Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 327 - 339)

WEDNESDAY 30 JUNE 2004

MRS DENISE MURPHY AND MRS MORAG ANTROBUS

  Q327  Chairman: Ladies, thank you very much for coming. We really look forward to what you are going to say. Could you give us some brief biographical details?

  Mrs Murphy: I am Head of Services Welfare within WRVS. I have worked for the organisation for nearly four years. Prior to that, I had a career in human resources.

  Mrs Antrobus: I am Senior Operations Manager with WRVS Services Welfare. I have been with them since December 1998. Prior to that I was a lecturer in further education.

  Chairman: Mrs Antrobus, we do admire the work that the WRVS has been doing over the years.

  Q328  Mr Blunt: Is there such a person as a typical services welfare officer?

  Mrs Murphy: Certainly since I have been with the organisation, when we select an individual—and that is myself, Morag Antrobus and some of the other managers—we look for someone who has a background perhaps as a matron at a school or in the nursing profession, the more caring professions. I would say that typically they would be caring people, capable of listening rather than doing all the talking and with a big heart, really.

  Q329  Mr Blunt: Are they all drawn from the Women's Royal Voluntary Service?

  Mrs Murphy: No, they are not volunteers. The AT services welfare officers that work for Services Welfare are in fact paid employees. We recruit via publications like The Lady magazine.

  Q330  Mr Blunt: Are there any men?

  Mrs Murphy: There is one.

  Q331  Mr Blunt: Is there an age requirement?

  Mrs Murphy: No. In the adverts we ask for a mature attitude to life but I do not suppose we would employ someone at 64 and a half, for example, because of the retirement age.

  Q332  Mr Blunt: Do you know how young the youngest is?

  Mrs Murphy: The average age of the 80 people we employ is 51 and the ages range from about 27 to someone who is due to retire in a couple of months at 64 plus.

  Q333  Mr Blunt: Do they come from any particular social background? You said they have mainly worked in a caring capacity. Is there any social background or career background that would be typical?

  Mrs Murphy: That is nursing and education, and clearly on the CVs I look for individuals who have worked with young people and who have tried to understand some of the issues that young people have.

  Mrs Antrobus: May I add that quite a few of them in fact actually have some sort of knowledge of the military—they might have been a spouse of someone in the military—for various reasons, and so they come to us, not all of them but a percentage, with that knowledge.

  Q334  Mr Cran: Still on the subject of your service welfare officers, are they trained? You advertise for them. You get the right individual. You have explained what sort of individual it is you are after. What do you do with them then? Do you train them in the job that you expect them to do or not?

  Mrs Murphy: It starts off with induction training. That induction training is over about three days. We go through the entire terms and conditions, through what they are expected to do and case studies. In fact when we select them we actually put a scenario together regarding a particular issue that they may be confronted with when they go into the units. That is obviously to assess how they would deal with it. After their initial induction, we are very well supported by Colonel ATRA who actually attends and goes through issues that he wants to put forward.

  Q335  Mr Cran: Is he a serving officer?

  Mrs Murphy: Yes. Colonel Villalard at HQ Land takes part in that induction as well. After that, the services welfare officer is then placed in a unit with a mentor, with another services welfare officer who is more experienced, and so there is a lot on-the-job training.

  Q336  Mr Cran: How long does that mentor stay with the person?

  Mrs Murphy: At least six months, but we like them to stay at their first training unit for 12 months. Ideally, that is what we would like them to do, but again because of pressures of people leaving—and thankfully the turnover of service welfare officers is not high—and because of the age profile I inherited when I joined the organisation, and there is quite an older work force, we have brought in young people to look at succession planning.

  Q337  Mr Cran: How often do you retrain these officers? You give them the induction training; they have six months with a mentor. Would you retrain them after that?

  Mrs Murphy: We are currently looking at the training ourselves. There are many courses within the Army that they can actually dovetail into and that is always available to them. We look at the listening skills training and that is something that we are currently doing.

  Mrs Antrobus: They start off initially in one of the training regiments, which is clearly quite different to working in the Field Army. What we like to try and do, we cannot always achieve it for logistical purposes, is to put the services welfare officer through Phase 1, then into Phase 2 and then out into the Field Army, so that the training, just by virtue of the job changing, because it changes from unit to unit and Phase 1 to Phase 2 and on to the Field Army, is ongoing. The more specialist training is something that we do try and dovetail with the Army because theirs is very good. At the moment there are a lot of courses on combating stress and because we are with the Field Army, we do have to get involved in that as well. They are very supportive about putting us through that training with their own staff.

  Q338  Mr Cran: How do you measure the performance? You get them in position, but your organisation is not like perhaps many others where, if you have a Marks & Sparks type organisation, you have a manager and supervisors who can assess your performance. This job is a bit different, is it not? How do you measure performance?

  Mrs Murphy: What I have tried to do since I have joined is add a bit more structure to what we have got within Services Welfare and we have introduced appraisals and we have introduced probationary period assessments as well. The way the structure is worked out is that we have myself, Morag and then we have four managers who look after a particular location—there is a copy of our structure in the report. Those managers are tasked with visiting a club x number of times throughout the period we discuss, so they have constant dialogues with their   managers. We also annually write to the commanding officers and ask them to complete a questionnaire basically about the service we provide, how could we do it differently, and then about the particular services welfare officer and how they are performing and what could we change there, and any training they think is lacking in that area, because those commanding officers and the unit welfare officers are working closely with those people every day.

  Q339  Mr Cran: What sort of on-going support do your welfare officers get from the centre of your organisation on an on-going basis? Do they get any, or are they working fairly solitary existences from everyone else in the camp?

  Mrs Murphy: It can be solitary, and that is one of the qualities, if that is the right word, when we choose someone. They have to be fairly robust people to live in an isolated part of the country. The support we give them is in the form of their manager who is on basically 24 hour call for them if necessary. Although the services welfare officers do not work 24 hours, there are times when they are called upon and they may need someone else to contact to give them some support there. We get feed-back currently from a series of information days whereby we go out to all the locations and tell them about the bigger part of the organisation and tell them how we are performing within Services Welfare. We have one more to do in Lichfield and then we have completed that. Through that exercise we will have had face-to-face contact with the 80 welfare officers.


 
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