In this Podcast, Julian Panter, Business Director at Matrix SCM, talks through a timeline of what we have been delivering with our clients in London in order to help them manage their temporary staff during these testing times in the public sector.
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Covid-19 has been a learning curve. We cannot say we know all the answers, but we have learnt a lot from our work with Councils across the UK, our supply chain of recruitment agencies, frameworks such as ESPO and YPO as well as Government updates. Success during this time has come from sharing intelligence and knowledge with each other, so that is what we wanted to achieve in this webinar.
Before we went into lockdown, we knew it was coming. The question was, “How do we protect our clients, agencies and staff?” Gathering information was key to understanding the problem to enable us to create solutions.
With potential issues on the horizon such as self-isolating staff and temporary work closures, we needed to understand what the best process was for moving forward. We worked together to ensure that we were protecting everyone both during the lockdown as well as when we come out of this challenging time.
We have been working with our clients to strongly encourage following the Government guidance, as although it is not mandated, it is important that we help them understand the advice and implement processes that suit their individual organisation’s needs.
We have been working with Councils across the UK to identify front line areas that need support and reassigning workers to those areas. For some workers that cannot be reassigned such as Refuge or any workers that cannot be redeployed due to self-isolation, furlough is a great way to ensure we are supporting the client, the worker and the agency. This ensures that workers are covered with pay, clients are not losing skillset or risking spreading the virus at work and agency margins are protected.
Management Information is vital. We need to understand what the effects of Covid-19 have been on the business. With all activity being logged on our system, we created processes for hiring managers to add justifications for furlough, self-isolating, and others for orders and placements raised through CR.Net. Any data that is logged on our system can be reported on, so organisations can input justifications onto CR.Net when managing placements or raising orders. We have processes in place that allow us and our clients to have full visibility of what is happening on site – we can manage and take control of the situation. This supports our clients both short and long term as when, in a few months or years’ time, we can review this information as and when needed at the click of a button.
Looking at the new orders coming through the system as an example, if the order is raised relating to Covid-19, we created a justification response so we can create reports on demand, track any peaks in orders and explore why there are fluctuations in the numbers.
We are seeing clients extending existing workers as opposed to raising new orders. From a worker’s perspective, they do not want to move roles due to the potential risk of trying to find a new job. From a Council’s perspective, they do not want to lose skilled workers. We have seen a different change in the workforce; Interim roles have slightly reduced, whereas Waste Services and Care role orders have increased.
We have been working with our clients to redeploy local workers. Enfield are a great example of this as a number of their local businesses have gone through difficult times due to the effects of redundancies and furlough. The opportunity here was that the Enfield Council needed skilled local workers to support with some local roles. So, we worked with the Council to create a link on their website where local skilled workers could look for work at the Council and apply for roles to work directly for them.