One Small Thing’s vision is a justice system that can recognise, understand, and respond to trauma. Their mission is to redesign the justice system for women and their children. This commitment led to the building of their flagship project - Hope Street. From within a healing, trauma-informed, residential environment, women and children have access to a range of specialist support. By taking a positive and compassionate approach, they aim to create a blueprint that can be replicated across the country and achieve better outcomes for affected women, their children and the wider society.
As a new organisation, One Small Thing’s principle challenge was putting in place a new system to help them run and manage new services. For colleagues who had worked in the sector over many years, communication was consistently a big challenge and any solution needed to ensure that staff could access the information they needed easily and at the right-time. Also, the ability for management to use a system to plan effectively was very important, not least in rotering staff in a way that accounted for skills, training requirements and preferred working patterns.
One Small Thing implemented all of Zone Nation’s modules which has meant that all support workers and management are using one system for all of their needs. Client’s data is entered securely in one place, duplication is minimised, and it is easy for staff to access and search for information. Their workforce is also managed from the same system, giving staff the ability to plan rotas ahead and react effectively to a dynamic staff team.
Whilst this is always work in progress, Clare at One Small Thing fed back to us:
“I think what has been created is absolutely incredible. Comparing it to a lot of the other systems I've used, Zone is already making a big difference, particularly by keeping everything in one space for payroll, reporting and care planning. Team meetings are run more efficiently, with better handover and communication between different teams. The system has brought a fluidity to our operations and way of working. I can already see just how far it can go. It's pretty brilliant.”
According to Clare, Zone is user-friendly which means everyone can use the system, not just those more comfortable with technology. Clare loves the ability to record team meetings and actions, which she then shares with all attendees to review and sign-off what was agreed. Actions can be assigned to a user, without the need for a meeting, enabling more asynchronous working. For Clare, the ability to hold supervisions, follow structured questions and upload her notes for others to review, is very powerful. Plus, the ability to pull a report on an individual in their care and share it with others, makes her day-to-day work much easier.
