that 30% of the country’s social care workforce left their jobs last year. Commentators talked about social care being on the brink of disaster. Pay, conditions and Brexit were all cited as contributing to this grim national picture.

And yet my own organisation, Dimensions, is experiencing a very different picture. A much smaller proportion, 13.5%, left their jobs. In research with over 500 of my frontline colleagues, people overwhelmingly said they are generally happy in their jobs, and that they prefer working at Dimensions to previous jobs. Those who came from outside of social care from retail, call centres or hospitality responded most positively.

Why? What makes Dimensions different? Are we just being lucky, or are there things that can help other organisations attract and retain more of their workforce? After all, we all want the same thing: for more people to consider a career in social care.

We have worked increasingly hard in recent years to listen to what our colleagues are telling us – through a range of surveys, listening events, forums and many other feedback mechanisms. We do more than listen; through a simple “you said, we did” approach, we publicly commit to changing what we can and explaining when we cannot. I believe we are also good at developing learning relationships with other organisations – such as Timpson’s – who engage their employees particularly well.

In this blog I am going to pick on three major issues (there are others) where I believe our innovative practices have helped us persuade colleagues to stay with us for the long term. Not all is well in these areas. Far from it, in fact. But the bigger the issue, the bigger the opportunity to make a real difference:

Rotas

We know from feedback that “flexible rotas” can mean one thing to a company and a very different thing to an employee. The more flexibility an employee has to choose a working pattern that meets their needs, the less flexibility we have as a support provider to meet our commitments to the people we support. We recognise that tension, and continue to spend much time testing and learning from new approaches to better meet the needs of both colleagues and the people we support.

Pay

As with every other organisation working in social care, pay will always be an issue. That’s why, wherever we can within the funding we receive, we prioritise pay rises for frontline support teams (proudly achieving an average of 4.5% pay growth for this group last year.) And because we know that people appreciate a little gratitude, we also actively encourage managers to say ‘thank you’ with cards and gifts for people who go the extra mile.

Careers

Some years back we also received feedback that our support workers felt trapped in their jobs; that career pathways were not available to them; that in order to progress, they thought they would have to leave. That’s why Dimensions now invests heavily in a number of career development programmes including our multi-award-winning ‘Aspire’ programme. Aspire participants are three times less likely than other staff to leave their jobs, and over 90% report increased confidence about career progression. We have also invested in leadership development training, recognising that great leadership is critical to creating a workplace where people can flourish and want to stay.

There’s a very long way to go. 13.5% may be better than 30% but we’re still losing many hundreds of good staff each year with all the inevitable knock-on results: time and money spent recruiting, inducting and training new staff. Increased use of agency. Rebooting team dynamics. All in all, if there is anything more important than retaining good colleagues, I’ve yet to see it.

Care work isn’t an easy career choice. It can be mentally and physically draining. It should be better paid. Some days can be really challenging. But as the survey of our support teams shows, for the right person it can be incredibly rewarding. As an employer, my job is to make it as easy as possible for people to choose to pursue their career at Dimensions. Thank you to all those that do.