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Radical home care: self-managed teams and social care
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A new report from the RSA suggests that self-managed teams may be a way to address some of the challenges of facing social care. They describe these challenges as:
- The lack of knowledge about people’s rights and options regarding their care
- The inability of bureaucratic, hierarchical organisational models to respond effectively to complex needs
- The physical and emotional burden placed on care workers who have to perform to a ‘time and task’1 model of service delivery
- Commissioning models based on the delivery of short-term outputs rather than long-term wellbeing.
The central principle behind self-managing teams is that teams themselves “…take responsibility for their work, monitor their own performance, and alter their performance strategies as needed to solve problems and adapt to changing conditions”.
The report, based on an assessment of evidence from experiments around the world, suggests self-managed teams are a possible solution to social care challenges because they can bring:
- More flexibility of service provision
- Increasing quality of work life
- Less absenteeism and employee turnover
- Increased job satisfaction
- Organisational commitment.