The organisation of staffing

Views about features of effective practice

Managers and staff among the Job Brokers interviewed, highlighted a number of aspects of staffing which they felt were relevant to their own relative success: Firstly, they highlighted the importance of staff being enthusiastic and committed, and being willing to learn and to change or adapt their practice through experience. They valued staff who were insightful about people’s situations, imaginative in finding ways to help them to address barriers to work, were friendly and approachable and were able to build good relationships with clients. Some also commented on the value of staff coming from different backgrounds. Different professional backgrounds were thought to be valuable for bringing different types of specialist knowledge to the team, and also to encourage staff to focus on clients as individuals rather than focusing on disability. Different personal backgrounds were valued where they meant that people brought different life skills and experiences. Some Job Broker teams said that the fact that staff had personal experience of issues such as living with an impairment, unemployment, claiming benefits, lone parenthood and being a former user of the Job Broker service helped clients to relate to them.

The second staffing issue highlighted by managers and Job Broker staff was the importance of a strong team focus, an issue raised both by people who felt there was strong teamwork in their own organisation and where it was noted as something of a gap. Having a team that worked closely together was seen as valuable for pooling knowledge, sharing ideas, discussing cases which raised more difficult issues, supporting each other and developing effective working practices. Formal structures such as team meetings, training and case review sessions were seen as helpful, but it was the value of regular informal exchange and support that was really emphasised.

There were, as noted in Chapter 2, different views about the advantages and disadvantages of having dedicated staff who worked only on the Job Broker service compared with staff who also work on other contracts. Some managers or staff felt that their dedicated staffing was instrumental in their successful performance; others had the same view about staff working on other services, although sometimes stressing that this was because of the complementarity of the programmes and the fact that both, or all, the contracts on which staff worked were focused on entering the labour market. There were similarly mixed views about the pros and cons of staff having generic roles (working with a client throughout their use of the service) or having specialist roles. Again, some managers and staff saw the fact that they had one or other model as being part of the explanation for their success.

Finally, managers also sometimes commented on understaffing as having been a feature of the organisation which had constrained the service and made it less effective than it might have been.

Clients similarly commented on the importance of Job Broker staff being informed about disability, being empathetic and understanding about how it affected individuals, and having personal experience of living with an impairment. Where clients had dealings with more than one member of staff, the approach of individual advisers was key to clients’ views about this but a smooth handover between staff was also important. Conversely, engagement with the service could be threatened where staff left or went off sick if no follow-up was in place. Jobcentre Plus staff also thought it was important that staff are friendly and approachable. There were some comments about high staff turnover among Job Brokers and about perceived understaffing. In one area, having a single member of the Job Broker team who took responsibility for job search support was felt to effective in helping the DEA and the Job Broker to work together on job search for the benefit of clients, but they otherwise did not comment on Job Broker staffing structures.

Analysis across the performance groups

It was possible to look at how some of these issues related to the four performance groups. There was not detailed information about the backgrounds of team members who did not take part in the staff focus groups, nor about team sizes. There was some discussion in the interviews and focus groups about how teams worked together although this needs to be treated with caution. This is partly because only a manager interview was carried out with some Job Brokers, and partly because the issue was not always raised in the staff groups. Sometimes it was mentioned by staff spontaneously, but it would be wrong to assume that where it was not there was an absence of good team relationships. With those caveats, there did seem to be a pronounced emphasis on the experience and value of close team working among the better performing Job Brokers who, with only one exception, described themselves as having strong teams. The closeness of the team was sometimes commented on by both managers and staff, who described good support for team members from within the team, sharing of information and discussion of ideas and ways forward. Although the quality of relationships cannot be gauged through a group discussion, it was noticeable that the Job Brokers in these staff groups appeared to have broadly similar approaches and not to be learning about each other’s practice in the group discussion itself. Among the better performing Job Brokers were also some who emphasised the important role played by administrative staff in the team.

The picture was more mixed among other Job Brokers. Although some described strong team relationships in the way that the more effective Job Brokers had, others did not comment on team support, and there were also some where managers or staff felt they did not work particularly closely as a team, or where they said they did not feel they shared good practice or information enough. Differences in approaches were sometimes commented on explicitly by Job Broker staff, or they said they had

learnt something new during the focus group. One group of staff felt that the focus by the Department on job entry levels was leading to more monitoring by their organisation’s management of the individual performance of team members, for the moment informally, and were concerned that this would make it more difficult to sustain a mutually supportive approach.

It was also possible to look at differences in staff roles between the four performance groups. First, in terms of whether staff worked uniquely on NDDP or not, among the better performers staff either worked exclusively on NDDP or worked across different contracts within which the Job Broker service was not set up as a separate or differentiated service. Among the others the picture was more mixed. Some Job Broker teams were dedicated staff; others worked across more than one differentiated contract; and others did not differentiate between job broking and the other contracts on which staff worked.

Second, in terms of whether staff were in generic or specialist roles, it was found that all the better performing Job Brokers either had completely generic staff roles, or designated only in-work support for a specialist role, with the exception of one where specialist roles were designed to complement the support provided by core advisers who maintained contact with their clients throughout. Again, the picture was more mixed among other Job Brokers with both completely generic, generic plus in-work support specialists, and wider specialist staffing structures.

The analysis suggests, then, that strong team work, a focus on the Job Broker contract or at least on services which prepare clients for work, and generic roles, at least for pre-work support, are associated with more effective performance.