Employ
Supporting your employer to have a positive experience is vital to retention, regardless of how they were recruited. This section of the toolkit will provide you as an employer with information to improve internal practices around equality, diversity, and inclusion and in preventing your employees from becoming victims of exploitation.
Employ
All staff need to feel valued and adequately rewarded for the roles that they do. By promoting human rights and the core principles of dignity, fairness, equality, respect, and autonomy every employer can ensure their staff feel valued. The Scottish Government has declared its intention to establish a National Care Service to “oversee the delivery of care, improve standards, ensure enhanced pay and conditions for Social Care workers
- Equality- connotes having equal rights and opportunities including access to information and resources as required.
- Equity ensures that all individuals are treated and have access to resource based on their needs in order to balance equal opportunity.
- Diversity- Recognises both individual and cultural differences and how we respect and foster these differences including through inclusion.
- Inclusion- Involves respect and fair treatment of individuals irrespective of background, social or racial orientation. It embraces valuable contributions across the team to the benefit of the organisation.
- Belonging- Having a sense of belonging can be subject to the individual and influenced by several factors i.e., feelings of acceptance, being heard and supported within a group.
The Equality Act (2010)
The Equality Act (2010) sets out protected characteristics and prohibits providers of education and of service from discrimination, victimisation or harassment practices towards individuals under the protected characteristics. More information can be found here:
- Gov UK – The Equality Act
Important resources focused on Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging can be found here:
- Equality and Human Rights Commission – Understanding Equality
- Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion – what’s it all about?
Tenets of Equality
The Centre for Workforce Supply - Social Care (CWSS) team at NES has produced a 4 min video briefly illustrating the meaning of Equality, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging as well as Discrimination. It provides examples that are helpful in reflecting on individual biases, cultures and preferences which impact on your ability to recognise diversity and the role of power in decision-making in promoting the general tenets of equality.
Video
This case study looks at how one provider addressed discrimination at an organisational wide level based on the experiences of staff experience. It demonstrates the approach taken and offers recommendations for best practice. Case study: Managing a complaint of discrimination within an adult social care provider setting | Turas | Learn (nhs.scot)
Modern Slavery
Scottish Care hosted a Modern Slavery Roundtable Event for the social care sector in partnership with Scotland Against Modern Slavery to share best practice standards and experiences around the international recruitment of staff.
This discussion focused on highlighting the potential risks involved for individuals from overseas who are seeking employment in the Scottish social care sector, giving employers an insight into some of the red flags that could indicate illegal trafficking of individuals and to show examples of good practice to follow and reduce those risks involved. You can view it through the following link: https://youtu.be/hUeshQvPeLQ
Cultural Humility
Cultural Humility requires practicing self-reflection and having an awareness of how ours and others’ backgrounds, cultures, power, privilege or exposures impact on behaviours. A motivation to understanding ours and other’s assumptions and perspectives, staying humble to varying cultures, and embracing life-long learning can facilitate positive work cultures which is imperative to maintaining equality, diversity, and inclusion in an organisation.”
More information can be found here:
Health Care Professionals | Cultural Humility | Health Care Disparities | CancerCare
What is Cultural Humility? The Basics | Equity and Inclusion (uoregon.edu)
Cultural Humility Definition, Facets & Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com
What Is Cultural Humility? 3 Principles for Social Workers - SocialWorker.com
Effective communication
Although it is heard, it does not guarantee understanding. The significance of effective communication ensures that information fulfils objectives as what is passed across is well understood. Potential barriers to communication with overseas staff could be as a result of a perceived lack of understanding i.e., a presumption that one will not be understood due to their use of local accents, undiagnosed/unconfirmed hearing difficulties, speaking too fast, using unknown terminologies.
The Centre for Workforce Supply - Social Care (CWSS) team, NES has produced videos illustrating this.
Cultural Awareness
Understanding and raising awareness of the existence of cultural differences, that go beyond ethnicity and skin pigmentation is vital and should be acknowledged or celebrated.
The Centre for Workforce Supply - Social Care (CWSS) team, NES has produced videos on colloquialisms and nuances illustrating this.
Return of service and repayment clauses
The cost of recruiting internationally can be much higher than domestic recruitment. Although some costs would seem to fall to the recruit, some employers may need to cover many of these to make it financially viable for a potential employee to accept a job offer. It is therefore reasonable for an employer to expect a minimum return of service to cover the additional investment in their new employee. However, employers must ensure that any repayment clauses are fair and proportionate and do not force the worker into a situation that could be considered as modern slavery.
Employers can include repayment clauses into the employment contract of a new recruit, but these must be in line with the Scottish government’s ‘Scottish code of practice for the international recruitment of health and social care personnel’.
To find out more look at The Centre for Workforce Supply - Social Care (CWSS), guide for return of service and repayment clause.
Guide
- Return of Service and Repayment Clauses ( Download, 185 KB)
Navigate to other sections of the employers resource
