Dave Webster, Involvement Manager, explains the Porchlight approach to service user employment.
“Porchlight have always been open to employing people with experience of having accessed services, but for a long time, though it represented our ethos, this was not made explicit. This changed around a year ago when we added information to our recruitment materials to highlight that “we are especially interested in hearing from former service users”.
Traditionally employers in this sector have said that service users must have left the service they were accessing at least two years earlier, however I feel that this figure would be purely arbitrary; why not 1 year? Why not 3? Therefore, we do not apply a blanket rule about the time an applicant should have stopped accessing services, though we would encourage people to work or volunteer in a different project to their own where possible.
My role, funded in April 2006 by the Supporting People Innovation and Good Practice grant, is to increase involvement activities across Porchlight and ensure they are meaningful. All members of my team have experience of service use as this was a condition that we placed in the original applications for funding. Two of the team are involvement workers, who work to further service user involvement as well as working with Supporting People (SP) to interview clients for the QAF on their review visits. The other member of the team is a diversity trainer – the application for this funding was born out of the realization that traditional equal opportunities and diversity training can be pretty dry. The idea was to counter this by delivering a new take on diversity training that is interactive, experimental and makes people think.
Originally the Involvement Worker posts were funded for one year but they have proved to be a great success which has resulted in secured long term funding through SP.
Was there any resistance from staff about ringfencing and purposefully recruiting?
No, not to this recruiting approach in itself but there was early resistance to the increased focus on service user involvement. In some ways it was necessary for there to be something of a cultural change within Porchlight to further develop its service user involvement into something really meaningful. With the vital and full support from the charity’s management this approach is now fully embraced across the organisation.
Part of my role now is to provide training to service users and staff teams in other organisations about how to implement service user involvement differently, and how to achieve better results. The main focus is attempting to redress, as best as possible, the inherent imbalance of power between staff and service users.
Did you do anything differently in the recruitment process?
We always strive to level the playing field to ensure no-one is excluded from having an equal opportunity. We wanted to address the fact that some people who were attending interviews might be doing so for the first time in a long time, and in some cases for the first time ever. We distribute the interview questions 15 minutes beforehand giving candidates time to prepare, that way there are no surprises during the interview, and a lot of that anxiety is reduced.
We have also run training workshops on interviewing – on both sides of the table. Once people understand the process an interviewer has to go through they realise what they need to do to perform as an interviewee – to give examples, to be specific and to recognise question prompts such as 'give examples from work, volunteering, life experience, training etc'.
We are flexible about taking references; they can come from keyworkers or tutors for example and we try to be understanding of gaps in employment and of course housing history.
What are the greatest benefits of employing service users?
There are real business benefits to employing former service users and not just in our sector. The advantage being that we get quality staff who really understand what it is we’re trying to do. Our team are skilled and passionate about what they do, and staff retention here is already very good.
Employing people whose passion for the work is linked to their own personal experience can only serve to further those factors. Speaking from working with my own team, their enthusiasm is extraordinary. I have to remind them to take annual leave, and not to overdo it!
What would be your advice to other organisations looking at service user employment?
Do it! And remember that planning in this area is particularly important. It’s a cliché but it’s true – fail to plan and plan to fail. But don’t let that put you off – there are solutions to the challenges that you might foresee. And after all, if we’re out there trying to get others interested in employing our clients we really need to be able to say that we’re doing it too and it’s working.
Support is really key, particularly in the early stages of what can be a very challenging time – with one employee I had no fewer than 5 one-to-one sessions in their first three weeks, and we provide mentoring for all new staff to help with the transition.
Although we choose to pay particular attention to support in the early stages, all staff are treated fairly, they have the same rights and the same responsibilities. However we recognise that sometimes you have to treat people differently in order to treat them fairly. The reward on this early investment is a highly motivated team, passionate about doing a really good job.
