Lifeways wins huge award for change management 

The Lifeways people team has won a major Personnel Today Award in recognition of one of the social care sector’s most ambitious transformation programmes in recent years. 

The UK’s largest team of professionals providing support for adults with complex needs in the community won the Change Management category, beating competition from some of the UK’s biggest names in banking, health and food manufacturing. 

Lifeways was recognised for a raft of significant improvements in the last 12 months, including: 

• Sharp reductions and savings in agency staffing 
• Improved retention across the workforce 
• A vacancy rate now well below the national sector average 
• A 50% year-on-year rise in staff retention during induction 
• A 20-point uplift in colleagues’ perception of leadership 

James Westwood-Beere, Chief People Officer at Lifeways, said: “I can’t tell you just how big of a deal this is for our team and for Lifeways as a Social Care company where budgets are stretched, and we have to do what we can with less. 

“In 2022, we embarked on a much-needed, complex and root and branch transformation programme which has revolutionised our entire business and I could not be prouder of everyone involved in making it happen. 

“It’s been a challenging journey to transform how we work, so to go through all of that hard work and to be recognised nationally for it is a wonderful feeling and well deserved recognition for our brilliant team.” 

Lifeways embarked on its transformation programme in 2022 when new leadership was appointed to lead the organisation following a financial restructure. 

In just two years, the company has not only stabilised, but has grown through the creation of consistent governance, clear accountabilities and positioning HR as a more strategic and influential function across the organisation. 

Transformation is part of Lifeways’ bold ambition to be the sector’s employer and provider of choice, and central to this is a fundamental cultural shit which has repositioned frontline teams as the organisation’s core decision-makers, with corporate functions redesigned to act as enablers rather than barriers. 

Andrea Kinkade, Lifeways CEO, said: “Our CHOICE values have been integral to creating the right environment for our teams to thrive and the best part is, they were chosen by our teams following nationwide leadership roadshows which reached more than 550 managers.  

“These sessions directly shaped the development of ways of working across every function, ensuring that service quality, clarity of responsibility and capability development were embedded from the outset.” 

Lifeways also revamped its HR business partnering model to create a more effective network of support for managers, strengthened governance and systems which enabled the business to have more oversight of how teams were operating. 

All of this extraordinary transformation was delivered without disruption to services. 

Andrea added: “The exciting part is, this is just the beginning. We’re now moving into our second phase of transformation which will further strengthen our offer, what we do and how we do it. Crucially, this is about ensuring the people we support have the best possible teams and environments around them to achieve the possible.”