Company culture and the NDIS
Disclaimer – That these are my own lived experiences and understanding from the research that I do around the NDIS and health-related topics please be aware that it is informational only and not to be used as a substitute for professional advice or working with a Planner, Disability Advocacy service or talking to your Medical and Allied Health team.
So this is going to be an interesting one to write as I expect
a lot of pushback from this post and we see that people need to be very aware
of this when choosing a support provider or support worker, so anything around disability-related supports.
Disability-related support is a very tricky topic but
in Australia, this is defined as support to help a person live a more ordinary
life despite having a disability.
In Australia, we have
the NDIS ( the National disability insurance scheme[i])
and it is a scheme that helps people
with a disability to live their best life. However, it has spored a new industry
company culture comes into it
As this is something
that is so often overlooked in disability care and that is office culture as
there can be such a disconnect between the office and the support workers on
the ground.
This is where problems really start to happen and it can be difficult
to fix once it starts to happen but we need to explore what is company culture and
why is it so important to be aware of when most of your staff are not in the office
anyway?
To me, company culture is important because they
are caring for a person and when the office starts to disrespect the clients
and not communicate with the clients you start to see that that it is on both
sides as it shows a fundamental disrespect to their support workers skills and abilities
and often playing god with peoples lives due to office politics or having to
clean up messy situations such as a failure of a support worker to prevent harm
to a person they support and this can be in the form of letting the office know
that the client won’t work with a support worker due to the support workers behavior,
but often the office will overlook the client's concerns and believe the
support worker over the client ( I am not saying that in some case this needs
to happen but in the case of clients that can self-advocate they need to
respect these wishes)
The office also needs to be quick to react to incidents in
real-time to protect both the staff and the people they support however we see
that people often lose sight of the fact that they a supporting a person who has
goals and needs to be listened to in a way as well. To be treated in a way that is appropriate
to their development and goals.
So this leads me back to what is a good company culture and
how does it start? And I will seek to
answer the flip side of what is a toxic company culture and how to spot it in a support organization this is a
bit harder to spot as there might be genuine reasons that they are understaffed
in the office and this is a massive issue in disability support.
For these reasons I will do another post on this as well, as
some fundamentally don’t understand the NDIS and have legislation therewith their own
rules and procedures but it is best practice to review company policies every year
and not just when there is an incident or a near miss but to keep up to date
with best practices in support as it is constantly changing.
The second is do they communicate well with their clients
and support workers and in the preferred form, so for a person who has hearing
issues do they text, or if they are having an event do they send out an email, or do they rely on support workers to remember.
The third is that the office is understaffed or that they
are so removed from the people they support they don’t understand what the day-to-day
reality is for their support workers they might think it is ok to constantly
roster new people but this can be really traumatic to people as if they are
not walking the talk that to me is a red flag and there will be several to look
out for the first being do they have stated core values and does the support and office reflect that so if
they say they are person cantered care
are they able to respect the persons wishes in that they have the same support
workers and that they can work long term to peruse goals with this
person.
As well as do they have good ethics in the office or are
they unlikely to take near-miss incident reporting seriously or do they have a
very ad hoc approach to it or do they go into protection mode to the point of
almost gaslighting [ii]
the clients and staff involved, in this area.
Do they have enough
staff or are the staff taking on dual roles because they need to will do some shifts to keep in touch with what is going on, on the ground
and seek to actively improve the business in getting feedback from clients as
well as family and friends?
As really good
support worker is limited by the company culture and I have seen good support
workers leave organizations because they don’t have a backup from their head office this then just frustrates them and after they have served
out their waiting periods we see that they start there own business, as they
can earn more this way and have a smaller client basis, and we see that people
need to be aware of this as well and often keeping it a small company keeps it focused
on the clients.
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