Planning for the future

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Trust, vision, values

Communicating the direction of travel to everyone involved when embarking on any journey is important. A lack of communication can result in feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, confusion and disengagement.

Organisational leaders cannot predict the future and it is important to be honest about that. Leaders of learning organisations readily accept they do not have all the answers but they are able to clearly set the direction, articulate and model the expected values and, critically, encourage the involvement of all staff. To be successful, leaders have to demonstrate trust in staff. That trust, or ‘authorising environment’ as it is sometimes called, helps create the conditions for positive cultural change. Staff will naturally become involved as they feel invested and that they have more ‘permission’ to try new things. The health and social service workforce needs to hear consistent language from leadership over a longer period of time.

‘It is by empowering individuals that we can achieve our shared ambition for a fairer and more prosperous nation. That is my call to Scotland’s leaders.’
(Nicola Sturgeon MSP, First Minister of Scotland, Scottish Leaders Forum, 2016).

That is the leadership challenge for integration going forward. Leadership is of huge importance to effective workforce planning. Leaders have to empower the workforce themselves, as well as people who use services, to learn, innovate and develop. While leaders cannot predict the future they are called to set the course and articulate, consistently, the direction of travel for the workforce and model the values required of the workforce. [Please see the section on systems leadership]

For workforce planning to be effective, an organisation also needs a set of values, and a vision for its workforce to fully realise its own goals. There are a variety of models in health and social care that services can use to create a coherent vision for workforce planning and, ultimately, planning for the future.

Everyone Matters, 2020 Workforce Vision, Implementation Plan sets out a range of specific priorities and actions based on the Healthier Scotland National Conversation. The high level actions focus on:

• healthy organisational culture
• sustainable workforce
• capable workforce
• workforce to deliver integrated services
• effective leadership and management.

Touchpoint toolkit

Communicating about the vision and importance of workforce planning is critical. Based on Cheron-Sauer, M (2012) ‘Social Work Education and Workforce Planning and Development in England, Europe, United States and Canada’, Churchill Memorial Trust, two examples of approaches which may be useful.

Download: toolkit / touchpoint-one.docx

Resources and signposting

• The development and implementation of a personal outcomes approach in health and social care impacts on service design, workforce configuration and practice development. The Personal Outcomes Collaboration is a helpful source for information and insight.
• The 2010-2020 Self-directed Support (SDS) strategy and supporting legislation calls for greater collaboration, flexibility choice and control for people who need support which requires a change to the way in which support is delivered.
• Self-directed Support gives people who require support great opportunities to design and create support that fits in with the way they want to live their lives.
• The Equal Partners in Care (EPiC) national framework supports the health and social care workforce to be more aware of carers and to work in partnership with them.
• The Right Values, Right People toolkit contains information to support employers and workers to adopt values-based approaches to recruitment. The toolkit contains different types of resources including videos and PDF documents that can be downloaded.
• The Safer Recruitment Through Better Recruitment resource is good practice guidance intended to help employers, especially those in social care, early education and childcare and social work to meet existing legislative and regulatory requirements in relation to the safer recruitment and selection of people who work with individuals who receive support and care from social services in Scotland.
• Iriss has published an evidence summary on Voluntary social care recruitment. The publication seeks to identify some best practice recruitment strategies from voluntary social care and other relevant sectors and industries. It provides background information about social care recruitment in Scotland and identifies the key challenges identified in the evidence. It identifies values based recruitment as one of the main approaches to recruitment being taken in health and social care in Scotland, and identifies key sources of information about the benefits and impact of the approach

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Planning for the future by the Scottish Social Services Council is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://learn.sssc.uk.com.