ORGANISATION, MANAGEMENT AND PARTNERSHIP
2
the pilots. The following three Sections (2.5 to 2.7) describe the ways in which pilots were working with partners, including the Employment Service and Benefits Agency, and explore factors which help and hinder partnership working. The final Section (2.8) summarises the principal findings from the chapter and looks at their possible implications for the national extension of the N ew Deal for Disabled People in 2001. As described in Chapter 1, a central feature of the pilots in the six contract areas was that they were designed to be run by partnerships of voluntary, private and/ or public sector organisations. In practice, partnership was also an important organising concept in the Employment Service pilots. However, across all the pilots partnership appeared to mean different things to different key players, partly reflecting the way in which the schemes were organised and had evolved (see Section 2.5), but also individuals’ own personal understanding. There was no formal definition or guidance given to pilot managers for working in partnership within the context of the N ew Deal for Disabled People. R espondents’ descriptions of partnership arrangements encompassed both ‘the partnership’ as an entity and working ‘in partnership’ as a process. Despite this, there was a general agreement on some core features of partnership: working with a shared aim and mutual exchange, but beyond a financial or contractual relationship.
The potential of partnerships was seen by people involved in the Personal Adviser Service to lie in drawing together a range of key experts in the field for the purposes of advice, information, and provision of resources (that is client services, staff, premises, clients themselves). Partnership was expected to result in collaboration (generating new ideas, new services), co- ordination of service provision, and accountability, representation, and credibility for the pilot service.
At the start of the Personal Adviser Service pilot, all the schemes drew together a number of organisations and agencies. In the contract areas, potential contractors were asked to list in their tender bid the organisations with whom they would be working in partnership. In the Employment Service led areas, these groupings were set up in a more informal way and described as advisory or steering groups. The type of organisation involved varied across the different areas, but included a mix of service providers, disability organisations, local employers, and statutory agencies (such as local authorities or health trusts). All the pilots included the Employment Service in their group. As the pilots developed, there was more focus on working in partnership to deliver services and less on the role of a partnership or advisory group (see Section 2.5).
In each of the contract areas there was one lead organisation which held the pilot service contract, drew down funding, and was seen as ultimately accountable for the delivery of the pilot service. Partner organisations were involved in a wide range of ways, from taking part in advisory
2.2 The evolution of the pilots
2.2.1 T he framework of partnership
groups, to taking on some management tasks, seconding or training staff, providing vocational services to clients, or providing premises.
T here were no formal contractual arrangements between partner organisations, except for specific aspects of their involvement, for example for secondments, or for the delivery of services. However, some of the contract areas had written partnership agreements, which were statements of intent or commitment to ways of working (for example, regular meetings).
In describing and analysing the delivery of the Personal Adviser Service, it is important to keep in mind the changing context in which the pilots operated since September 1998. What pilots chose to do and how they approached the task of delivery was affected by what were perceived by managers and Personal Advisers as changes in policy and guidance about the use of resources.
Based on the accounts of these changes in the interviews with Personal Adviser Service staff, it is possible to identify a number of phases that the pilots passed through: a set-up phase, initial delivery based on an ‘holistic’ approach, a change in emphasis to achieving ‘work outcomes’ for clients, and a later emphasis on innovation and experiment. It is not the intention to suggest that each pilot has moved smoothly through each of these phases. For example, activities around ‘set-up’ tended to continue for many months after each pilot area started taking on clients, and the ‘holistic’ approach has continued to inform the work of individual Personal Advisers even after the change in emphasis towards achieving more work-focused outcomes. What these phases encapsulate are changes in the way Personal Adviser Service staff have perceived and interpreted what, for them, the pilots were meant to be achieving and how they were meant to deliver the service. The important point is that each phase brought with it new ways of looking at the Service (from the staff themselves) and generated changes in organisation and practice.
The different phases are summarised in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 The evolution of the Personal Adviser pilots Phase of development Main characteristics of phase
Set up phase Concentration on issues in setting up the infrastructure (premises, equipment, staffing).
‘Holistic’ phase Early emphasis on client focus, working with clients to identify goals and plan action. Pace set by client and their needs. Outcome-focused phase Emphasis on activity that will move clients into work. Adoption
of strategies to promote this aim.
Outcome-focus, Outcome focus maintained but with central government innovation emphasis endorsement to increase level and range of innovation using
Intervention Fund.
2.2.2 From an ‘holistic’ to an outcome focus
The Intervention Fund is a discretionary fund allocated to each pilot project. It can be used for any purpose that will help individual clients towards and into work, and support them in work. Up to the end of O ctober 2000 the total value of the Intervention Fund across the 12 pilots was £ 3,465,000.
Each pilot area had to invest considerable time and effort to setting up the necessary infrastructure (premises, equipment, staffing) to enable delivery of the service to commence. When the service was initially available it was mainly delivered within what managers and Personal Advisers described as an ‘holistic’, client-focused approach. There was an emphasis on working with the individual client to identify appropriate personal goals and to find ways of making progress towards them. The pilots were not given targets for any aspect of their activities. The ‘holistic’ approach was also evident in interviews with staff in the contract areas even though these later pilots committed themselves, in their contracts with central government, to meeting targets for the number of job placements, progress plans agreed and successful job retention cases. In early 1999, however, targets for the number of clients placed in work were introduced for the Employment Service pilots. This change in emphasis from an ‘holistic’ approach to service delivery to one geared towards getting people in work was received with differing degrees of acceptance by managers and Personal Advisers. Where pilots had adopted a strong work focus from the outset, the change in emphasis appeared to have little impact and was met with little comment or opposition. In other pilots areas however, the change was both profound and unwelcome. The original holistic ethos of the Personal Advisers was felt to be undermined by the introduction of targets. It was thought that clients who were a long distance from the labour market would suffer if time and resources were concentrated on people who were job-ready or near job-ready.
In April 2000 a meeting was held of personnel from all 12 pilots and officials from the Department for Education and Employment, Department of Social Security and the Employment Service. O ne message to emerge that pilot staff took away from the meeting was that they should innovate and experiment more in the kinds of help they were giving to clients. Where necessary, staff could ‘take risks’ with the Intervention Fund to support clients into work. From subsequent research interviews with managers and Personal Advisers it was evident that they felt they had been allowed some important additional flexibility in what they could do to help some clients.
The next sections of this chapter present the research findings on the management, organisation and delivery of the Personal Adviser Service across the 12 pilots. It will become apparent that the changing policy context described above has influenced decisions about management and
organisation and impacted on the work of individual Personal Advisers in delivering the service.
This section looks at the management of the Personal Adviser Service pilots, including the involvement of partner organisations in advisory or management roles. The extent to which the aims and objectives of the pilots changed, and the development of the role of the manager are examined. Management structures and divisions of labour are explored, in particular how they changed in response to the changing policy context described above. The final part of this section looks at the contribution of external organisations to the organisation and management of the pilots. As mentioned in Section 2.2.2, there had been a clear shift of emphasis in the Employment Service pilots in early 1999 towards the achievement of targets for placing clients into work. Some managers described this clearly as a change in their aims for their pilots. For others, however, this was less of a change and more a confirmation of how they had seen the purpose of the pilots, as having a clear work focus, from the outset. R eflecting on what they were trying to achieve towards the end of the pilot evaluation, there was an emerging consensus that getting people into work was the prime objective, although some managers said that the service they offered to clients (by which they meant the ‘holistic’ approach) had not changed.
A similar range of views was evident in the interviews with the contract area pilot managers. Most talked about the dual objectives of getting people into work and of helping them move towards work, that is, increasing their ‘employability’. There was less emphasis than in the Employment Service pilots on the primacy of getting people into work despite the existence of targets in the contracts of their organisations. Managers were mainly content to see increased employability as either a satisfactory end in itself or as an important stepping stone on the path to paid work.
The main impact of the emphasis on job placements was on Personal Advisers and the balance of their work with clients, and the way in which Personal Adviser tasks were broken down, in some pilots, into discrete ‘specialist’ functions. This specialisation by function is described later in the chapter.
In some of the pilot areas there had been a change of manager or significant change in management arrangements since the pilots started. The other managers were able to reflect on the changing nature of their roles over the life of the pilots. A common description of their early months in post was an account of dealing with the problems of setting up the pilots.
2.3 Managing the pilots
2.3.1 Aims and objectives
2.3.2 Changes in the role of management
These (described in Arthur et al., 1999 Chapter 2) included:
• finding suitable premises;
• recruiting and training staff;
• arranging support facilities (telephones, IT and other office equipment etc.); and
• setting up contracts with training and other providers.
In early 2000, managers described how their roles had changed. They had all moved away from internally-focused issues, such as set-up problems or the ‘hands-on’ management of the day-to-day work of the Personal Advisers, and were engaged more with monitoring performance and developing services. The following activities were described as additional aspects of the manager’s role:
• planning ahead/ strategic thinking;
• developing new services;
• actively developing partnerships;
• negotiating contracts;
• networking to promote the service;
• consolidating existing services;
• evaluating current services;
• improving service delivery;
• monitoring value for money; and
• managing the Intervention Fund.
As managers changed the nature and scope of their roles, they adapted the internal management structures of their offices so that most everyday administration tasks were carried out by other staff.
The interim report (Arthur et al., 1999) described the range of management structures set up by managers in the early days of the pilots. Some pilot managers had from the outset appointed deputy managers (who typically acted as line managers to the Personal Advisers) and/ or office managers to oversee and supervise the administrative support staff. O ther pilots acted with a sole manager. By early 2000 the practice of having deputy managers and office managers had extended to more of the pilots. The advantages of having a deputy manager more or less permanently in the office were appreciated by pilot managers whose ‘new’ roles required them frequently to be away from the office.
In some of the pilots, particularly the Employment Service areas, the occupational psychologist fulfilled a range of management roles, including:
• monitoring and evaluation of Personal Adviser performance;
• routine reviews of Personal Adviser caseload and individual cases;
• evaluation of external provision of services; and
• routine analysis of management information.
2.3.3 Management structures and divisions of labour
There was variation between the pilots in how and to whom management tasks were allocated. Decisions about delegation of tasks depended partly on the amount of input possible from the occupational psychologist, and partly on the aptitudes of the staff in post.
As described earlier, lead organisations generally took the bulk of the responsibility for managing the Personal Adviser Service. Where other organisations were involved this was usually in an advisory role, and it was rare for partners or managers to feel that other organisations had very much strategic power or influence. However, external organisations did contribute in a number of ways to the organisation and management of the pilot service - most commonly through the secondment of staff (reported further in Section 2.4) but also through contributing to management decisions. Where organisations were engaged with a pilot in these functions, they tended to be seen as ‘core’ partners.
Partner organisations were involved in making contributions to the running of the pilots at a one-to-one, bilateral level and via a group forum. The degree of influence they appeared to have varied hugely as might be expected. Partners contributed to a range of design issues, particularly in the early stages. These included ideas and suggestions for promoting the pilot service and engaging with clients and employers, ways of approaching specific impairment issues, adding knowledge of and links to local employers and providers.
Where partners were contributing at a bilateral rather than group level it tended to be as a result of their own personal skills and expertise as much as their role in representing an organisation. Individuals made contributions to a range of management functions - for example, helping to recruit staff, contributing to financial decisions, running premises or host sites, and contributing to data management systems. However, it was rare for individuals outside of the lead organisation to be involved in this way, and had only happened in contract areas, and where the lead organisation had a past working relationship with the key individuals involved. In these circumstances, the need for clarity in management responsibility was emphasised.
The group forum was the most visible manifestation of the ‘partnership’ as an entity. Some groups had lapsed or been disbanded after the early days of the pilot when it was felt that their main contribution to design issues was complete. O thers continued to meet, although some with less regularity. By Summer 2000 groups were meeting every one, two or three months in different pilot areas. Where partners were members of a group forum, it appeared to be unusual for them to have individual contact with each other in relation to the pilot outside the group situation: their main contact was through the lead organisation, an arrangement which was generally seen as appropriate and fitted in with the model of one organisation largely running the pilot service.
2.3.4 Involvement of partner organisations in advisory or management roles
The role of the group forum was not always clear either to pilot managers or to representatives from external or partner organisations. The groups can be conceptualised as ranging along a continuum from active to passive involvement of members, where active groups discussed issues and members felt they had the opportunity to input into decisions, and passive groups tended to be the recipients of information about the progress of the pilot service. In some pilot areas groups appeared to become more passive during the course of the pilot.
This section is concerned with the internal organisation of the Personal Adviser pilots, including the types of staff employed, how they were recruited, the range of duties they carried out, and how the distribution of functions among staff changed in some of the pilot areas. When the pilots were set up, managers were given a degree of freedom to decide how the Personal Adviser Service would be delivered. Although there were important differences between pilots, the range of staff employed in the pilots included the following:
• management;
• Personal Advisers;
• occupational psychologist; and
• administrative staff.
The numbers of staff varied between the pilots but in general increased in response to the growing number of clients on the caseload.
In some pilots, the role of the Personal Adviser moved away from that of
generic adviser, competent in all aspects of the Personal Adviser function,
towards a more specialised role. The role of occupational psychologists, where they were employed, also evolved beyond the provision of professional assistance to Personal Advisers to include managerial and developmental tasks. Administrative staff provide a range of support functions to the other staff of the pilots, including basic clerical functions such as record keeping and managing appointments, but also more client- based work such as answering clients’ enquiries, checking eligibility, and accessing the database of job vacancies which forms part of the Employment Service’s Labour Market System. The role of administrative staff also changed mainly as a consequence of other changes in the role of Personal Advisers.
Pilot managers were appointed from a range of prior jobs. In the Employment Service areas, all the managers were recruited to the pilot scheme from existing jobs within the Employment Service (either mainstream or disability services). All had past experience of working with Disability Services, although for differing amounts of time. Among contract area managers, some were existing employees of the lead organisation, and some were external appointments; most had experience