Project Lead - Who Cares in the Workplace

This is a project start-up and lead role with an anticipated three-month project development window. It requires excellent communication and negotiation skills, a commitment to establishing and maintaining quality standards, an ownership of your work, a belief in what you are doing, and an understanding of why it matters. If you thrive delivering important, life-enhancing people-focused projects with diverse work loads, and believe you have the skills and abilities to assist us with informing significant change across the Royal Borough of Greenwich for unpaid carers, we would, most definitely, like to hear from you.

Unpaid carers are the unsung heroes of our society. We are Greenwich Carers Centre - a well-established, highly regarded and much-loved charity dedicated to their support.

Becoming an unpaid carer is rarely a choice. Through accident, illness or injury, giving ourselves to the care and support of a loved one is something that one in every two of us will do at some point in our lives.

For many of us, caring becomes a 24-hour, year-on-year commitment - an expression of love that requires the gifting of our careers, our plans, and our lives.

For others, providing essential care whilst holding down a financially necessary job means balancing the needs of the workplace with needs of the care relationship. The competing pressures of work and caring are detrimental to wellbeing. Feelings of anxiety, stress and guilt are common to working carers and a risk to their emotional, physical and mental health. Life can become an endless struggle to hold everything together and not let anyone down. Working and caring can be downward spiral to not working at all. Many carers exit employment and continue to provide care in financial hardship and poverty.

…it doesn’t need to be this way – with your help, we are going to change it.

Purpose of the role

This post will deliver a two-year funded project focused upon improving the lives of working carers by supporting their employers to provide more carer friendly workplaces. Working solely within the Royal Borough of Greenwich, the project will establish a network of Carer Friendly employers. It will raise awareness of the issues faced by working carers by engaging with private, voluntary and statutory sector employers across the borough. The project will support employers to provide more flexible working practices for carers within their employment.

To improve flexibility in the workplace to ease conflicting pressures on working carers

To support carers in sustaining employment

To support employers in becoming a GCC recognised Carer Friendly Employer

To agree working environment improvement action plans with employers

To support employers with implementing action plans

To sign off completion of action plans and issue status notice

To improve the visibility of carers in the workplace

 To work with employers and their teams to improve understanding of carers

  Key responsibilities

To plan project delivery and contribute to the development of annual project delivery plans, including identifying key               project milestones and profiling project process and outcome targets

To lead on developing marketing tools, information materials and so on

To work towards the achievement of monthly and quarterly project delivery targets

To establish and work with a network of employers across the Royal Borough of Greenwich

 To raise awareness of carers by delivering information workshops and/or training to private, public and voluntary            sector employers, managers and staff teams

To work with individual employers to identify and action plan steps to reducing pressures on working carers by supporting employers to provide greater workplace flexibility.

To provide tailored action plans for employers and support and monitor progress towards completion.

To award recognition certificates thereby establishing a network of carer friendly employers

Develop and maintain relationships with community groups and voluntary, statutory and private sector partners with the express aim of raising awareness of caring and identifying hidden working Carers.

To set-up and chair a project steering group that includes carers and stakeholders. The group will meet regularly to support and progress the project. 

Represent Greenwich Carers Centre by attending relevant local voluntary and statutory events and working groups as requested by line manager and participating with community events, including those held by Greenwich Carers Centre

Complete service monitoring requirements as requested by line manager. This includes excel-based KPI reporting and the development of sample case-studies

Work to individual work-performance targets as required by line management

Contribute to local authority quarterly monitoring reports as requested by line management

Attend team meetings, service reviews etc as required

Always work within organisational policy and act in the best interests of the organisation

Work within the organisations Safeguarding Policies. This will include completing safeguarding training to ensure that             you have a good understanding of safeguarding concerns, including potential abuse and neglect of adults.

This job description is not intended to be exhaustive. The postholder will be expected to adopt a flexible approach to the responsibilities, which may be varied from time-to-time. 

Person Specification - Essential

 Project set-up and management experience

 Excellent customer service skills

 Excellent written and verbal communication skills

 Experience in a client facing role

 Experience of working externally with a range of professionals

 Experience of working autonomously towards agreed targets

 Experience of monitoring and reporting on the performance of initiatives

 Ability to write reports

 Experience of Microsoft Office including Outlook, Word, and Excel

Person Specification -  Desirable

Experience of consultancy style working

Experience of supporting carers

Knowledge and understanding of carers rights

Knowledge and understanding of workplace practices

Human Resource experience

Experience of delivering engaging presentations

Experience of working across the community on an outreach basis

Ability to develop and service networks

Knowledge and understanding of caring