AC 1.1 Evaluate the extent to which the flat non-hierarchical structure was appropriate under Kirsten’s ownership and the extent to which the hierarchical bureaucratic structure is suitable under Chaffinch Group’s ownership.
Kirsten’s Flat Non-Hierarchical Structure
Under Kirsten’s ownership, Calmere House operated a flat, non-hierarchical structure in which all 42 employees reported directly to her. Drawing on Burns and Stalker’s distinction between organic and mechanistic organisations (cited in Torrington et al., 2024), Kirsten’s model was quintessentially organic: characterised by decentralised decision-making, fluid communication channels, minimal formalisation, and shared professional responsibility. Mintzberg’s (2023) structural taxonomy would classify this as a simple structure, where coordination is achieved through direct supervision and mutual adjustment rather than rigid standardisation.
The flat structure was highly appropriate for several reasons. First, the small workforce enabled Kirsten to maintain meaningful personal relationships with every employee, fostering the psychological safety and trust that contemporary research identifies as essential for high-performing teams in care environments (West and Dawson, 2022). Second, the consultative management style empowered employees to contribute their professional expertise directly to care decisions, enhancing the quality and personalisation that generated Calmere House’s outstanding reputation and waiting list. Third, the minimal bureaucracy allowed rapid, responsive decision-making that is critical in care settings where resident needs are individual, unpredictable, and time-sensitive (CIPD, 2024a). The absence of hierarchical barriers meant information flowed freely, enabling staff to adapt care provision in real time.
However, evaluation requires acknowledging limitations. The flat structure was entirely dependent on Kirsten’s personal presence and capacity, creating a single point of failure with no succession planning or scalability. As regulatory requirements intensified and utility and staffing costs escalated, the model became unsustainable for a sole owner, which was a motivating factor behind the sale.
Chaffinch Group’s Hierarchical Bureaucratic Structure
Following the acquisition, Chaffinch Group imposed a hierarchical bureaucratic structure with multiple management layers: employees report to Kath, who reports to an area manager, then a general manager, and finally an operations director. This aligns with Weber’s bureaucratic ideal-type (cited in Torrington et al., 2024), characterised by clear chains of command, formalised rules and procedures, role specialisation, and impersonal relationships.
For Chaffinch Group as a multi-site corporate entity, this structure offers clear advantages: it enables standardisation across homes, facilitates regulatory compliance at scale, creates clear accountability, and achieves economies of scale in areas such as procurement, HR administration, and training (Armstrong and Taylor, 2023). These are legitimate benefits for a large care group managing multiple sites with varying staff and resident populations.
However, its wholesale imposition on Calmere House has been profoundly unsuitable for the acquired unit. The abrupt shift from organic to mechanistic structure has destroyed the collaborative culture, eliminated employee voice, and replaced personalised care with standardised processes that residents find impersonal. The multiple management layers have created communication barriers that slow decision-making and distance leadership from frontline realities. The evidence of increased turnover, rising sickness absence, resident departures, and declining occupancy demonstrates that the bureaucratic structure, while organisationally logical for Chaffinch’s corporate governance, has been catastrophic for Calmere House’s operational performance and cultural integrity. Chaffinch should consider a hybrid structure retaining corporate governance where necessary for compliance and financial control, while preserving localised autonomy and flatter management within individual homes to maintain the responsive, person-centred culture that drives care quality and commercial success.
AC 1.2 Analyse how Chaffinch Group could use a rational approach to strategy formulation to ensure that services provided meet customer needs.
A rational approach to strategy formulation follows a sequential, analytical process: environmental analysis, objective setting, strategy development, implementation, and evaluation (Johnson et al., 2023). This classical model assumes that strategy can be deliberately planned through systematic data collection and logical decision-making. Chaffinch Group could apply this structured framework to realign its services with genuine customer needs at Calmere House.
The first stage requires comprehensive environmental analysis using PESTLE and SWOT frameworks to understand the external factors affecting the residential care market and Calmere House’s internal capabilities and weaknesses. This analysis should identify customer expectations, competitive positioning, regulatory requirements, and workforce challenges. Crucially, Chaffinch must reconceptualise its ‘customers’ in residential care: these are not merely purchasers of a commodity service but vulnerable adults and their families whose needs encompass physical care, emotional wellbeing, dignity, autonomy, and personalisation (CQC, 2024). The analysis would reveal that Calmere House’s previous competitive advantage resided in the quality of its human relationships, not in its physical infrastructure.
The second stage involves establishing clear strategic objectives that reflect these broader customer needs. Rather than focusing exclusively on financial metrics such as room occupancy and return on investment, Chaffinch should adopt a balanced scorecard approach (Kaplan and Norton, cited in Armstrong and Taylor, 2023) incorporating customer satisfaction, care quality indicators, employee engagement metrics, and financial performance as equally weighted objectives. The current singular focus on financial return has driven decisions that have systematically degraded the service proposition that historically generated commercial success.
The third stage requires developing strategies that deliver against these balanced objectives. For Calmere House, this means restoring personalised care through reinstating resident choice over room décor and daily routines; investing in permanent staff recruitment to reduce costly agency dependency; empowering local management with delegated authority for care decisions; and rebuilding the consultative culture that generated the home’s reputation and waiting list. Applying Porter’s generic strategies framework (cited in Johnson et al., 2023), Calmere House historically competed through differentiation rather than cost leadership, and Chaffinch’s standardisation strategy has eliminated precisely this competitive advantage.
Implementation and ongoing evaluation complete the rational cycle, requiring Chaffinch to translate strategy into operational plans with clear milestones, assigned responsibilities, and measurable performance indicators. Continuous monitoring through resident satisfaction surveys, employee engagement data, occupancy rates, and CQC inspection outcomes would enable strategic adjustment and evidence-based decision-making (CIPD, 2024b).
AC 1.3 Analyse one external factor currently having a negative impact on the residential care industry and one external factor currently having a positive impact.
Negative External Factor: Economic – Workforce Cost Crisis and Recruitment Challenges
The UK residential care sector faces a severe economic challenge driven by escalating workforce costs, persistent recruitment difficulties, and structurally inadequate funding. Skills for Care (2024) reports vacancy rates in adult social care exceeding 9%, with approximately 131,000 vacant posts on any given day. Simultaneously, successive increases to the National Living Wage have raised employment costs significantly for an industry where staffing constitutes approximately 60–70% of total expenditure. Local authority fee rates have consistently failed to keep pace with these cost increases, creating a structural funding gap that threatens the financial viability of care providers across the sector (LaingBuisson, 2024).
For Calmere House, this external pressure manifests directly in the reliance on expensive agency workers who lack cultural alignment, the difficulty in replacing experienced permanent staff who have left since the takeover, and the financial pressure on remaining employees whose workloads have increased as a consequence of vacancies. The economic factor compounds the internal management problems: even if Chaffinch resolved its cultural and structural issues completely, the external labour market would continue to make recruitment and retention of quality care staff a significant strategic challenge.
Positive External Factor: Technological – Digital Transformation and HealthTech Innovation
Conversely, technological advancement represents a significant positive external factor for the sector. The rapid development of digital health technologies, including electronic care records, remote monitoring systems, AI-assisted care planning, and e-rostering platforms, offers transformative opportunities to improve both care quality and operational efficiency (NHS Digital, 2024). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital adoption in social care by several years, and continued government investment through the Digitising Social Care programme has created infrastructure and funding to support technology implementation across the sector. For Calmere House, this external trend creates opportunities to reduce administrative burden on care staff, improve communication, enable more personalised and data-informed care, and enhance the home’s attractiveness to both prospective residents and employees who increasingly expect digitally-enabled workplaces (CIPD, 2024c).
AC 1.4 Assess how technology could be used by Chaffinch Group and how this would impact work at Calmere House.
Chaffinch Group’s decision to implement technology at Calmere House presents significant opportunities if managed sensitively and with genuine employee involvement. Electronic care records systems, such as Person Centred Software or Nourish, would replace paper-based care documentation, enabling real-time updates to resident care plans accessible to all staff on shift, reducing duplication, improving the accuracy of handovers between shifts, and generating data for care quality monitoring and CQC regulatory compliance. Critically, this technology directly supports care personalisation by ensuring every carer has immediate access to each resident’s preferences, medical history, dietary requirements, and individual care needs, regardless of whether they have worked with that resident previously (NHS Digital, 2024).
E-rostering and workforce management platforms, such as Rotageek or Sona, could optimise shift scheduling, reduce the costly reliance on agency workers through better utilisation of the existing permanent workforce, ensure compliance with Working Time Regulations 1998, and provide employees with greater visibility and control over their working patterns. This could potentially improve work-life balance and contribute to addressing the retention challenges currently plaguing Calmere House.
However, technology implementation carries substantial risks that must be assessed. The existing workforce, accustomed to minimal technology under Kirsten’s ownership and already experiencing low morale and distrust of management, may resist digital tools if they perceive these as yet another top-down imposition. Implementation without adequate training, genuine consultation, and ongoing support could exacerbate the feeling among employees that changes are being imposed upon them rather than developed collaboratively (CIPD, 2024c). There is also a real risk that technology is deployed primarily as a surveillance and control mechanism rather than an empowerment tool, reinforcing Kath’s autocratic management style. For technology to deliver its potential benefits, Chaffinch must involve employees in technology selection and implementation decisions, provide comprehensive and ongoing training, and frame technology explicitly as a tool to enhance rather than replace the human relationships that define quality care (Torrington et al., 2024).
AC 2.1 Using theories and models which examine organisational and human behaviour, explain why problems have arisen following the takeover of Calmere House by Chaffinch Group.
Several established theories of organisational and human behaviour provide robust explanations for why problems have arisen following the takeover of Calmere House.
Schein’s (2024) three-level culture model provides the most comprehensive framework. Under Kirsten, Calmere House possessed deeply embedded underlying assumptions about the intrinsic value of personalised care, respect for employee professional expertise, and collaborative decision-making. The espoused values of high-quality, person-centred care were genuinely reflected in everyday practice. The visible artefacts, including open communication, flexible care routines, and individually decorated resident rooms, were authentic expressions of these deeper cultural layers. Chaffinch’s intervention forcibly changed the surface artefacts through standardised rooms, email-only communication, and agency staffing, and directly contradicted the espoused values. However, the underlying assumptions held by the existing workforce remain fundamentally unchanged, creating a profound cultural clash that manifests as resistance, disengagement, and voluntary turnover. Chaffinch attempted to change culture from the outside in, whereas Schein’s model demonstrates that sustainable cultural change must work from the inside out.
Herzberg’s two-factor theory (cited in Armstrong and Taylor, 2023) further illuminates the problem. Under Kirsten, strong motivators were present: recognition of professional expertise, meaningful work through personalised care, autonomy in clinical and care decisions, and professional growth through genuine consultation. Chaffinch has systematically removed every one of these motivators while simultaneously degrading hygiene factors through increased workloads, longer working hours, reduced job security as permanent colleagues are replaced by agency staff, and the imposition of an autocratic management style. The predictable consequence, according to Herzberg’s framework, is profound dissatisfaction combined with a complete absence of motivation.
Adams’ equity theory (cited in Armstrong and Taylor, 2023) explains the growing resentment and withdrawal: existing employees perceive that their significantly increased effort, professional expertise, loyalty, and emotional labour are not equitably reciprocated by the organisation. Meanwhile, agency workers who contribute less commitment and have no investment in the Calmere House culture receive comparable or higher pay. This perceived inequity drives the withdrawal behaviours, including increased absence and resignation, that the case study describes.
AC 2.2 Assess how changes to selection and employee voice have impacted organisational culture and behaviours at Calmere House.
Changes to Selection
Under Kirsten’s ownership, selection was a values-based, culturally sensitive process where candidates were assessed for behavioural and attitudinal fit alongside technical competence. This ensured that new employees reinforced the collaborative, person-centred culture and integrated naturally into the team. Chaffinch’s approach represents a fundamental shift to transactional, compliance-driven selection: an external agency sources candidates, and Chaffinch merely verifies qualifications and experience without assessing cultural fit, interpersonal skills, or behavioural alignment with the care ethos. This has introduced employees who lack commitment to Calmere House’s values, disrupting team cohesion and diluting the cultural norms that sustained both care quality and employee satisfaction (CIPD, 2024d). Using Handy’s cultural typology (cited in Torrington et al., 2024), the culture has shifted from what would be classified as a person culture, centred on individual professional expertise and collective purpose, towards a rigid role culture defined by procedures, compliance, and positional authority. The selection process is both a symptom and a cause of this cultural transformation: by failing to recruit for cultural fit, Chaffinch accelerates the erosion of the culture that made Calmere House successful.
Changes to Employee Voice
The erosion of employee voice has been equally damaging to organisational culture and behaviours. Under Kirsten, high employee voice was institutionalised through regular staff meetings, one-to-one consultations, and genuine influence over care decisions. This created what Boxall and Purcell (2022) term a high-involvement management system, where employees feel psychologically invested in organisational outcomes because their professional judgement is respected and their contributions directly influence practice.
Chaffinch has replaced this with a one-directional, top-down communication model: standardised policies communicated by email with no opportunity for dialogue, no staff meetings, and Kath’s dismissive response when employees attempt to raise concerns. The CIPD (2024e) identifies employee voice as a critical driver of engagement, innovation, organisational learning, and retention. Its removal has created a culture of silence and learned helplessness, where employees feel their professional judgement is neither sought nor valued. This explains both the increased voluntary turnover, as employees with options choose to leave an organisation that does not value them, and the increased sickness absence, as those who remain express their dissatisfaction through withdrawal behaviours that provide temporary escape from a distressing work environment.
AC 2.3 Explain how Chaffinch Group could have better managed the change from a small owner-managed care home to Calmere House being part of a large organisation.
Chaffinch Group’s management of the transition was characterised by speed, unilateral imposition, and a complete absence of meaningful employee engagement. Applying Kotter’s (2023) eight-step change model reveals systematic failures at every stage of the change process.
First, Chaffinch failed to create a sense of urgency that employees could understand and support. The rationale for change was communicated purely in corporate financial terms, alienating a workforce motivated by care quality rather than return on investment. Second, no guiding coalition was formed: Kath was imposed externally without involvement of existing experienced staff who could have served as credible change champions and cultural bridges. Third, no compelling shared vision was articulated that connected Chaffinch’s corporate objectives with Calmere House’s care mission and values. Fourth, communication was minimal and exclusively one-directional, with standardised policies imposed by email rather than through face-to-face engagement and genuine dialogue. Fifth, no effort was made to empower broad-based action by removing barriers to change, such as providing training, resources, or opportunities for employees to shape the new arrangements. Sixth, no short-term wins were generated to build momentum and confidence in the new direction.
Chaffinch should have conducted thorough cultural due diligence before the acquisition, understanding Calmere House’s cultural strengths and developing a plan to preserve them during integration. A phased transition plan, co-developed with existing employees and led by a dedicated transition team including Calmere House staff, would have enabled gradual adaptation rather than abrupt disruption. Retaining key cultural elements, such as personalised care, employee consultation, and values-based recruitment, while introducing necessary corporate governance structures would have achieved integration without cultural destruction (CIPD, 2024f). The failure to follow any structured change methodology has transformed what could have been a successful acquisition into an operational and human crisis.
AC 2.4 Explain the experience of change for the employees at Calmere House and examine how this is reflected through the stages of one model.
The employees at Calmere House have experienced the takeover as a profound and multidimensional loss: loss of their trusted leader, their collaborative culture, their professional autonomy, their voice in decision-making, their supportive team relationships, and their occupational identity as valued care professionals. This experience maps precisely onto the Kübler-Ross change curve, originally developed to describe the stages of grief but widely and effectively applied to organisational change contexts (Cameron and Green, 2024).
The initial stage, shock and denial, is clearly evident in the case study: employees found it ‘hard to believe’ that the sale would proceed and that Kirsten, for whom Calmere House was ‘the focus of her life’, would actually leave. This reflects the cognitive inability to process an unexpected and unwelcome reality. The second stage, anger and frustration, manifested as employees challenged Kath’s authority and resisted the imposition of new policies and procedures. Kath’s dismissive response, stating that Chaffinch ‘need to see a return on their investment’, rather than acknowledging employee concerns, intensified the anger and accelerated the transition to the next stage.
As Kath’s responses made clear that resistance was futile and that employee views would not be accommodated, the workforce moved into the depression and detachment stage, which represents the emotional low point of the curve. The case study provides compelling evidence of this stage: employees feel hopeless and increasingly dissatisfied, workloads have increased as colleagues leave, they miss the support of departed co-workers, they feel their views and opinions are no longer sought or valued, they do not know what the business is planning, and they believe the change in ownership has not been positive. Sickness absence has risen as employees physically and psychologically withdraw.
Critically, the Calmere House workforce appears stuck in this depression stage, unable to progress to the acceptance and integration stages that would enable productive engagement with the new reality. This stagnation is directly attributable to Chaffinch’s failure to provide the communication, support, consultation, and empathetic leadership necessary for employees to process their loss, find meaning in the new arrangements, and rebuild their professional identity within the changed organisation. Without deliberate intervention, the workforce will remain trapped in this destructive state, with continued high turnover, rising absence, and declining care quality (Bridges, 2023).
AC 2.5 Assess two factors that could impact employee wellbeing at Calmere House including why it is important that these factors are addressed.
Factor 1: Excessive Workload and Unsustainable Working Hours
The case study identifies that existing employees are covering the absences of colleagues who have left, resulting in increased workloads and longer working hours to reduce the impact on residents. The CIPD’s Health and Wellbeing at Work survey report (2024g) identifies workload and work intensity as the primary cause of work-related stress in UK organisations. Sustained excessive workload leads to physical exhaustion, cognitive impairment, emotional depletion, and eventual burnout, a syndrome increasingly recognised as a significant occupational health risk in the care sector (Skills for Care, 2024). In a residential care setting, the consequences extend beyond the employees themselves: fatigued, stressed care workers are more likely to make errors, less able to provide compassionate personalised care, and at greater risk of workplace injuries, directly endangering the vulnerable adults in their care. Furthermore, excessive working hours risk non-compliance with the Working Time Regulations 1998. It is essential that Chaffinch addresses this through effective permanent recruitment to fill vacancies, equitable rostering, and realistic workload management that does not depend on employee self-sacrifice to maintain safe staffing levels.
Factor 2: Loss of Autonomy, Voice, and Professional Identity
Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory (2024) identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as three fundamental psychological needs whose satisfaction is essential for intrinsic motivation and psychological wellbeing. Chaffinch’s changes have systematically undermined all three needs at Calmere House: autonomy has been eliminated by Kath’s autocratic management style and standardised corporate procedures that override professional judgement; competence is devalued as the care expertise employees developed over years is replaced by compliance with corporate instructions; and relatedness is fractured as trusted colleagues depart and agency workers with no cultural alignment or long-term commitment are introduced. The CIPD (2024g) emphasises that ‘good work’, defined by meaningful tasks, appropriate autonomy, supportive relationships, and a sense of purpose, is foundational to employee wellbeing. Calmere House employees have lost all of these elements simultaneously. Addressing this factor is essential not only for the wellbeing of the current workforce but for the commercial survival of the home: the connection between staff wellbeing, care quality, and resident satisfaction is well-established in healthcare research (West and Dawson, 2022), meaning that employee wellbeing is not merely an ethical obligation but a direct driver of the occupancy rates and income that Chaffinch seeks.
AC 3.1 Discuss how the people manager, recruitment advisor and employment relations case advisor could support the retention stage of the employee lifecycle.
People Manager
The people manager should lead the development of a comprehensive, data-informed retention strategy. This begins with rigorous analysis of turnover data to identify patterns: which roles, shifts, tenure groups, and demographic segments are most affected, and what themes emerge from exit interviews. The people manager should then benchmark Calmere House’s pay and benefits against the local care sector market, as the external economic pressures identified in AC 1.3 make competitive remuneration essential for retention. Beyond financial reward, the people manager should design a total reward proposition incorporating non-financial elements valued by care workers, including professional development pathways, flexible scheduling options, structured recognition programmes, and wellbeing support. Critically, the people manager should provide Kath with coaching and development on people management skills, as line manager behaviour is consistently identified as the single strongest predictor of employee retention or departure (CIPD, 2024h). If Kath’s autocratic style does not change, no other retention initiative will succeed.
Recruitment Advisor
The recruitment advisor’s contribution to retention begins before employees even join the organisation. The current transactional, agency-dependent selection model, which assesses only qualifications and experience, must be fundamentally redesigned in favour of a values-based approach that assesses cultural fit, interpersonal skills, and behavioural alignment alongside technical competence. This includes developing person specifications that explicitly incorporate Calmere House’s care values, designing structured interviews with situational and behavioural questions, and building direct recruitment pipelines through partnerships with local colleges, community organisations, and health and social care networks. Realistic job previews should be provided so candidates understand the culture, expectations, and working environment before accepting positions, reducing early-tenure turnover caused by unmet expectations. Reducing agency dependency and recruiting culturally aligned permanent staff will directly improve retention by rebuilding the team cohesion and shared sense of purpose that originally defined Calmere House (Taylor, 2022).
Employment Relations Case Advisor
The employment relations case advisor should address the absence, grievance, and engagement issues that are both symptoms and drivers of the retention crisis. This includes implementing early-intervention absence management processes that are supportive and wellbeing-focused rather than punitive, ensuring access to occupational health services and employee assistance programmes, and establishing robust but fair grievance and conflict resolution mechanisms. Crucially, the ER advisor should champion the re-establishment of formal and informal employee voice mechanisms, such as staff forums, regular team meetings, suggestion schemes, and confidential one-to-one conversations, that provide employees with legitimate channels to raise concerns, contribute ideas, and influence decisions. The ER advisor should also review whether the imposition of new terms, policies, and procedures was conducted in a manner consistent with employment law and good practice, and address any outstanding employee concerns through a structured engagement and resolution process (Lewis and Sargeant, 2023).
AC 3.2 Analyse how people practices could help Chaffinch Group to fill 100% of resident rooms within six months.
The 100% occupancy target is fundamentally a people practice challenge, not a facilities or marketing challenge. Residents are leaving and new residents are not arriving because the quality of the lived care experience has deteriorated, which is a direct consequence of workforce instability and cultural degradation. People practices can address this through several interconnected strategic interventions.
First, workforce stabilisation through improved recruitment, selection, and retention practices as described above will rebuild the consistent, committed, and skilled permanent workforce that delivers the personalised, relationship-based care that residents and their families expect and value. Research by West and Dawson (2022) in healthcare settings demonstrates a direct, statistically significant relationship between staff engagement levels and patient outcomes, establishing that investment in the workforce is the primary mechanism for improving service quality and, consequently, the commercial attractiveness of the care home.
Second, restoring employee empowerment and professional autonomy will enable care staff to resume the personalised, flexible, responsive approach that distinguished Calmere House from competitors and generated its waiting list. This requires modifying Chaffinch’s standardisation approach to permit localised decision-making on care delivery, room personalisation, activity programming, and daily routines within a framework of essential quality and compliance standards. The distinction between standardising governance (appropriate) and standardising care delivery (inappropriate in person-centred care) must be recognised.
Third, employer branding and reputation management are essential for attracting new residents. Calmere House’s previous reputation was its most valuable commercial asset, sustained by word-of-mouth from satisfied residents, families, and referring professionals. People practices that rebuild employee satisfaction and care quality will organically regenerate this reputational capital. The CIPD (2024d) emphasises that employer brand and customer brand are inextricably linked in service sectors: organisations that treat their employees well consistently deliver superior customer experiences, and vice versa.
AC 3.3 Discuss how Kath could consult and engage with employees to understand why employee turnover at Calmere House has increased.
Kath’s current autocratic management style, characterised by giving instructions without discussion and dismissing challenges, is the primary barrier to understanding and addressing the turnover problem. Effective consultation requires a fundamental shift from a telling approach to a listening approach, utilising a combination of formal and informal mechanisms that create psychological safety for honest employee participation.
Structured stay interviews with remaining long-term employees would provide rich qualitative insight into what employees currently value about working at Calmere House, what has specifically changed since the takeover that causes dissatisfaction, and what factors would cause them to consider leaving. Unlike exit interviews, which capture reasons retrospectively when the employee has already made an irrevocable decision, stay interviews provide proactive data that enables preventative intervention before further departures occur (CIPD, 2024h). These should be conducted confidentially, ideally by an independent member of the people team rather than Kath herself, given the current deficit of trust between management and the workforce.
Anonymous pulse surveys, using brief, focused questionnaires distributed at regular intervals, would provide quantitative data on engagement levels, specific areas of concern, and satisfaction with particular aspects of the work environment. The anonymity is critical given the prevailing culture of silence and fear of reprisal. Results must be transparently shared with the entire workforce, accompanied by a visible and genuine commitment to act on the findings. If employees perceive the survey as a token exercise with no consequent action, it will deepen rather than repair the trust deficit (CIPD, 2024e).
Reinstating regular staff meetings would recreate the collective voice mechanism that employees have lost since the takeover. These meetings should be genuinely consultative, with standing agenda items for employee concerns, ideas for service improvement, and feedback on recent or planned changes. Kath must visibly demonstrate that employee input genuinely influences decisions, as research consistently shows that token consultation without genuine influence on outcomes is more damaging to engagement and trust than no consultation at all (Boxall and Purcell, 2022).
Finally, establishing an employee forum or staff council with elected employee representatives would provide a sustainable, structured voice mechanism that ensures employee perspectives are systematically represented in management decision-making on an ongoing basis. This forum would provide a mechanism for early identification of emerging issues before they escalate into turnover drivers, and would signal a genuine organisational commitment to partnership rather than the unilateral imposition that has characterised Chaffinch’s approach to date (CIPD, 2024e).
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