Support workers

Your local area improvement initiative will require staff to support clients into work? Are you sure those should be conventional contract, part-time or full-time posts? Perhaps it would be more effective to induct a pool of local support workers and then buy their Slivers-of-Time?

Having this resource would then enable you to:

• offer a completely personalised service to clients. Instead of diarying clients around staff availability, they buy support by the hour when they need it, not when a member of your team happens to be available
• ensure an automatically audited account of every penny of expenditure with full record of who booked what, at what cost, why they booked, and when
• seed the local Slivers-of-Time market with a pool of workers who can, of course, do all sorts of other types of work if they wish.

Examples of this kind of localised service delivery using Slivers-of-Time workers in East London include the CIPs Market Research case study.

The &Slivers-of-Time Ready" scheme

The launch of Slivers-of-Time Working in East London included the pilot of a specific scheme using support workers bought in this new way. A large Housing Association had fragmented bits of work to be done and residents who could work odd hours but had no experience of using computers. Funding of £3,500 was obtained from London Connects to pay existing Slivers-of-Time sellers to train potential new sellers. The steps were:

• A pool of 20 experienced sellers were identified and inducted as trainers under the supervision of a local training provider. They were paid for the 3 hours of induction then flagged within in a specific pool in the local marketplace.
• Residents were invited to a presentation at which Slivers-of-Time Working was explained and training offered free.
• Interested residents were offered up to four one hour, one-on-one sessions. The first dealing with how a computer worked, the second introducing the Internet, the third looking at the local Slivers-of-Time marketplace and so on.
• Residents specified when and where they wanted those hours. Locations were public places with free Internet access. Hours were anytime day or evening when a trainer chose to be available for work. Booking was immediate. Trainers could re-book themselves, with audit trail, for future sessions while sitting with their trainee.
• The residents started selling their hours, many of them entering the workforce for the first time in years. As one of them told a visitor from the Treasury who asked to meet a group of Slivers-of-Time sellers "after my first few bookings I finally realised I am not useless".

"Slivers-of-Time Ready" is a speedy and highly cost effective form of work-preparation. Induction materials were off-the-shelf. Provenly reliable sellers were booked for induction as trainers with a few days notice (the way many Slivers-of-Time sellers like to work). The trainers cost an average £8.50 an hour with all employment costs (this figure will be higher in less deprived parts of the country.) Many of the residents were confident after only two or three sessions.

Other types of support workers

Any form of support that can be easily taught to a large group as effectively as a small group may be best provided as a Slivers-of-Time resource. We advise restricting opportunities to higher level sellers who have worked their way up the market, developing their communications skills and resourcefulness on the way.

Some further ideas for categories of support that might be better provided the Slivers-of-Time way:

• personalised schoolwork support
• low level medical advice (eg Health Eating initiatives)
• home support for the housebound
• youth street outreach
• financial awareness initiatives

Clearly some of these workers will require CRB checks. (See our section on inducting a pool of Slivers-of-Time sellers.)

• New businesses built on Slivers-of-Time Workers