Our Culture Matters and listening to our Staff’s opinions and ideas is where we’re at…

We recently hosted our latest Staff Forum, chaired by our Managing Director Mark McKenning, joined by a great cross-section of our amazing Support Workers, together with Senior Support Worker Chloe Gough, and Wellbeing & Welfare Officer Jade Gibson.

Our regular Forum is a brilliant opportunity for us to get some quality time to meet with a number of staff to review previous initiatives and practice and also gain feedback to new investments and ideas.

We’ve done a lot this year (and we’ve a lot more to do…), we wanted to check in with our team and establish their thoughts on how our new IT investment was working. In February this year we launched our new call management software- it’s called People Planner, we moved away from paper records and rotas and stepped into clear, accurate, responsive records, live views of our staff attendance and client care practice.

When Mark asked the group for their thoughts, they all loved the new product. The same was true of our new dynamic communication and messaging Application ‘Connecteams’- which we introduced in August- the team really like the immediacy of the product- we’re excited as we’ve lot’s more opportunity to really get more from this, but our first thoughts are great.

Mark discussed our commitment to staff welfare and our supporting Culture- the team were vey positive about the way our team supports them. We discussed initiatives such as paid birthdays off work and the free Blue Light discount cards we acquire for our staff, the team feel these are really valuable and appreciate these initiatives.

We checked in on our staff recognition program- our quarterly ‘Halo’ awards- Mark asked if the gift we purchased was the right thing to do (we aim to purchase something really personal for each quarter’s winner- something they would really like but not always buy themselves- up to a value of £200. The group thought that was a lovely idea but feel that staff would prefer either voucher of cash instead (via payroll), so going forward that’s what we’ll do!

Mark also took the opportunity to make sure the team were aware of our Wellbeing & Welfare Officer (Jade), a further commitment to our organisation recognising great people need great support, both work related and none work related. The team all felt the benefit of this role within our service.

We discussed our passion for staff growth and development, sharing success stories of staff progression within our team and our dedication to our internal promotional pathway, which many of our management team have followed.

We’ve done a lot of fantastic training this year and we’ve some more incredible training planned, titles include; MAPA Intensive Interaction, Bonding Through Play, Safety Intervention, Makaton, Spinal Injury Awareness, Understanding Autism Outcomes- to name just a few. We’ve also just changed our Health & Social Care diploma partner- staff wishing to complete their level 2 & 3 diplomas will be funded by us to do so. The group were super positive about our exceptional training delivered through our Training Academy, especially the Clinical training delivered by Louise, our Clinical Lead.

Mark thanked each member of our team for their hard work and support and also for their contributions. Our forums serve as a platform for shaping our direction- and the enthusiasm from the team was brilliant!