Well, I can’t say definitively, but we did just give it a seriously good go! Those of you who follow this blog will know that Anderida Adolescent Care are a relatively small, residential child care organisation with homes based in East Sussex, England. We are always working on innovations to better our practice and do what we can to make the young people we work with as comfortable as possible. But they say that if there’s smoke throughout your house, the responsible adult needs to put on the oxygen mask first, before putting them on any children, as no one will survive with the adult conked out on the floor. So with this metaphor in mind, what are we doing for the staff? The front line who take all that rough with the smidge of smooth. We are no Google; sadly we can’t go flying our staff to New York for having a ‘good week’, but we wanted to do something.
Residential care work is tough. Anderida Adolescent Care staff will continue to smile whilst the pressures of their roles mount, and often fraught 24 hour shifts can leave lasting emotional impact. So we set out to come up with a way that fed into staff’s work life balance – but not with a day’s fishing in the rain off the pier and a pat on the head, but rewards that actually meant something to the individual and their families or home life. Like a day off!
So Kudos Credits were born. Kudos Credits are a major new initiative to try to positively feed back into the lives of the staff team. Kudos Credits are awarded every time a member of staff goes above and beyond the call of duty or demonstrates quantifiable, excellent practice from a list of ‘achievements’. These achievements include things like ‘identify an environmentally conscious strategy’ and ‘outstanding contribution to a training class’. Once credits have been built up, they can be cashed-in for rewards that are of genuine benefit to the work/life balance of the team, like a full rota with no weekends or an extra day’s holiday.
So, on a password-protected page of our website we have a full menu of achievements and rewards, as well as a method for staff to keep tabs on all the credits that they’ve earned and a suggestion box for people to leave their own ideas.