Maintaining skilled and competent workforce
Maintaining a skilled and competent workforce
This section includes good practice on:
• Introduction
• Employee retention
• Homeworking
• Evening shift
• Training of existing employees
Introduction
An effective workforce is fundamental to a successful organisation.
Employee retention
The good practices below will help you to maintain a skilled, competent and effective workforce. These are:
• promoting the benefits of healthy eating and exercise by investing in innovating training and establishing in-house initiatives such as ‘healthy eating days’
• investing in stress management courses for all staff
• having a training strategy that recognises the different skills bases and competencies needed by benefit processors, customer-facing employees, fraud investigators, supervisors and managers
• operating a training programme for all employees that includes training for new and existing employees in all key areas of benefits administration that: o makes employees aware of the objectives of the service, o builds and keeps up-to-date competencies in providing an effective benefits service to customers, internal and external stakeholders, and o addresses the competency needs of all employees
• supporting changes to Housing Benefit (HB) and Council Tax Benefit (CTB) administration procedures, for example regulations or advice in Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) circulars, with timely local training sessions and/or locally-produced written training material
• investing in performance management, and in the training and development of new and more experienced employees, as these can play a key role in: o attracting new recruits o retaining employees o offering a career path for potential managers o developing the management skills of more senior employees o bringing greater consistency and fairness to the management of employees o highlighting where individuals need to develop or improve performance, and ensuring that career advancement is based
This section includes good practice on:
• Introduction
• Employee retention
• Homeworking
• Evening shift
• Training of existing employees
Introduction
An effective workforce is fundamental to a successful organisation.
Employee retention
The good practices below will help you to maintain a skilled, competent and effective workforce. These are:
• promoting the benefits of healthy eating and exercise by investing in innovating training and establishing in-house initiatives such as ‘healthy eating days’
• investing in stress management courses for all staff
• having a training strategy that recognises the different skills bases and competencies needed by benefit processors, customer-facing employees, fraud investigators, supervisors and managers
• operating a training programme for all employees that includes training for new and existing employees in all key areas of benefits administration that: o makes employees aware of the objectives of the service, o builds and keeps up-to-date competencies in providing an effective benefits service to customers, internal and external stakeholders, and o addresses the competency needs of all employees
• supporting changes to Housing Benefit (HB) and Council Tax Benefit (CTB) administration procedures, for example regulations or advice in Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) circulars, with timely local training sessions and/or locally-produced written training material
• investing in performance management, and in the training and development of new and more experienced employees, as these can play a key role in: o attracting new recruits o retaining employees o offering a career path for potential managers o developing the management skills of more senior employees o bringing greater consistency and fairness to the management of employees o highlighting where individuals need to develop or improve performance, and ensuring that career advancement is based