Community Lives Consortium

Supervision and Appraisal

Hi my name is Michael Connolly I am the Contract Manager for Network 2, I have been employed by the Consortium since May 2006.

I previously worked for the Consortium in 1998 as a Support Worker. 

I would like to speak briefly about the new Supervision and Appraisal system that we have introduced this year. 

As a company the Consortium recognises the importance of positive and proactive supervisions in the development of staff. 

Supervision of staff has improved over the last year, that means that every staff member has been supervised by their line manager once every two months, in some cases once every month. 

This new format is designed for the Supervisor to ask questions around the individual needs of the Support staff. 

By doing this we feel that we are giving more value to the staff and we are highlighting more issues and needs of the staff member as an individual and not concentrating on their tasks. 

The new format aims to discuss areas around their personal items that they bring to the agenda, areas of health and morale, concerns around workloads, staff personal development, training needs if appropriate and also to round things off action plans, which can concentrate on areas like training what they see as their needs are in the future. There could be issues around their team development. 

So what do we do with all this information that we gather through the staff supervisions. At the end of each year we summarise along with the staff all the points that we have brought up throughout the year and put them into a new Appraisal form that we are actually piloting at this moment. That will also be introduced as a staff development file. 

In Network 2 the Service Co-ordinators are actually using the new supervision format. 

As a group of managers we would like to think we are raising the profile of the supervisions that we are putting more on supervisions and that way we are making sure the staff take more ownership of supervisions.