Powerful and productive teams

This week I’m in Aberdeen facilitating a learning programme designed to build powerful and productive teams – teams that have a strong sense of trust, are open and honest and hold each other explicitly accountable for their contribution to the team's goals. 

This stage of the project requires the teams to work on focused and relevant challenges that have been devised to give them an opportunity to:

• Practice and develop smooth processes and ways of operating
• Apply and develop key behaviours and challenge the mindset of self and others
• Build and own a process of continuous learning and improvement
• Become a high performing team
• Provide an excellent outcome for a deserving ‘client’  

Part of the criteria for selecting an appropriate challenge is that they must have a tangible output – deliver value to a charity or equivalent, be something you can take pride in, be sustainable over the long term and have an ‘emotional’ content – building a produce garden on a waste ground at the back of the Remploy factory in Aberdeen ticked all these boxes and more.

Remploy was established in April 1945 under the 1944 Disabled Persons (Employment) Act introduced by Ernest Bevin, the Minister for Labour. The first factory opened in 1946 at Bridgend in South Wales, as the factory network grew, employment was provided for disabled people returning from the Second World War. It is a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB) which exists to help disabled people achieve the independence, personal self confidence and wellbeing that can be achieved through sustainable employment.

Remploy is now one of the UK's leading providers of specialist employment services for disabled people and those experiencing complex barriers to work. Tailored services include development, training, learning and rehabilitation to help individuals prepare for, gain and remain in sustainable work, whilst providing employers – in the private and public sector – with the skilled staff they need to realise commercial benefits.

There are insufficient mainstream employment opportunities for all unemployed disadvantaged and disabled people, so job creation through commercial and social enterprise is critical. Remploy is therefore developing a model to support the creation of jobs for disabled and disadvantaged people through an alternative approach to the Remploy factories.

In order to develop the model Remploy has identified five of its existing sites to trial this new approach. The Social Enterprise model will enable each of the five factories to explore opportunities appropriate for their local economy and community, building on the existing skills and assets of sites and employees. Each of the sites is managed by an individual with a background in social enterprise. They are supported to develop a number of social firms, the nature of which will depend on each of their localities and markets. Expertise to support work experience and trainees is incorporated into each site.

The Aberdeen factory is one of five Remploy sites involved in a pilot project to look at developing some current activity into social enterprises. Ben Mardall has been employed as Social Enterprise Manager to take this forward. The aspiration is to develop a multi-functional building promoting active inclusion to support the integration of disabled and disadvantaged cohorts into the workplace by offering a cross cutting theme which addresses unemployment and provides work opportunities for people furthest from the labour market. Although all the businesses are commercially focused, all profit is spent on the social objectives of the enterprises. Our objective to offer a ‘hand-up’ not a ‘hand-out’.

The Aberdeen site is at the vanguard of that process.

Should you require any further information about Remploy Aberdeen, contact Ben Mardall, Social Enterprise Manager: ben.mardall@remploy.co.uk

Should you wish to learn more about lloydmasters learning programmes see our website or contact the team: info@lloydmasters.com