Supporting staff at Carers UK

Helen Walker, Chief Executive, Carers UK – 28/04/2021

At Carers UK we spend a lot of time helping you to support your employees with caring responsibilities and as you might expect, given the cause, many of our own staff have caring responsibilities – so do we walk the talk as well? And what have we put in place during lockdown to support all our staff with flexible working and help when they are struggling in this new challenging world?

The week before we went into lockdown in March 2020 we moved swiftly to remote working, in our London office first as that was where cases were highest and employees were reliant on public transport, but within a couple of days our offices in the other three nations had also closed. The goal – to ensure that employees were kept as safe as possible, as quickly as possible even if this impacted on our capacity to deliver in the short term as we adjusted to home working and got everyone up to speed with equipment and using teams/zoom.

Trying to create the ‘office’ environment in the virtual world has been hard but we’ve focussed on keeping in touch regularly with all employees in a number of ways mindful that people absorb information differently.

Some teams meet daily for a 15-minute chat on top of their weekly meetings, others have bespoke coffee mornings strictly not about work. Some have buddied up to check in on those living alone. We have Directors coffee sessions to drop in and chat with people you’d normally just say hi to in the kitchen but wouldn’t dream of ‘just dropping in on’ and we’ve made sure regular one to one meetings and appraisal processes continue as usual.

Across the organisation I started to write weekly to all staff – simple update emails on what we were achieving for carers across the organisation and reminders to look after themselves – I was keen in these to take a relaxed tone, to offer support, flexibility and make sure we cut one another some slack – I also admitted my own challenges because we all have good days and bad days – Chief Executive or not!

We have a newsletter, the Weekly Whippet, full of info and fun facts. All staff zoom meetings every month with written team updates emailed in advance so they don’t drag on interminably – no one likes a lengthy zoom! We regularly remind people of the contact details of our employee assistance programme, our flexible working and leave policy. We’ve ensured managers check in on those shielding or with caring responsibilities – aware that respite centres and the usual support might not be available – and we adapted our leave policy to recognise people couldn’t go away last year but equally they still needed to take time away from work, so allowed more carry over year to year than usual (but not too much!) We’ve put on a huge amount of well-being training – from how to sit at your desk and not hurt your back, to looking after your mental health in lockdown – and we’ve put on events for black history and LGBTQ+ history months, inviting authors in to speak about their work and putting on allyship training for all staff.

We maintained business as usual and held our annual staff conference online. As part of our new strategic plan we asked for volunteers to write our new values so they were for the staff by the staff. We set up a social committee who have done virtual baking competitions, games nights, escape rooms, gardeners question time and that perennial ‘favourite’, zoom drinks!  

Our core job of course is supporting carers and we’ve developed a range of online support sessions for carers during lockdown which we’ve opened up to our staff team too whether they are carers or not, from having a cuppa together and sharing experiences to online dance classes, yoga, singing or first aid. 

Finally, we’ve constantly reviewed Government guidance and updated staff whenever new guidance has come out about when or how we might reopen our offices (in all four nations). We’ve told them what we are putting in place to make the offices safe and we’ve surveyed all staff about their hopes and fears about returning, what they would like to see in place and what a ‘hybrid’ home/office work life balance looks like for them. Of course, we can’t guarantee everyone will get what they ask for but we are determined to reward our staff for their extraordinary achievements for carers during the pandemic by supporting them back out of lockdown into a safe and balanced work environment. We have learnt much about ourselves, our resilience and astonishing work ethic and I am super proud of what we have achieved this year and determined we don’t lose the good things.