Dissemination and debate

Sharing information and encouraging open debate around the issues and concerns of staff were both essential in reducing and overcoming resistance to the GROW scheme.

Disseminate information

Keeping GROW on the top of the organisational agenda was imperative for its success. It was impornant for staff across the organisation to perceive service user employment as a current and important issue.

Methods of communication included team meetings, senior management briefings, the intranet and the staff newsletter (see example below).

Debate issues and concerns

Open discussion and debate gave staff at all levels of the organisation the chance to voice their views and feelings and, ultimately, change their minds.

We ran team training days and focus groups. We elicited the support of our champions. We listened to concerns, posed counter-arguments, and reassured staff that issues would be thought through and solutions found and discussed.

"I started as a new team manager, and the day I started I was told that I was going to have a GROW trainee. I thought that Thames Reach had gone absolutely gone crazy and that it was too soon to start doing this sort of thing.

"In other organisations I have worked for they had tried to do a similar thing and had failed absolutely miserably in most circumstances. So when I first heard that this was going to happen in my team, I was really worried about how it was going to affect my team and how it was going to affect me coming in as a new manager.

"But I didn’t know then that the trainees would have all the enormous back-up and support that was provided by the GROW programme."

John Barker, team manager

Audio - Managers and supervisors pass on their experiences - [7.19 MB] Jasprit, John, Jenny and Andy pass on their experience as managers and supervisors of trainees. They detail the many benefits, some of the pitfalls and the best way to deal with them, and conclude with a few unanswered questions.