Our commitment to our customers
Our people are committed to providing compassionate care and know that the relationships they develop with the people they work with can make all the difference between ‘a customer’ and ‘a happy customer’.
Key to this is recognising the commonality between our customers and our staff: we believe that looking at what makes us similar, rather than what makes us different, helps us develop meaningful relationships with our customers and deliver successful care and support. We have adopted this well being model across our care and support business and it’s a philosophy that is underpinned by three drivers.
Our three drivers for delivering care and support
We all strive towards a sense of well being
Well being is a shared human goal, yet we recognise that there are many ways to achieve it, which depend on our upbringing, experiences and personal resources. We encourage our staff to question our customers’ decisions in a totally non-judgmental way as this enables them to work with customers on alternative lifestyle or behaviour options when presented with what might seem unwise choices, such as personal neglect or criminal behaviour.
We all have useful personal assets to achieve our goals
We collaborate with our customers by drawing not only on their experiences, strengths and assets, but also on our own. This helps us to develop close relationships which are based on equality, dignity and respect.
We all have personal needs that condition our potential
We believe that just as important as recognising our strengths and assets, is acknowledging our limitations and needs. We encourage colleagues to take time to reflect if things start to affect them negatively so that they can consider appropriate ways to turn things round. We also want customers to take responsibility for engaging with us and the support we provide. At the same time we encourage them to be open and honest so that, if their lack of engagement is due to us not meeting their needs, we can work with them to provide more effective care and support. This is what we believe is true collaboration.