Staffing

“It’s difficult to find and keep good staff. We have a high turnover and rely heavily on volunteers who have been helping out for years.” Manager, Young People’s Advice Service

The challenges in recruiting and retaining both paid and voluntary staff are varied, and also addressed to some extent by other sections of this website. The familiar concern about high running costs for rural services impacts on the ability of agencies to offer salaries that compete with those of larger urban areas.

Some agencies have attempted to combat the issue of high costs by utilising their existing resources to gain extra revenue, including hiring out training and meeting rooms, and even using volunteers to help with fundraising including, in one case, getting marketing students from a local university to voluntarily run a fundraising and awareness day which also helped to raise the profile of the agency, a supported housing and advice provider for young people.

A regular concern is that it is hard to afford or access training for support staff, and this can impact on the long-term prospects of retaining staff. While some agencies have sought to develop their own in-house training, informed by the experience of existing staff members, others have tried to set up local consortia to help spread the cost among a number of agencies. Sometimes this is done with the assistance of the local council, as in Exeter where training is sometimes set up for agencies from within the city and beyond. Indeed, Homeless Link can also help you to set up regional training consortia, while regional networking websites, discussed in greater length elsewhere in these rural homelessness agencies, can also provide frequent opportunities to access training or set up peer-learning and support groups. There is also a great deal of largely untapped ICT resources available to homelessness agencies which can help to develop the skills of staff from volunteers to managers. For more information on affordable or free ICT support and resources, take a look at our ICT Connections section on this website.

Offering flexible working can also help in retaining staff, for instance by allowing remote working – which can also potentially extend the geographical reach of your services – and diversifying workloads and offering job-sharing opportunities. As suggested elsewhere, the most successful services seem to be those that have sought to offer as wide a range of services as possible, which in turn offers greater scope for staff to broaden the scope of their work, and that helps in the long-term retention of staff.