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Save Multi-agency services: Terms and conditions
Whether your service is staffed by direct recruits or practitioners who are seconded from partner agencies, you may encounter some issues over terms and conditions. Some of the key challenges and some solutions are highlighted below.
Pay
Differential pay can become a source of tension within services, particularly if it is not addressed openly and up front. Some services have used the following methods to address some of the tensions involved in differential pay:
- Use highly skilled and highly paid workers to maximum effect by cascading skills to others, enabling some tasks to be undertaken by other workers, providing consultation and supervision for these workers, and building up the capacity of the team.
- Ensure they get maximum value for money by recruiting the right people for the right jobs. This means carefully reviewing job descriptions and person specifications.
- Give staff access to other benefits, for example arrange for them to access training offered by other agencies.
- Use the budget to make additional payments where people are working across professional boundaries, but being paid less than colleagues.
At the same time, some services have found that pay differentials are not an issue. Some report that their staff accept that they will all be on different rates of pay, because they are carrying out different jobs. They recognise that this would be the case in a hospital, school or private company. However, this can become an issue where staff perceive they are doing equal or more work and getting paid less.
In some areas, staff have taken a lower salary in moving to a new multi-agency service. This tends to be because they are keen to work in a preventive and early intervention capacity, which can give scope for new approaches and ways of working which present a challenge and a great deal of job satisfaction. This example is included simply to highlight that there is not necessarily an assumption that taking on a new job means getting paid more, and that the reasons for changing jobs are often quite complex.
Other terms and conditions
Some services, particularly those with a high proportion of secondees, may also encounter difficulties if people are on very different terms and conditions. This is perhaps most applicable in projects with a strong schools focus, since staff from an education background are likely to be on term-time-only contracts, while others may have more flexible leave arrangements.
This can give rise to two sets of tensions:
- Staff on year-round contracts may have less annual leave and have to work in school holiday periods. Some may feel resentful that responsibilities for holiday projects and support may automatically fall to them.
- Staff on term-time-only contracts will only be able to take holiday in school holiday times, and therefore have less flexibility over their annual leave than others.
Ways of addressing this include:
- Identify whether there is scope to re-negotiate terms and conditions. For example, if some members have term-time-only contracts, but it is preferable for them to be able to provide school holiday cover too, their contracts could be re-negotiated so that they have flexibility to take a percentage of leave during term-time.
- Specify in-job-descriptions that the number of days leave remains the same, but that the post requires staff to work all year round.
Services that have dealt successfully with issues over pay and terms and conditions suggest that a key factor in averting tension is recognising and acknowledging the situation from the start. They suggest that the following steps are useful:
- Make it clear to all service members before they join that individual salary and employment terms may differ.
- As part of initial team-building, build up commitment and enthusiasm for the vision and common purpose.
- Sell the benefits of multi-agency working as opposed to the sticking points, for example by focusing on what it can give individual members in terms of experience, career progression and job satisfaction.
- Acknowledge the individual strengths and expertise of all service members, and create an environment in which individuals know that their expertise is recognised and safeguarded, and in which they are motivated to use those skills.
- Appreciate and acknowledge the differences between service members, whether in skills base, salary or employment terms – but do this in the context of the common purpose and vision.
- Don't forget that team building is an ongoing and evolving process, requiring regular discussion and analysis of roles and responsibilities, and including scope for individual and confidential discussions.
Reading and resources
Children's Workforce Strategy - This sets out the Government's vision of a world-class children's workforce along with proposals to tackle some major challenges including the need to recruit more high quality staff into the children's workforce and retain people in the workforce by offering better development and career progression.
This article from Children Now discusses some of the issues around differential pay and conditions in the children's workforce.
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Last updated on 04/05/2009
