How strong HR is helping Cafcass onto a surer footing after some traumatic years in children’s services
Plenty of HR professionals are used to dealing with high stakes. But for Jabbar Sardar, director of HR and OD at Cafcass (Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service), the decisions he makes can have life-changing consequences.
Sardar’s organisation is dealing with a huge rise in the number of children being taken into care. As the body charged with looking out for the interests of children involved in legal proceedings, Cafcass is the largest single employer of social workers in England and will have handled 11,000 care placements and 49,000 private cases (arrangements where separating parents cannot agree) this year.
Dealing with such demand, which has surged since the outcry over the death of Baby P in 2008, would be hard for any organisation. But when that case was in the headlines, Cafcass was in a state that can only be called shambolic. Patched together from more than 100 different local organisations into a single body in 2001, its services were regularly slammed by Ofsted inspectors as “inadequate”, “too slow” and “not delivered to minimum standards”.
Fast forward to 2013 and Cafcass is anticipating with some optimism its first ever national inspection of the whole service (until now, inspections have been regional). Sardar, who arrived in late 2006 after revamping HR in the education sector in Leeds, is hoping for a “good” rating, following six years of graft to improve performance at Cafcass, in which his department has played a central role.
Along the way, the organisation has shed around 20 per cent of its workforce, including more than half its managers, through a combination of redundancies, natural wastage and, occasionally, performance managing people out of the organisation. None of the jobs lost have been social workers. Although the family support officer role has been abolished, Sardar stresses that no other reductions have come from the coalface and 93 per cent of Cafcass’s budget is now spent on front-line services. HR, too, has been revamped from a traditional personnel function to a strategic partner for the CEO and the 1,800-strong business.
There’s no time to rest, though. Chief executive Anthony Douglas talks of a period of apocalyptic change, in which it’s impossible to predict the future. To deal with that, Sardar’s next target is leadership development. But what have been the lessons from his already turbulent period in charge?
Get pay right
When Sardar arrived at Cafcass, the organisation was operating with dozens of sets of legacy terms and conditions. In the process of unifying them, he discovered that Cafcass social workers – whose job involves advising the courts on decisions made by local authority social workers – were often being paid less than the social workers whose decisions they were challenging. “We wanted the crème de la crème, but how could we get them when we were paying lower salaries than local authorities?” asks Sardar.
The introduction of unified terms and conditions came with a pay rise for many. But it also came with strings. A new performance framework was introduced and managers were required to rate staff at each supervision on criteria such as engagement with children, safeguarding and case analysis. “It gave us a consistency of understanding about how many people fell into different [performance] categories,” says Sardar.
At the same time, automatic pay increments went out of the window. Staff could rise up the scale only if they had a satisfactory, or better, performance rating, and those judged inadequate would get an action plan and appropriate support. If it didn’t work out, they left – voluntarily, or otherwise.
Although popular with the majority, the new performance framework did not suit all. “We did have grievances and turbulence,” says Sardar. “We were giving people the pay and a toolkit, but we were also saying: ‘We need you to do the job.’ Some people wanted to appeal the grading they were given. Some felt performance culture was not for them. But we were very firm and fair.” For a while, tribunal numbers rose. “We fought a lot to make a point. And we never lost one,” says Sardar.
That, adds senior HR business partner Daryl Maitland, is “a really important public sector principle. Don’t shy away from the path of most resistance.”
Training empowers
Sorting out pay and performance are “hygiene factors”, says Sardar. You then need “pull factors” if you want people to work the right way and to attract the best. Cafcass introduced a four-day management programme, designed to help all managers improve engagement in their teams.
Manager numbers had been halved, so each manager now had 12-15 people in their team. How did they cope with the increased workload? “Through the management development programme we were giving them the skills,” says Sardar. “A really good manager can manage 20 people, but a poor manager can’t manage one person.”
Supervisions initially happened every six weeks, but that was relaxed to 12 weeks when standards improved. These regular meetings, which had previously just involved reviewing the caseload, are now as much about understanding and motivating staff and getting to know their personal circumstances.
This approach has also made it easier to attract the kind of people who, in Sardar’s words, “want to make a difference at the cutting edge of social work…We are getting the right people at all levels in the organisation.”
Technology is cool
Sardar is an HR professional who likes data. He has facts and figures at his fingertips about the size and shape of the workforce, sickness rates, turnover rates and the number of adoption cases. When he’s looking for improvements, the starting point is evidence.
Technology – BlackBerrys, laptops and tablets – has been rolled out to the front line in a way that is normal in the private sector but revolutionary in social work. Staff can now access all data on the move.
Personal performance information is also available online, via an internal scorecard, so people can look at their caseload or sickness rates and compare them to other teams. “It allows them to look at their efficiency and understand their own data,” says Sardar. “Do they have more work than others or not? Previously, when an individual had a meeting with their manager, the manager would tell them this stuff. Now they have it themselves and it allows them to self-regulate. I’m not aware of many organisations who have that sort of technology.”
Well-being isn’t fluffy
The daily headlines – whether it’s Sharon Shoesmith’s payoff or the disarray in Birmingham children’s services – demonstrate that social work is extremely trying, even without the ongoing burden of public sector cuts. Time off for stress used to be a big issue at Cafcass, accounting for 40 per cent of long-term leave. But active absence management – and clever procurement to obtain a flexible health and well-being package that is better used by all staff – has brought average sick days down to only five a year. Resilience training has also been rolled out to help staff deal with the stresses of the job.
As a result, the number of individuals on long-term sick leave has dropped from around 50 to fewer than 20 at any one time – about as low as it can get, given the inevitability of serious physical illnesses. Despite all the strains Cafcass has faced, there are no unallocated cases, says Sardar. “People are busy and pressured, for sure. But they are not stressed.”