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Section 3: Transforming Performance

In this section we:

• Describe the six themes that were identified by the Workstreams in terms of enhancing the performance of current services;
• Focus on the key actions that underpin these themes;
• Consider the practical implications of putting these into practice;
• Set out what the offer to individuals and employers will be; and
• Describe the key focus on effective partnership and what its key components need to be

The six performance themes

The Workstreams identified six themes in terms of enhancing performance

Early interventions. There needs to be earlier identification of those at risk of long term worklessness. This applies to those in work (particularly when they become ill) as well as those out of work. And it applies to engagement in the process of people applying for Incapacity Benefit. This applies particularly to disadvantaged people who are unlikely to engage with mainstream employment services, especially at transition points in their lives where they are most vulnerable.

Case Study
Full Employment Areas Initiative ( FEA) Glasgow

The aim of FEA is to find new ways of reaching and actively engaging with workless people in Glasgow. Teams of "community animators", who themselves have been unemployed long term, meet with local residents - on the streets, through local networks and through knocking on doors. They aim to find out what is holding people back from employment and look to help address those barriers. As the animators have experience of unemployment themselves, they can use their own experience to help break the culture of worklessness, to move people on and eventually into work. Clients can get help to build up their confidence, communication and other soft skills and will be referred to appropriate services once they feel ready to take that next step towards employment.

Client-focused interventions. We need to identify and respond to the specific obstacles faced by each individual, and help them to build all the aspects of their own capacity to work. As part of this we need to present clients with a simple, coherent and progressive service that is at all times focused on their needs and not the needs of delivery and funding organisations.

Case Study
GET ON programme Edinburgh

The GET ON programme has been designed to support people who face difficulties in getting into work. It follows a 5 stage model, which works with the clients' abilities and support needs. The first stage is registration, and access to advice, guidance and an assessment of needs. Clients are directed to appropriate support and training based on this assessment. For those who need minimal help it can be a direct referral to training for work through the Academies. Depending on the level of support needed, Stage 2 involves training designed to prepare participants to enter vocational training or employment. This is delivered by a rannge of organisations based on the client's needs. Stage 3 is choosing a career path. The Academies promote their sectors and interested clients can then undergo the selction process for their chosen Academy. Stage 4 is the vocational training provided by the Academies, lasting 3-4 weeks. Stage 5 provides aftercare, support and tracking of clients, including further assistance for those who have not yet moved into work. GET ON work in partnership with other agencies to allow their clients to access a wide range of services.

Employer engagement. We need to make sure that we are offering employers simple, effective and appealing ways of benefiting from the skills and commitment of these potential recruits. Employers need to be offered coherent access to the range of support available. This will help them to reach out to unfamiliar sources of labour and meet potential recruits half way in terms of recruitment, selection, induction and training approaches. There is a particular responsibility on employers in the public sector and those receiving public sector contracts to offer stepping stones to the wider job market and to play their part in developing a better sense of corporate responsibility amongst employers, especially in supporting our young people.

Case Study
Ready for Work

Scottish Business in the Community's ( SBIC) Ready for Work programme is an employer-led employment initiative which operates in Scotland. It provides people, for example homeless people, who face disadvantages in the labour market to gain the skills and experience necessary for obtaining work. For clients the programme consists of pre-employment training, covering communication and team working skills, which lasts for 3 days followed by a 2-6 weeks work placement, provided by SBIC member companies and other employers, to help client (re)familiarise themselves with the workplace. SBIC also work with the businesses - encouraging inclusive HR and recruitment processes, running awareness sessions for employees, followed up with buddy training to ensure participants are supported during their placement. At the end of the placement the client receives help to gain and sustain employment through the Job Coaching programme. Once in work the client and employer benefit from support from SBIC to help sustain the employment including visits and help to resolve any issues arising. SBIC evaluate the placement for both the employer and participant.

Sustaining and progressing employment. Much of the success in entering and sustaining employment depends on the effective support provided beforehand; nevertheless there should be a stronger focus on providing support for people who need it after they have started in work. There is a strong link to be made to workforce development and specifically to helping these new employees to progress in work through skills enhancement.

Case Study
The Marriott Model

The Marriott Hotel group work closely with Jobcentre Plus to target recruitment of people who are on inactive benefits. Successful recruits are employed from day one. The Marriott acts both as a training provider and employer and has been able to design a programme which meets both their recruitment needs and as well as providing support for clients. The Marriott programme consists of a 90 day 'New Hire' process. New recruits to the programme receive training to improve their communication skills, improve their confidence, literacy and numeracy skills as well as customer service training and other technical/specialised skills to enable them to carry out their duties effectively. Following this initial training, employees are encouraged to study for appropriate qualifications. A mentoring scheme has also been developed to help new recruits to settle in to the world of work with ease. This programme has allowed the Marriott to increase its recruitment and retention rates.

Joined up planning and delivery of services. Local services should be more cohesive, with joined up funding and procurement approaches, common assessment processes, clear referral procedures and a sharper focus on employment outcomes. There needs to be joint training for all the front line staff who engage with the priority client groups and investment in local support organisations, especially those in the social economy.

Case Study
Glasgow Fort Partnership

The Glasgow Fort Partnership was set up with the aim of providing local people with some of the 2,000 job opportunities being created at this new retail park in Glasgow's East End. Membership consists of employers, and public and private organisations. The Partnership co-ordinates the advertising and filling of vacancies for employers at the Fort. Staff man an on-site office which co-ordinates employment vacancies and acts as a recruitment centre. People who have not worked for some time can access a specific training course run by the John Wheatley College, funded by members of the Partnership. Through the Partnership itself, 890 people obtained work, 566 of whom are residents in the Greater East End area. The Partnership also assisted 2 local social economy organisations to win a ground maintenance contract at the Fort, giving these organisations additional income and helping them to become self-sustaining.

Better outcomes. There should be a clear focus from an early stage on the outcome of sustained work, however long the journey from being inactive to being employed may be. This should be matched with higher expectations on the performance of organisations providing support services - and more robustness from funders in responding to poor performance.

Case Study
Employment Academies - Edinburgh

The Employment Academies were a response to recruitment difficulties experienced by employers during a period of labour and skills shortage, developed in partnership with employers from a range of business sectors in Edinburgh travel to work area. The aim was to increase the size of the labour pool by targeting excluded individuals and matching their potential with hard to fill vacancies. This approach followed three principles - Demand Led Training; A Customer/Client Focused approach and Contract Management - The Academies provided a brokerage service under contract between clients, trainers and employers. The unique selling point is the training is for vacant jobs which prospective employers reserve under contract for successful trainees. Each Academy evolved to reflect different sector/employer needs and aspirations. The Academies were - Financial & IT Services Academy (The Pool), Tourism and Hospitality Academy, Retail Academy, Healthcare Academy, Construction Services Academy (Edinwork) and the Public Service Academy (Deal Me In). The Healthcare Academy has been one of the most successful academies - 213 students have started training, 180 have gone into employment, and around three quarters are still in employment.

The key practical actions and their implications

Within these themes there are some key practical actions and implications which the workstreams considered in detail and these are described in this section.

• There will be local alignment of funding plans and greater flexibility and responsiveness in its application. The practical implications of this will be:
• The local funding partners will work closely together to agree the scale and pattern of services needed to drive up effective engagement with locally identified and agreed priority client groups and to deliver agreed outcomes for which they will be jointly accountable.
• The partners will jointly review progress towards their agreed joint objectives.
• The partners will agree how the local provider infrastructure needs to be managed in terms of performance, the completeness of the supply chain and the profile of spending across the key functions. They will drive this through their procurement arrangements and joint organisational infrastructure.
• There will be a stronger focus on reaching out and engaging with those distant from work, and flexibility in approach to the individual needs of the client, should they require support over the long or short term. There will also be more emphasis on effective follow through with support where needed for those finding work and their employers. The practical implications of this will be:
• The need for all the front line staff who touch the lives of workless people to be clear about the significance of their role and the importance of using their engagement to identify those who could make progress into work - even if this will be a long journey. They need to understand the respective roles of the array of services available and know where and how to refer their clients to ensure that they can be comprehensively assessed, their priority needs agreed and their first steps to work taken.
• The profile of spending will change over time from its current strong emphasis on personal development, training and job-finding to a flatter distribution covering all the key tasks. This is demonstrated in the graph below (table 4) which is an illustration of how funding may be allocated in the future.

Table 4

• Investing more in the assessment process, making it more thorough and covering each individual in terms of their current situation, their priority needs and their next steps. This assessment will need to be reviewed from time to time, but it will provide the basis for the help provided by a wide range of employment and specialist providers. The practical implications of this will be:
• The need to identify those people who can offer this service and to develop a common assessment process which can be widely adopted; and
• The use of a common assessment process will result in people being far less likely to be referred at the wrong time or to the wrong organisation.
• Developing an effective "personal account management" service for individual clients, ensuring that they benefit from stability in terms of managing their progress through a number of services. The practical implications of this will be:
• The careful management of existing staff resources and the clear allocation of these account management roles to individual clients;
• The development of "account manager" skills among a range of staff across a number of organisations; and
• The development of information systems to support account managers in terms of available specialist support, progress, review and referral procedures.
• Over time, more and more contracts will pay service providers by results - that is, by the number of people placed in sustainable work or passing real milestones towards work. This will mean that the best performing services will be encouraged to grow and develop. There will be higher expectations of performance and a drive for all organisations to match the performance of the best. The practical implications of this will be:
• a shift to better performing local organisations which focus on employability;
• a greater return on public investment in terms of the number of people finding and keeping work;
• increased capacity of specialist organisations, helping them respond to the expected higher flows of clients referred from employment services and needing their support to make further progress towards work; and
• a growing appreciation among funders that their responsibility is to the client and not to organisations.
• The provision of support for organisational change and development for employment and specialist services - and especially for those in the social economy. The focus will be on helping them to improve their skills, systems and management and to make sure that they have the detailed management information they need to refine and improve their service and its impact. The practical implications of this will be:
• a more robust and sustainable infrastructure of support organisations;
• the need to access locally-held information about the size and nature of the local workless client group to inform work and build capacity for service provision to be matched to and meet local needs;
• stronger working relationships between organisations on the ground with a clearer definition of and appreciation of their respective roles;
• enhanced confidence by staff when referring clients to another organisation; and
• enhanced value for money.
• The active management of local service provision. This will ensure the completeness of the local "supply chain" of services ensuring that they are available for clients to use, and the collection and active use of systematic feedback from clients to manage and improve the quality and impact of the supply chain. The practical implications of this will be:
• the need to map the existence and scale of current services and determine the extent to which these present a complete, connected and high quality supply chain;
• the need for each of these services to understand their role in the supply chain and their specific strengths;
• the local partnerships agreeing the way in which they will complete, develop and strengthen this supply chain through support and procurement processes;
• local partners being more robust in stopping doing things and taking contracts away from poor performers;
• the need to ensure that local decision making around the allocation of resources and strategy are working at the right scale in terms of the market and labour mobility.

The offer to employers and individuals

By creating an integrated "employability service" at a local and national level with these features, Workforce Plus will be able to make the following offers to client and employers.

The offer to employers will be:

• There will be a common assessment approach for potential employees, to help match clients to your needs;
• There will be "aftercare" and in-work support provided for people who need it, to help them adjust to their new employment, especially those who may not have worked for some time. This should help you to reduce the cost and effort of losing new employees within weeks of recruitment;
• There will be a trial/pilot of a "brokerage" service which will provide you with a clear access point to help you make an informed choice when and if you need help with recruiting or keeping people in work; and
• Employers can expect potential recruits to have good basic soft skills.

The offer to individuals will be:

If you want to work, whatever your current circumstances, you should get support from organisations that are best placed to help you develop all the relevant aspects of your confidence, ability and skills; move into work when you are ready; and (if you need it) to maintain and develop your job and career.

• You will receive a thorough assessment of your current situation, agree what you need to deal with as a priority towards making progress to work, identify where you can get the help you need and be introduced to the best person to provide this help;
• Your progress to work will be measured in a way which helps you see the progress that you have made;
• You may need different people in various organisations to help you. If so, with your permission, these organisations will share information, building on what you have already achieved, with the common objective of helping you take a job and stay in good quality work;
• You will be helped to work out how employment will affect your income in the short and long term, and to manage your household finances if you need help to do this;
• You will get help to find affordable, accessible childcare if you need it to help you enter training or work; and
• You will be helped by people who know where the local job opportunities are, and know the local employers and their needs well.

The Workstreams have, therefore, identified that the key to enhanced performance lies in effective partnership working - at the local level and between the local and national level. Government Departments, their agencies and delivery agents will be more joined up in their approach. In engaging with clients there will be a co-ordinated and coherent response to their needs across these agencies.

The Workstreams identified three main areas for joint working:

• The development of coherent and complete support services which provide:
• accurate financial assessments of the benefits and implications of employment, including the benefits, difficulties and responsibilities clients will face;
• a range of opportunities for work experience and employment from an early stage;
• a model of assessment which includes distance travelled towards an employment goal as well as the employment outcome itself, which should be shared by agencies; and
• support whilst in employment for those who need it (and their employers), which can also be accessed in periods of change and in crisis for as long as required by the client.
• The streamlining of funding for these services to reduce bureaucracy and complexity and with a stronger focus on outcomes and more demanding performance standards, with a view to
• fewer funding streams which create incentives to providers to join up services for the benefit of clients;
• contracts designed to encourage innovation from providers; and
• ensuring that funding and targets do not lead to providers unintentionally keeping clients parked in systems and programmes rather than moving them into work.
• Investment in infrastructure and capacity building, to further develop:
• delivery of services by staff who are trained to understand the client's needs and who are able to either deliver the appropriate services or refer to more appropriate provision geared to the clients needs;
• provision of suitable environments, where supportive relationships between support worker and client can be built and maintained;
• a holistic service which deals with employability alongside specialist services dealing with personal and social barriers, recognising the point at which employability support would help move the individual on; and
• better links between employers' needs and the services provided to clients.

In the next Section we set out how we plan to drive and support these kinds of behaviours and actions.

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