Culture Eats Strategy – Staff Forum News

The Culture in our service really matters to us, we work hard to enable our team to have a healthy work/life balance and also to ensure our staff feel supported, listened to and valued. One of the ways we use to sense check how we’re doing is to meet with our staff in our Forum session.

We held our second staff Forum of the year this week and we were delighted to listen to the views of seven members of our Support Worker team. We were thrilled to hear how much they all love their role, how happy the role made them feel- being able to support their dedicated customers and how much they love working with Caremark.

Our Director, Mark welcomed the team and started by saying a sincere Thank You to each individual for the support they provide and the difference they make to our customers. He said, “we are so grateful to our amazing staff- they humble us every day with the remarkable care and support we provide. Our Forum is essential to ensure we provide a platform for our staff to share their views, ideas and suggestions- it’s also a valuable opportunity to understand what we get right and areas where we need to improve. It also allows us to share some new initiatives and gain an important perspective and opinion from our amazing staff”.

During the discussion we discussed our Culture- the whole team commented on how they felt valued and listened to and supported by our management team, several members of the group compared our service to that of other care organisations where they had worked in the past, where they’d felt overworked, underpaid, not valued and certainly not listened to or supported.
The team really value the support and customer-specific training they receive and completely appreciate having dedicated customers with dedicated shift patterns and excellent rates of pay in an organisation to enable staff to progress in the company.

We took the opportunity to discuss many of our pre and post-Christmas initiatives, such as; our annual Halloween event and Spooktacular event, our Christmas Jumper Day, Children in Need and our cake baking fundraising, Christmas Card design competition and also our Support Worker Awards for 2022. The feedback we received was terrific- we’re all really looking forward to the forthcoming events.

Mark also took the opportunity to discuss the move towards electronic rostering and recording- moving away from manual records and time sheet/rota’s via a free App. Some of the team have experience using this product and were really pleased to hear this news- some of their comments were; ‘it’s so much easier’’, ‘’very simple and efficient to use’’, ‘’really safe’’, ‘’the customers love it’’ and ‘’it’s immediate’’.

We’ll keep you posted to the developments as and when we have any news.

As a token of our Thanks, the Forum team will be receiving a little gift in recognition for their feedback and contribution!