Supporting your employee to have a positive experience is vital to retention, regardless of how they were recruited. This section of the resource will provide you, as an employer, with information to improve internal practices around equality, diversity and inclusion and to prevent your employees from becoming victims of exploitation.
All staff need to feel valued and adequately rewarded for their roles. 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…” [National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care in Scotland].
Principles of ethical recruitment include:
The Equality Act (2010) sets out protected characteristics and prohibits providers of education, including health and social care services from discrimination, victimisation or harassment practices towards individuals under the protected characteristics.
Important resources focused on Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging can be found at:
The Centre for Workforce Supply Social Care (CWSS) team at NES has created a four-minute video titled ‘Tenets of Equality’ which succinctly demonstrates the principles of Equality, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, as well as Discrimination. It offers examples that aid in contemplating personal biases, cultures, and preferences that affect one's capacity to acknowledge diversity and the influence of power in decision-making, thereby fostering overall equality.
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 requires practicing self-reflection and having an awareness of how ours and others’ backgrounds, cultures, power, privilege or exposures impact on behaviours. It requires a resolve to understand ours and other’s assumptions and perspectives, how staying humble to varying cultures, and embracing life-long learning can facilitate positive work cultures which are imperative to maintaining equality, diversity and inclusion in an organisation. More information can be found at:
Although information is heard, it often does not guarantee understanding. The essence of effective communication is to ensure that information passed across is well understood. Potential barriers to communication with the displaced talent pool could be as a result of a perceived lack of understanding, for example a presumption that one will not be understood due to their use of local accents, undiagnosed/unconfirmed hearing or learning difficulties, speaking too fast or using alien terminologies.
The Centre for Workforce Supply Social Care (CWSS) team has produced some videos to illustrate this:
Understanding and raising awareness of the existence of cultural differences, that go beyond race, ethnicity and pigmentation, is vital and should be acknowledged or celebrated.
The CWSS team, have produced videos on colloquialisms and nuances illustrating this:
To help ensure public protection, people working in social services have a duty to raise concerns and employers are responsible for making sure they can do this in an easy and safe way. The Care Inspectorate guidance 'Raising concerns in the workplace' clearly sets out these roles and responsibilities and the protection offered to people raising concerns under whistleblowing legislation.