Wiltshire Police were one of our nominations for a BASE Award as SW Employer of the Year. The British Association of Supported Employment holds its annual awards later this year. We’ll be sharing with you some nominations made for customers, staff, businesses and supporting teams of Pluss. We have been working with Wiltshire Police for the last 18 months to develop reasonable adjustments to the recruitment process and in work support for our customers. After an initial approach by Supt Armstrong, we have been working primarily with John Flynn, Deputy Head of Contact Management and key members of his team – Sinead Griffey and Samantha Milnes in particular. The adaptations for our customers have been exceptional, with key changes made to the recruitment process including John providing informal meets prior to any application, offering shadowing within Central Call Handling to assess suitability of the role to the customer, providing assessments by Access To Work regarding equipment, processes/software and working environment. Sam has been acting as a mentor to several of our customers, offering one to one training, shadowing and displaying much of the good practice outlined in the Equality Act 2010, none of which would have been possible without Sinead reallocating resource within her team to provide the time and support some of our customers need to build confidence and stamina. John has allocated this time for them and absorbed this into his budget, which in this climate of budget cuts within the Police force has demonstrated his passion and enthusiasm for developing the skills of people with disabilities which has led to the pioneering approach to recruitment within an organisation that historically found any changes to established processes very challenging. Wiltshire Police have shown that they have been true to their commitment to us 18 months ago, to change the demographic of their work force and utilise the skills and abilities of disabled people within their workforce, enabling them to fulfil their potential. Some of the examples of the adaptions to in-work and career development shown are the commitment to one of our customers with a visual impairment who, through the support shown to assist him through the training process, it became apparent that he had additional learning issues that had not been apparent before because employers had not taken the time to look beyond the surface of this customers needs. Through mentoring and cross department working (which had not been done before) they could create a new role that utilised this customer’s skills base fully but carved out tasks from several departments. Another customer had suffered from agoraphobia and been debilitated for 12 years prior to working with us; she was given a 3 week paid shadowing period prior to the rest of the group induction so that she could build up her hours in work (though she was paid as a full time employee from the start), and Sam was provided as a full time mentor for this customer in this 3 week period. It also meant that she could learn the systems at her own pace without feeling she was in competition with other new recruits. She passed her 6 month probationary period, progressed into unsupported employment and has applied for a vacancy within the custodial department to work directly with the public.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 09:39:41 +0000
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