Values at the heart of the business
I started up Connect Assist in 2005. We located in the South Wales Valleys, at the time an area of high unemployment. But also an area with strong communities where people look out for each other. Given that the business was delivering helplines supporting people in challenging life circumstances, the location and our values were a perfect fit. Here is why it worked
In the midst of the hard work and constant demand of running a business, it was sometimes possible to forget why we were doing it. However, every new job created was a reminder. By the middle of 2011 we had created 41 jobs, which we were very excited about. This is why we had set up in the Welsh Valleys, and it was working.
And we weren’t just creating jobs. We were creating growth opportunities for the people who came to work at Connect Assist. Rusty (my leadership partner) was the driving force, seeking opportunities for professional development and promotion of our people. One of our initial staff team, Sharon, had become contact centre manager. Steve, who initially joined for the social media project, was running technology, both for the contact centre and for our rapidly growing digital service and CRM system business.
But it didn’t stop there. I have never met anyone who has such an understanding of and dedication to diversity as Rusty. She would hire advisers who lived with disabilities, life-limiting health conditions or other barriers to employment. She wanted to give everyone possible the chance to work with us, particularly those that other employers might be wary of employing.
That year we undertook a survey of our workforce. Some 45% had joined us after a period of long-term unemployment and 30% had a life-limiting health condition or disability. One of our longest-serving team members joined us after a very long period of unemployment as a result of a serious kidney condition. He was in and out of hospital for a long time, but we always kept his job open. He became one of our top performers.
Rusty was a legend in the local job centre. She hired a call adviser with Tourette’s syndrome, which surprised many, but he eventually became a team leader. At one stage we employed a woman with quadriplegia, who was not only an outstanding call adviser but was training as a counsellor, and once qualified she left us to pursue that career.
Rusty made it her business to learn about the life story of all our staff members. She discovered that a significant number of their families were financially dependent on the one salary that they were earning from us. She created a ‘friends and family’ recruitment incentive and, as soon as we could create the jobs, we had a number of families with two or three people working with us, often across more than one generation.
For us, as well as every other business, managing cashflow was absolutely vital. But the cash situation of a business is all too often a well-kept secret, known only by directors and the bank manager. We took a different approach. We were up front about our cashflow and approach to managing our finances with employees and customers, making it clear that this meant that no employee or customer would ever face a sudden financial shock (as subsequently happened with our closest competitor). Our employees really valued this as so many of them had faced multiple redundancies in former jobs, to the extent that they typically asked questions about cashflow in staff meetings. Customers valued our being open about this, evidenced by the fact that invoices were almost always paid on time.
ffWhen customers or potential customers visited the contact centre and listened in on calls, they regularly commented on the empathy of our call advisers. They were of course very well trained and supported by Rusty and Sharon, but their empathy was typically a key part of their personality before they came to work for us.
Empathy was one of the core values of Connect Assist and we applied it across the entirety of the business. Despite the additional work and administration involved, we also adopted an environmental standard, displaying the ethic of least negative impact on the environment and our locality.
This approach built staff confidence. Rusty took her turn taking calls in the contact centre, which also won staff confidence. We did all business travel by train. One of the particular successes was a democratisation such that no one person in the hierarchy was so important that they couldn’t travel on a second-class train. These decisions matter.
In 2001 Save the Children reported that in Rhondda Cynon Taf, where we were located, 17% of children lived in extreme poverty. And in 2019 research conducted by the End Child Poverty Network found that Wales was the only UK nation to see a rise in child poverty over the previous year, with the worst electoral ward being in Rhondda Cynon Taf (at 47%). We had located in one of the poorest areas in the whole of Europe. One result of this was that most of our advisers had life experience of much of what they were presented with by callers to the helplines.
It took us time, but we began to talk about this. We started any presentation or proposal talking about the reasons for locating in the Welsh Valleys. We talked about the qualities of our people, their lived experiences and empathy. We gave charities and other potential customers a picture of what they would be part of by working with Connect Assist.
It was a compelling narrative, and it was a key part of our growth. I had worked my whole career in social enterprises with social and environmental values, but there had always been something missing. I never really understood what it was until then. Connect Assist was values-driven through and through, in what we did, how we did it and the difference it made to everyone involved – our staff, our charity customers, their clients and service users, and the community that we were based in.
Creating Social Enterprise is a book and newsletter by Patrick Nash, lifelong social entrepreneur.
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