Following on from a great webinar we ran with the PPMA the other week, we thought we would run a panel discussion with some of our clients and partners exploring ‘How Leading HR Professionals are Overcoming the Challenges of Covid-19’.
We have looked back at how we have been dealing with the challenges of Covid-19. In this webinar, we are exploring ‘looking forward’. We want to take some of the lessons learnt and look at what challenges we may face in the new norm so we can understand how to overcome them.
Karen Grave, President at the PPMA
Vanessa Carthy, Apprentice, Qualification and Growth Manager at Lancashire Council
Natalie Ludlow, HR Client Manager at Worcestershire County Council
Ian Middleton, Business Director at Matrix SCM
Harpreet Daurka-Braich, Head of Procurement at Matrix MM
The webinar featured Chris Grimes, Sales Director at Matrix SCM, asking questions to our panel to understand how they are dealing with the challenges around social distancing, workforce challenges, returning to business as usual, Social Care challenges and traditional challenges such as annual leave and summer peaks.
Public Health England have been sharing materials and guidance around Social Distancing which has been useful. However, we need to be problematic about delivering this. As an example, the recommended 2 metres distancing is wider than a refuse van, which raises the question how do we implement this in certain scenarios?
The PPMA Community are not looking at bringing their workforce back to the office until September, so their view is to pilot approaches with limited staff in the office to see how effective they are. From there, we can find what works and implement accordingly.
Lancashire echoed this, emphasising that they plan on using a phased approach to bring workers back to the office. When they entered lockdown, virtually everyone went home to work remotely. Still today, anyone that can work from home, is. For staff in the office, they have put signs around the offices, explored staggered start times and are utilising Skype and Teams calls where they can. Building on Karen’s point about refuse, Lancashire have implemented social distancing and set up appointments for drop offs.
As a workforce, we do not want employees being worried about coming back into an office where we have thousands of workers. So, they are actively sharing information on their intranet. This ensures they are supporting their workforce’s wellbeing and mental health for when workers come back.
At Worcestershire Council, they are just trying to organise how social distancing is going to work. As a community, we need to apply context to each situation and find the best way of delivering it. As an example, as Worcestershire Council have an old building, going to the toilet may involve a one in one out scenario of leaving the building to use portaloos. This obviously isn’t an ideal situation but it’s important to understand the challenges we are going to face so that we can overcome them.
Dialogue is going to be key; we want to support our clients where we can and be aware of what is going on so we can help. We’re continuing to work as a partnership by understanding potential future workforce problems so we can be proactively help.
Post-Covid-19, we need to ensure we have the structure in place to support our clients if demand increases. This involves ensuring we have the knowledge of their current capacity, what their future demand could be, then ensuring the infrastructure is in place to manage and support that demand.
This involves working with both our clients and suppliers as we need to understand if the suppliers have the capacity to hit the numbers that the client may need. If there is a shortfall, we need to work with the supply chain to ensure we are in a position where we can support potential demand requirements.
Regarding future workforce pressures, Worcestershire Council has mass-extended all of their placements until the end of the summer. As a Council, they have a relief bank of staff that acts as a first port of call when they are offering shifts before they go to their agency pool. They have had a lot of relief pool workers that have helped, with Matrix SCM temporary workers coming on board to support in shortfalls.
One of the by-products of this situation is that re-deployment has forced organisations to take strategic workforce planning seriously. PPMA have seen an incredible number of workers being re-deployed across our authorities’ communities which has led to them finding skills in our existing workforce that they weren’t originally aware of.
Part of the planning here is understanding how authorities can shut down and open quickly again if they need to. As a community, we must ensure that when we make these transitions, they are smooth and support everyone, whilst also supporting front-line workers. As a HR community, we need to ensure they are mentally and physically supported to be able to cope with both potential scenarios.
Moving forward, the need for local authorities’ services are potentially going to increase. As authorities start to ramp up service delivery, they need to ensure that they have the workforce strategy in place to be able to support this.
During this time, authorities have been putting a lot of pressure on front-line staff, so as we begin to transition into the next phase whatever it may be, we must ensure that they have time to rest before the next peak. At Worcestershire Council, they have allowed staff to carry over annual leave and ensured that rotas are set up so that staff have time to take breaks and recover.
As a workforce, we do not want employees being worried about coming back into an office where we have thousands of workers. So, at Lancashire Council, they are actively sharing information on their intranet; ensuring they are supporting their workforce’s wellbeing and mental health for when workers come back.
Workers across Lancashire Council have been deployed into new roles to help deliver key services to the community. The strategy they are working on now is ‘how do we introduce workers into their old roles; transitioning them back to business as usual?’
The ‘Here to Help’ campaign involved asking people who have previous Care experience to re-deploy them into Care homes. As it stands, workers-wise, they have been covered. However, they are foreseeing potential problems due to the location of their care homes. With a number of their homes being in rural locations, will people want to travel, can they travel and will they feel safe doing so?
Similar to the NHS campaign, Lancashire Council did a similar thing with Social Care by working with Matrix SCM to train staff up to help with the Social Care homes.
We’ve found that agency workers have stepped in to help. The Care workers are using their experience to help run the homes and temporary workers are then there to support them. This takes on workload, such as cleaning, to free up their time to focus on delivery.
At Lancashire Council, they are responsible for private Care homes that go into crisis. If this happens, they have to support them. So far, this has been successful and we’ve found most haven’t needed the support of the Lancashire Agency support.
In Qualified Social Care, we have maintained a good number of CV submissions, agencies have kept a good work ethic at home and we’ve seen a good uplift in Unqualified Social Care with unprecedented numbers.
Part of our work has been setting up infrastructures. This ensures that, should we see numbers increase dramatically, we can support requirements. A great example of this is our work with the Nightingale Hospital. We have built the infrastructure to support them with staff should they need it, however we hope we never need too.
The areas we have identified for clients where we have had to further expand the supply chain has been around Unqualified Social Care. Some authorities have used the same agencies, but as needs become greater, we are going out to find more agencies to support them. Our Supplier Enrolment and Engagement teams have worked hard to build supply chains out where needed and have done a great job of supporting suppliers and getting them onboard.
An example of this is our work with the Nightingale Hospital as mentioned earlier. We have worked with our agencies to build an infrastructure if needed. Ultimately, we are there to offer support, but with the current circumstances we hope we never have to.
We have been running a lot of supplier engagement work and the response has been very positive. A lot of suppliers have wanted to help and provided ideas on how we can support our clients. Examples of this included outcome-based resilient contracts; with large projects such as a series of hostels needing more cleaning, as opposed to bringing onboard and managing a series of workers to deliver this, you could engage with a company who will manage the whole contract for you.
The Panel all agreed the key lesson for the HR community from everything that is happening at the moment is ‘to know your workforce’. This goes from understanding where they are and if they need support through to identifying their capabilities and abilities that can be utilised by the organisation.