Hitting the targets, but missing the point?
This year, ODEN began working on a Service Quality Standards Framework to help support service providers as they strive towards service excellence within increasingly more rigorous accountability models and performance contracts.
Employment practitioners and managers make decisions every day that impact the people they serve. A purposeful practitioner’s decisions are consciously, strategically and intentionally guided by a set of ethics, principles and/or values, ensuring that the person and their goals remain at the core of everything they do. Collectively, this produces an organizational work culture with heart, purpose and integrity.
Over the past few months, ODEN conducted an analysis of the publicly stated visions, missions, mandates, values and guiding principles of the 100+ member agencies that we serve. In this research, we were looking for the commonalities across our agencies, in both language and in spirit. Using this research, ODEN has drafted Guiding Principles to inform this Service Quality Standards project. Invitations will be going out shortly to members to form a working group that will vet the draft principles and guide the development of ODEN’s Service Quality Standards.
Our first draft of Guiding Principles are as follows. It is important to recognize that these are in draft, and will go through a facilitated process to work toward a final product.
1. Person Centred, Person Directed, Person Empowered: people are well-informed and are honoured in their decision-making regarding the intent, direction and quality of the employment services they receive. Services respect individuality. People are heard and are effectively supported in exercising choice, in defining and attaining personal goals and in achieving self-determination.
2. Navigator, Advocate, Collaborator and Voice: Through relationships, partnerships and collaboration, practitioners use their position and voice to open doors, to secure holistic supports and to acquire the resources required to help people get to where they are going.
3. Systems Focus: Services work to eliminate structural and systematic barriers to employment and engage in building awareness, public education and partnerships. Services influence community attitudes and are focused on advancing community benefits in a barrier-free and inclusive society.
4. Purposeful and Professional Practice: A purposeful practice is continuously self-examining, improving and evolving, using evidence and innovation to drive performance and achieve outcomes. Service interactions are respectful, authentic, professional and ethical. With courage, practitioners, managers and organizations are accountable for both the quality of their service and the results achieved.
5. Workforce Development: In contributing to a viable workforce that can support current and future business and industry, services aspire to operate an easy-to-access system for hiring and training that takes into account the business goals of the employer and needs of people who have disabilities.
ODEN is committed to supporting the ongoing success of our members. Hitting contract targets is critical for compliance and funding stability, and service excellence is critical to ensure your customers (people who have a disability and employers) and their needs drive service decisions.