Helping more people into work, faster

Carly-Ann Harrison can see up to ten people in a day. She used to spend most of each conversation looking at a screen.

"You lose the connection when you're not maintaining eye contact. You're trying to type at the same time, and you're obviously missing bits out."

Carly-Ann is one of hundreds of employment advisers at The Growth Company, a social enterprise delivering the Restart Scheme, Working Well Individual Placement and Support in Primary Care (IPS), Connect to Work, and Recovery Works across the UK.

Employment advisers are required to keep records of every meeting they have. So people like Carly-Ann lose hours every week typing up notes when they could be spending time helping participants get into work.

The Growth Company wanted to give that time back to advisers. So they partnered with Beam, starting with a pilot of Notes, with the aim of reducing the amount of time advisers spent on paperwork, so they could spend more time with people.

Following the success of the pilot, they rolled Notes out across the organisation, and adopted Interpret, Beam's real-time interpretation tool.

The challenge

Not enough time for participants

Advisers can see up to ten people in a day. During those appointments they jot down detailed notes, which means looking away from the person in front of them. After appointments they were writing up their case notes that could be audited at any time.

"You'd see advisers at the end of the day who'd had people pop in unexpectedly, behind with their notes and quite stressed, spending a lot of time head down typing," says Gemma Batchelor, Operations Manager.

Inconsistent notes

Something had to give, and it was usually the notes. Advisers fell back on short bullet points that recorded the appointment had happened, but they often missed out important details

Programmes like Connect to Work and the Restart Scheme require paperwork in different formats like case notes, action plans, and vocational profiles. Advisers were switching between formats all day, and consistency of documentation varied. Records that vary are harder to defend at audit, and on the health contracts, harder to evidence at fidelity review.

Unreliable interpreter bookings

Many participants at The Growth Company don't speak English as a first language, so advisers were running those appointments through an interpreter they dialled in over the phone.

That often meant waiting, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes, for an available interpreter. In a thirty-minute slot, that's most of the session gone.

Quality varied too. Lines dropped mid-appointment, background noise made the interpreter hard to follow, and advisers had no way of checking the programme had been explained accurately or understood.

The pilot

The Growth Company started with a pilot of Notes, involving 20 key workers across two programmes: ten from Individual Placement and Support and ten from Working Well Support to Succeed. Advisers used Notes to record appointments and generate structured summaries they could use to complete case records. Across the pilot they used it 602 times, here's what they found:

Time back

Time to complete appointment notes fell by 65%. One adviser said Beam Notes "drastically cut down my admin time" and they'd be "extremely unhappy if this wonderful gift was taken away".

Better quality documentation

Advisers rated Notes summaries 4.8 out of 5 for overall quality. Managers saw the difference in action plans, which came back with more detail and, as one put it, "feeling much more individualised for the participant".

More present conversations

Every member of staff reported improved quality of participant support. Advisers put it down to no longer splitting their attention.

"I'm able to more confidently deliver appointments and be more present with my participants because I'm not multitasking."

Time that went into the work that moves people into jobs

Managers saw appointments become more productive, with more of each session spent on job searching, applications, mock interviews and setting clear actions.

Advisers also used Notes to build CVs directly from conversations, surfacing skills that might otherwise have been overlooked. One described turning "conversations about personal experience into CV ready elements", and noticed it did something for confidence too, "as it shows they've got more skills than they realise".

Staff enjoyed the job more

With less of the day going on admin, advisers got more of the work they came into the job for.

From pilot to partnership

The Growth Company rolled Notes out across IPS, Restart Scheme, Recovery Works and Connect to Work, training hundreds of advisers on site and giving every programme a champion to drive adoption and shape templates around how their teams work.

Gemma Batchelor, Operations Manager, led the rollout, and it taught her a lot about what good adoption actually takes.

"I quite naively imagined that all of our advisers would be like, this is amazing. They'd complained about the admin for years and I thought they'd be straight onto it."

Some were excited but others had spent years doing the job a particular way and were proud of how they wrote their notes. So the training changed shape from what the tool can do, to focusing on how it can help advisers do their job.

Beam enablement manager Stuart took that on the road, coaching advisers at their desks across every office.

"People learn in different ways, and for some people just watching an online training session doesn't cut it," said someone "Actually showing them how they can use all the different functions in real time, has made a huge difference. We wouldn't have been able to do it without Stuart."

The impact grew too

Advisers in the Working Well IPS in Primary Care teams who used Beam most frequently achieved 35% more job starts than colleagues who weren't using it. They also supported people into work 18 days faster than moderate users, and 34 days faster than advisers not using Beam.

Gemma says, "The most effective employment advisers are the ones who can really prioritise and focus their own time on the activities that matter. Giving them more time in the working week to concentrate on getting people into work really helps."

Supporting hard to reach participants

The Growth Company has also rolled out Interpret, Beam's real-time interpretation tool. So far advisers have used Interpret in 25 languages, and early users have rated it 4.2 out of 5 for satisfaction.

Advisers said the quality of their conversations improved, and they could see exactly what was being said rather than taking someone's word for it.

"When you call an interpreter, you don't know what they're saying to them or what the other person's saying back," Carly-Ann says. "They might tweak a few words, which could change a whole conversation."

That matters on a mandatory programme, where a participant needs to understand what is expected of them. "Unless you know this programme, you don't understand what's expected of you," says Carly-Ann. "When I'm trying to explain to the interpreter, they kind of don't understand the importance of it. Whereas I can convey that better using Interpret."

It changes what people are willing to say, too. "You definitely lose that element of, this is a safe space if you need to tell me anything, because you're going through two people."

Built together

Interpret removes language barriers and Notes captures every appointment so advisers can focus on the person rather than the paperwork. Both tools were built around The Growth Company's workflows, their templates, and the way employability programmes actually run.

"Regularly every week we give bits of feedback and quite often we'll see that implemented really, really quickly," Gemma says. "We feel that we've helped to shape the tool as well as just use it."

Book a demo to see how Notes and Interpret could work on your contracts.