Workforce Strategy: The complexity of workforce challenges in our health and social care sectors.

In the past 24 months, our Talent Directors have been instrumental in working alongside, NHS Trusts, Local Authority’s, Charities and Social Housing organisations to support a number of highly complex recruitment and workforce planning challenges. Solutions we have provided include;

• Built centralised recruitment teams to support shared workforce and flexible working across perm and bank staffing.
• Filled critical leadership roles across Governance, Operations, Marketing, Technology, Finance, People and HR.
• Designed and delivered bespoke Recruitment and Retention training programmes.
• Designed automated recruitment and scheduling processes.
• Designed and executed recruitment attraction campaigns.
• A review and re-design of recruitment and retention,  digital content.
• Collective and collaborative workforce events.
• Worked with numerous tech platforms and product teams.

It is no secret that the health and social care sector face extreme challenges in both hiring and retaining employees. The aftermath of the “pandemic storm” combined with the lowest unemployment records to date have now rolled up into the reality of the higher cost of living. This is not a workforce task for the faint hearted. However, these sector wide challenges bleed into all other sectors and the solutions that support change can be adopted across all shapes and sizes of organisations.

Our top line thoughts on what we are seeing and the impact we can have.

One thing we all definitely learnt in the pandemic was to be more aware of others and how to pivot our businesses to deal with the restraints of enforced change. Some of what we learnt, such as remote working and secondary employment is now the norm in most industries, however this is not applicable to the health and social care workforces. If anything, the shift to remote working and increased flexibility has had a negative effect on our front-line health and care force as their work provision is hands on 24hrs a day 365 days a year. The sector is also not helped by a lot of legacy processes, red tape, unfit for purpose systems and leadership teams that are primarily motivated to care for others and are not hired with the skill sets to design and implement organisational transformation at the required scale. If all of those challenges aren’t enough the workforces feel fundamentally underpaid, a huge percentage of the workforce is nearing retirement age and it’s not a sector that is being promoted well to younger generations.

When there are a lot of similar organisations facing the same issues it’s important to come together and work collectively to overcome challenges.  Within social care the challenges are felt nationally but are better solved locally. 3 quick wins from our in-depth insights into the sector would be:

1. Hire leaders that have worked in transformative / disruptive environments, that are BRAVE and are able to see and execute change. We are not talking about the idealists and blue-sky thinkers, but those that combine the ability to think laterally, have extreme patience, take educated risks and are results driven. There is far too much “hamster wheeling” ( going around in circles) within the sector and leaders need to know when to get off and try something new AND be empowered to do this. We fully respect the sector needs safeguarding, but to keep hiring the same people that continue to do the same thing is madness ( as said Albert Einstein).
2. Bring people together. Everyone has workforce challenges, and everyone’s workforce is fed from the same pool of talent. Build a collective so you can share ideas, share people and where possible share systems (or at least insights).
3. Write better content – share content more creatively, the sector has great stories so use them. The job and people specs, adverts need constant revision and a creative eye. New generations of workforces are not as uniformed in the way they make decisions and apply for jobs – there needs to more visual content and reflection in choices of communication,

On a final note, these sectors have a “real “social purpose, and leave us thinking ” what is the alternative”, what happens if the UK cannot (will not) change this and the monumental impact this will have on the health and wellbeing of our loved ones. We are driven to support workforce change and development within these sectors and we are just getting started.

Written by Emma McNamara, Talent Partner, June 2023