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Summer Conference 2009

Recruitment, Retention and Staff Motivation!

Thank you to everyone who attended our 5th Annual Conference.   This year’s theme was Recruitment, Retention & Staff Motivation and a great many of the delegates fed back that they found it very worthwhile.   They also said that the speakers had made them consider their current R&R and staff motivation practice, which is exactly what we’d hoped for.  

The conference was opened by Mary Bradley, CSAC’s Chair who set the theme for the day and read a poem about one person’s wish that his current care worker will stay in post as he really liked her. Mary was then followed by our first speaker George Tomlinson. George employs a team of 6 carers to look after his wife Alice.   He talked us through his social care journey and shared his thoughts on keeping good staff, which is as simple as treating them well. 

Our next speaker was Professor Jill Manthorpe who heads up the Department of Health’s Social Care Research team and she shared results from a study about the social care workforce of the future.   Her findings were certainly challenging for many to hear as she indicated that the social care landscape is likely to change significantly in the coming years.  

Mark Bowes

Mark Bowes then hosted a very engaging and energetic session about Developing Emotional Loyalty and the benefits of getting to know your staff if you want to retain them.   He was followed on to the rostrum by Sandy Armstrong, CSAC’s very own Recruitment & Retention Project Officer who highlighted the R&R Strategy she has produced and spoke about how individual organisations can begin to implement some of the actions within it fairly easily themselves. 

Summer Conference Drama Group

Our traditional after lunch drama session was performed by Moveable Feast Theatre Arts, an inclusive drama group from the North East.   Their performance was called “Together We Are Better” and involved singing and dancing to relay the message that staff who learn more about the people they support, can help them live their lives in a more fulfilled way and gain more personal and job satisfaction themselves. This was the third time that Moveable Feast had performed for us and as usual feedback from delegates was tremendous with many comments such as ‘Moveable Feast Theatre group were exceptional”   “Really enjoyable and thought provoking.”

Chris Graham, Director of Croftlands Trust then talked about utilising   ‘the outcomes star’ and the way in which it had helped move on people that access services, as well as having a very positive impact on the Croftlands staff that use it with clients. 

Our final speaker was Shane Harding, the Marketing Director for Cumbria Newspapers. Shane highlighted how media is changing and the new opportunities this provides for different industries including social care for example text and video marketing.   Whilst some people felt this session was a little hard sell, others said that they found it extremely thought provoking and would consider radically altering the way they advertised vacancies and their businesses in general.   

Overall we view the day as a great success and were delighted to receive very positive comments such as “professional, innovative, polished, high quality   and informative” and “an inspiring day, plenty to think about in the workplace.” However, we are not complacent and note that a couple of people felt that it wasn’t quite as engaging for them as past years.   Other feedback asked us to consider moving next year’s conference to the South of the County which we will endeavour to do although finding suitable accommodation for the numbers we have, has proved difficult when we’ve searched in the past. We will of course look again and if anyone has any suggestions please let us know.

Planning for next year’s conference will start in the Autumn.