Know where to focus your development spend in 2022 – care sector insights
Posted on: 22/11/2021
Are you, like us, sick of hearing that the answer to fixing the care sector is ‘more staff’? It’s a common challenge that we hear from care teams. While this might be in some ways true, we know that providing more (quality) staff is only a small part of the solution.
We also know that teams with high performing, adaptable, people-focused leaders often have more engaged staff delivering better care outcomes… despite having the same resourcing challenges as lesser performing or engaged teams.
What the sector actually needs is to stop wasting the critical resources (people, time, money) we DO have due to the blind spot ‘interference factors’ that are having a detrimental impact.
Typically, interference factors are the things that ‘get in the way’ of us achieving our goals, and include communication breakdowns, internal rivalries, absenteeism, conflict avoidance etc. Things that add no value yet consume resources and greatly impact on engagement, morale and delivery of customer care outcomes.
Along with these factors, our latest research reveals significant gaps across the care sector in critical leadership capabilities as well:
- conflict management
- self-care
- performance management
- sharing responsibility
- communication
- coping with stress
- change management.
Sasha Burnham, Head of Research shared that: “these specific capabilities have a significant impact on the workforce, with change management, conflict management and communication having the strongest correlations with organisational performance and care outcomes.”
We can conclude that providers who are able to create a workforce who feel engaged and motivated to deliver high quality care by focussing on developing the key leadership capability gaps and pin point the greatest levers for increased performance outcomes, even without increasing staff ratios. Using data and uncovering the enormous amount of ‘interference’ means the real issues can easily be addressed, quickly and cost effectively. Providers who take this evidence-based approach to leadership development will have a competitive advantage.
We know what the industry data days, and yet no two care organisations have the exact same experience. So, what does your organisation specifically need to target in order to get the best out of your people? To move it, first you need to measure it.
CILCA and CISCA are two incredibly powerful empirical assessment tools that can identify the insights needed to eliminate the interference factors within your organisation, and across the care sector, right now. If you want to know where to focus your development spend in 2022, talk to us about how these tools can help shine a light on your biggest risks, and opportunities.