Reflections and lessons on workforce capacity in adult social care

Our CEO Oonagh Smyth recently attended the Leading Age conference in Denver. She reflects on key takeaways from the event.

The Leading Age Conference is a national event open to CEOs, administrators, executive directors, and other decision makers working across adult social care.

It’s an inspirational and educational opportunity providing time to share learnings and hear different perspectives. There were sessions on everything from marketing to technology. Many of the ones I attended focused on capacity – a key issue for adult social care now.

Our recently published ‘State of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’ report found that in England, vacancy rates across adult social care have increased by 52% in one year to the highest rate on record. Discussions from the conference made it clear that similar issues can be found in other countries too.

On day one of the conference, I was thrilled to hear discussions focused on compassionate leadership – something which we often discuss internally and externally at Skills for Care.

At my first session we looked at the importance of culture, joy, and wellbeing at work; factors which can’t be overlooked for their impact on recruitment and retention, but also their impact on productivity. A happy team will deliver better results.

As we explored workforce strategies for the future in the second session I attended, we again spoke about the importance of empathy, as well as considering a commitment to equality and diversity and how the sector can widen its recruitment pool.

We also looked at an interesting study which highlighted the top stressors of the workforce – these were workload, bills, and personal mental health. These are issues which employers must consider to create a positive workplace that supports its people.

On day two there was a welcome focus on data and analysis, and how this can provide some very solid guidance on what does and doesn’t work when it comes to recruitment and retention.

A lot of what we spoke about resonates with work that Skills for Care has done, and that we know many providers in the UK are doing. Much of what providers pay for in the USA they can get free in the UK with our Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS). ASC-WDS provides social care employers with a benchmarking functionality which allows you to compare your organisation against other similar organisations for key workforce metrics. This can provide predictive analysis on what works. We know that people use ASC-WDS and the benchmarking insights as a tool to support their planning.

There was much discussion around the challenges the sector is facing right now with recruitment and retention.

One particularly interesting point that was raised was the need to be clear with who we are trying to attract.

Skills for Care’s data tells us that around 82% of people working in adult social care are female, and the average age is 45. Do we want to keep attracting this similar demographic or do we want to reach out to different people, such as men and younger people? We need to know who we want to attract so we can tailor messages to directly target these groups.

As part of this we need to use data to analyse how we can best optimise connections with different audiences, by utilising the channels that they use.

Use different channels across social media to target different demographics – for example Facebook is popular with a different generation than those who use Instagram, or TikTok – which is particularly popular with younger people. Also consider paid Google adverts.

Think about your online presence and how you appear as an employer- are there reviews about your organisation on Glassdoor, what does the employment page on your own website say about working for you? Does it show a positive workplace environment and opportunities for progression?

You can also take it offline and attend local job fairs, and look at other ways to reach out to the local community such as community centres that are popular with the group you’re targeting.

We also need to consider the distribution the of applicant pool. For example, someone might apply for a catering job, but we can offer them a different post if they have the right values. Previous applicants might also be interested in reapplying if they dropped out of the process for some reason or another, so consider reaching back out to them.

We know we need to be clear in every role about career pathways. If there aren’t any, then we can probably expect higher turnover. Even if there are few opportunities to progress to a new role, we know that investing in ongoing learning and development in your current role is key too. Our data shows that that average turnover rates decreased from 41.2% among staff who had no training, to 31.7% among those that received some form of training.

Furthermore, continued investment in staff training further reduces average turnover amongst care workers. Turnover was reduced by 9.1% for care workers who received more than 30 instances of training when compared to care workers with one instance of training.

At every stage of the recruitment process we need to nurture candidates. A good example of how to do this is in communicating effectively and efficiently with candidates. Someone likened making a successful candidate wait for three days to hear if they got the role to not hearing from someone three days after a date; they will think we are not interested.

We should go through the application process ourselves - does it work? How does it feel? How easy was it? Did it feel positive and compelling? Was it practical?

Of course, we also spoke about compensation – one of the most important elements in finding and keeping people to work with us.

We looked at creative solutions to compensation and heard tips from compensation experts. Of course, not all compensation elements are in our control, which is why we need to think creatively.

We need to be clear what outcomes we want. We can’t be competitive in all areas. Are we trying to attract, retain or motivate? Different compensation methods can have different outcomes.

For example, compensation experts in the US have found that competitive base pay was most likely to attract people and could also help to retain staff but has less impact on motivation. Whereas opportunities for advancement were a greater motivator. One compensation example which I am not hearing about in the UK at the minute is providers paying people daily which they felt was helping them to be competitive.

For retaining staff some of the key impacting factors included paid time off, flexibility and job satisfaction.

We also discussed the importance of pay differentials for staff with more experience or greater responsibility. Skills for Care’s data shows that on average, care workers with five years’ (or more) experience in the sector are paid 7p per hour more than a care worker with less than one year experience.

Over the course of the three days, it was interesting to see the insights from our data brought to life across many of the discussion points raised.

It was also promising to hear some practical solutions and ideas to address the real challenges which employers across social care are facing right now.

We know that social care is really sensitive to wider labour market issues and competition with other sectors but hopefully some of this and some of the support that we offer can be helpful.

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