Signature Senior Lifestyle has celebrated record breaking colleague retention of 96%.

The milestone came 12 months after the luxury residential and specialist care group launched its Regional Carers flexible workforce programme.

Mandy Raymond, head of regional resourcing, who oversees the programme, said: “Our Regional Carers programme ensures we provide our residents with a consistently high standard of care, from carers they can trust have been trained to our exacting standards. The programme means we avoid having new people entering homes weekly, which can be unsettling to residents living with dementia, allows residents to feel comfortable and create a relationship with our care team. By stripping out costly employment agency usage, we can invest in the people actually doing the work, rather than covering agency costs.”

Signature’s Regional Carers work flexibly across any of the company’s 10 homes when extra carers are needed to cover annual leave or sickness. The new recruits receive a week-long, bespoke induction programme, ensuring they are well equipped to deliver high-quality care to Signature’s required standards and work across different homes and in-home care teams.

Colleagues are assigned a two-week rota, given two weeks in advance and are required to work flexibly across the Signature portfolio. They specify which days and times they are available each week so a personalised rota can be prepared for them.

All Regional Carers are contracted to a set number of hours, meaning that regardless of home-level demand for short-term cover, they are still paid their contract hours. This provides them with personal financial certainty and avoids the damaging employment practices often associated with zero-hours contracts.

In addition to having significant flexibility in working days and hours, Regional Carers also have their travel costs reimbursed in full and are paid at a small premium above the equivalent in-home role, given they need to be available to cover a significant geographic area.

A specially developed app facilitates communication with Regional Carers, enabling the easy sharing of new, short-notice shifts, dissemination of new corporate information and online meetings. The app offers easy access to the company intranet, latest company news, rewards and benefits programme, e-learning platform, procedures and policies, and payslips.