The parent organisation

Views about features of effective practice

The Job Broker managers and staff interviewed saw a number of aspects of the nature of the parent organisation and the role of the Job Broker contract within it as being relevant to their performance.

First, some commented on the importance of the Job Broker contract being backed by the organisation as a whole. In some organisations, involvement in the Job Broker contract had been questioned at a senior management level. Some managers described wider difficulties in the management of the organisation, beyond the Job Broker contract, which had affected morale and clarity about the direction of the Job Broker service.

The extent to which the Job Broker service was integrated within the organisation was also seen to be relevant to effectiveness. (As noted in Chapter 2, the Jobcentre Plus Job Brokers are viewed as individual and independent organisations in discussing the organisational context of the Job Broker service.) This was seen, variously, as involving integration at a management level, consistency with the principles and objectives of the organisation, and integration at the level of service delivery so that the Job Broker team was able to draw on other internal services for NDDP clients. Some organisation representatives also talked about the value of experience of providing similar services or working with similar clients in designing and delivering the NDDP service. They saw knowledge of the potential client group and the barriers they face to work as being very helpful, or felt it had been an advantage that the organisation already provided an established and high quality service on which the Job Broker service was built, or within which it was integrated. Individual DEAs had some further comments to make here. One suspected that the fact that a Job Broker had what they viewed as too many contracts might explain why they were not very active on the NDDP contract. Another thought that organisations that provide only job broking were likely to be more effective than those operating a number of contracts. One DEA also considered well-established organisations which specialise in employment support for disabled people to be most effective.

Some clients too had views about the organisation providing the Job Broker service. They valued organisations which they felt showed an empathetic approach to disability and specialist understanding of their impairment. Some were positive about organisations where other clients were also disabled; others sometimes felt out of place, particularly if their condition was quite different from those of other clients.

Analysis across the performance groups

It was possible to look at some of these issues in more depth across the four performance groups. First, among the more effective performers, some Job Broker

managers or staff commented on the high profile of the Job Broker contract within the organisation as a whole. They highlighted, for example, the high proportion of the work of the organisation that it represented, describing it as an important or prestigious contract, talking about it being seen as a successful part of the organisation’s activity, or one that made valued financial or other contributions to the organisation. Some felt that the perceived value of the Job Broker service had risen only as its financial performance improved. Among the Job Brokers with middling or lower performance levels, however, there were comments about job broking being only a small part of the organisation’s activity, not being widely valued or seen as prestigious, or about management questioning the continuation of the service.

Across the different patterns of performance, there were managers who stressed that the service was very similar to, or built on, or was a natural extension of, other aspects of the organisation’s activity. However, there were some organisations where a service aimed directly at people with health conditions and disabilities was a new direction. None of these organisations were among the higher performing Job Brokers or those which recorded high job sustainability among clients groups who might be expected to be further from work. Among the latter group, however, some organisations saw aspects of the funding and contractual arrangements, and particularly the focus on outcomes, as a way of working which did not fit well with the practices, values and ethos of the organisation. The importance of prior experience is perhaps also highlighted by the fact that the four Job Brokers in the study sample which had operated during the earlier Personal Adviser Service phase of NDDP (see Chapter 1) were all among the highest performing Job Brokers, and the two Jobcentre Plus Job Brokers were in the highest and middle performance groups. It is not possible to ascertain whether it is their experience of delivering similar services, of working with similar clients, or of a similar funding structure which is critical here, but all may be relevant.

There were also differences in how far different Job Broker teams were able to make use of other services or resources within the organisation to augment their own work with NDDP clients. (Again, note that the Jobcentre Plus Job Brokers are viewed as independent services here.) This arose where job broking was not seen as a distinctive service so that what was provided to clients was the same as that provided under another contract or in the organisation’s work generally; where NDDP clients were on the caseload of another service as well, where other services were used for more intensive work with clients before they were registered on NDDP, or where there was other internal provision such as training, job search resources, information about vacancies or links with employers on which Job Brokers could call. These other resources were available to all but one of the better performing Job Brokers. The picture was more mixed among those with medium performance, where the Job Broker contract was sometimes completely separate and sometimes integrated with other services. Among the Job Brokers with lower job entry rates, there was again much cross-use of services. For some, this reflected the fact that NDDP was not a distinctive service; for others it may be a function of the relatively small scale of the

Job Broker work and the fact that it did not have dedicated resources. Only one of the Job Brokers with relatively low performance rates had other services which could be used for early work with clients prior to NDDP registration.

The picture then is a varied one. However, there does appear to be some association of effective performance with both strong organisational support for the Job Broker service and expertise and resources on which to build.

It is perhaps also worth noting that public, private and voluntary sector organisations were found across all the patterns of performance among the in-depth study Job Brokers; there seemed not to be any association between sector and effectiveness. Finally, there was some suggestion in the data that a local and regional scale of operation was associated with strong performance more than a UK-wide scale of operation.