Agenda item

Glynis Phillips, Cabinet Member for Corporate Services, Lorna Baxter, Director of Finance, and Cherie Cuthbertson, Director of Workforce and Organisational Development have been invited to make a presentation regarding the results and actions arising from the recent Employee Engagement Questionnaire.

The Committee is recommended, having considered the report and responses to questions, to AGREE any recommendations arising therefrom.

Calum Miller, Cabinet Member for Finance, Lorna Baxter, Director of Finance, Cherie Cuthbertson, Director of Workforce and Organisational Development, and Karen Hopwood, Head of Organisational Development were invited to make a presentation to the Committee on the recent Employee Engagement Survey.

Cllr Miller introduced the survey, which had been undertaken in February 2023 and promoted to all staff members. The survey met with a response rate of 55%, which was believed to be the highest in the organisation’s history. Its purpose was to develop a baseline of data on workforce attitudes to enable the tracking of future change, and to understand current issues, particularly in light of the Council’s development of the Delivering the Future Together programme.  The results highlighted areas of strong performance and areas for development. In response to the results, a corporate action plan was being developed, but data and feedback was also being looked at from a directorate level to determine whether specific interventions and actions needed to be implemented within parts of the Council.

Karen Hopwood, Head of Organisational Development, was introduced as the officer with greatest familiarity with the data and invited to present the key findings. At 55%, the response rate was over double internal staff surveys, which typically met with responses of 20-25%. This increase was achieved through significant promotion and communication, including writing to staff individually, but also through the employment of competition within directorates. Following questioning, it was confirmed that the Council had not tracked responses based on whether they were made by a full-time or part-time staff member but it was confirmed that the intention was to do so in future surveys. In light of the fact that comparator questions from the previous employee engagement survey had shown an increase in negative responses, a challenge was put as to whether the level of dissatisfaction was a driver in the high rate of responses. In reply, it was explained that the previous survey had been undertaken in the very specific circumstances of Covid, and that it was a significant task to unpick how staff needs were being better met within the lockdown environment than in a more business as usual setting, but one which was being looked at. 

Having used an external provider to deliver the survey and analyse the results provided the Council the ability to benchmark itself against other employers. The Council scored within the ‘good’ category overall, but there were areas on which it could improve. All questions asked could be traced to 8 overriding areas, such as ‘my team’ or ‘leadership’. The Council scored net-positively in all areas.

Respondees were also given the opportunity to provide free-text responses to a number of questions, with over 1000 comments registered. Some of the key findings from these were that staff felt very supported by their managers, and that there was a lot of opportunity for development within the Council overall, albeit that they did not always see those opportunities personally. One particular barrier to development was the lack of time available to take up development opportunities. Areas for improvement identified included the visibility of leadership and clarity of messaging. This had been identified as a priority area for action. The other major theme in terms of improvement concerned wellbeing, particularly in relation to hybrid working and the development of strong working relationships with colleagues in a hybrid environment.

Having established a baseline data set, the plan was to run a steamlined follow-up survey a in February 2024 and a further full survey in 2025. These surveys would be augmented by very short, one-question ‘pulse’ surveys on the intranet to take the temperature of staff on a particular issue at a particular point in time. Work would also be undertaken to analyse the responses of those with protected characteristics to see if any specific issues were identified, though from an initial scan no major outliers were present. The results of the entire survey were also to be housed within the Data and Insight team, to enable the learning to be used in conjunction with other sources of data to inform future work.

An area of challenge concerned the validity of results owing to the confusing nature of some questions. For instance, it was queried whether staff would know how to respond to the statement ‘members of my team do not much care for one another’ in order to give effect to their views. This issue was recognised, but it was counterbalanced by the fact that including positively and negatively framed questions meant respondees concentrated more, and was thus actually good practice.

Some degree of challenge was put forward by members over whether the actions recorded to address issues arising from the survey over leadership were correctly targeted, with concern that the emphasis was on communicating policies rather than the content of the policies themselves. In the absence of sufficient clarity over objectives and values staff could feel unmoored or directionless. A question was raised whether this issue was primarily operational, or whether it included a political aspect. In response, this challenge was recognised as genuine, and one which senior officers had been working on directly with staff, for example through multiple listening sessions, but also through the DTFT champions, who themselves were now meeting with staff in their areas more regularly and sharing information in both directions. It was senior leadership’s intention to bring this learning together with learning from other sources, such as the Wellbeing Survey, to identify the root causes of the challenges and address them. Listening sessions held had not fed back concerns over political leadership. The locus of dissatisfaction with leadership was explored by the committee, and it was confirmed that the highest rate of dissatisfaction was to be found amongst  junior and mid-level managers rather than senior managers or non-managers. Further discussion was held over whether consideration had been given over issues of leadership over what senior leadership were doing or not doing, or not doing to the expected standard. To address this issue, a 360 feedback framework had been established for senior leaders to identify, confidentially, precisely those issues. 

It was observed that feedback presented an image of a hierarchical organisation in which mid-level managers faced significant stresses but insufficient agency to address the challenges they faced. In reply, it was confirmed that the Chief Executive had identified the need to dilute the Council’s hierarchical structure significantly as a priority and steps were being taken to develop much more of a matrix-management environment. The aim was to move to a place where 80% of work was undertaken within a matrix-management stye; presently it was estimated to be around 20%. Members asked how this would be monitored and the need to identify measures was acknowledged.

Strong concern from the Committee was raised over the high number of staff reporting that their health was suffering because of work.  Learning from the listening sessions undertaken indicated that the primary driver of this was increasing demand on staff without communication of what issues could be dropped to accommodate the additional work. Communication over priorities and developing agency to address these priorities were the main foci of response. However, no overarching approach was being taken to ensure workloads were reduced as well as added to across the organisation. In addition, hybrid working meant more staff working flexible hours, which caused certain staff to feel a pressure to respond to e mails arriving during non-working hours. There was a challenge of adapting ways of working in a hybrid environment to prevent such implicit pressure.

The Committee explored how staff could challenge practices which were unhelpful outside of the linear management structure in the event that their difficulties lay within that structure. In response, it was explained that the 12.3.2 mechanism was built around supporting staff wellbeing, so concerns could be raised with immediate line managers. However, DTFT Champions were also available to provide a non-linear route to raise concerns and issues.

The Committee challenged the intended follow-up of running a significant though reduced survey in a year’s time and doing a full survey the year after, highlighting the value of the NHS’ annual staff survey which allowed direct comparisons over time.

The Committee AGREED to make the following recommendation and observations to Cabinet:

Recommendations:

-        That the Head of Paid Service and other relevant officers undertake the following:

a)    That the staff engagement survey is repeated, in full, on an annual basis

b)    That future staff engagement surveys are able to differentiate between responses from full and part time staff

c)     That solutions are developed to address the twin needs of moving to a hybrid working model whilst also ensuring that relationships are developed between more junior and senior staff

d)    That stronger steps are taken to clarify expectations of staff members around working outside standard office hours

e)    That further work is taken to understand and unlock the skills which the staff members believe are not being utilised

f)      That the Council develops measures to understand whether it is achieving its intention to become less hierarchical and more of a matrix-working environment

g)    That means are developed to allow work which does not deliver value to be dropped, rather than consistently adding to expectations on staff

h)    That questions be added to future surveys over whether staff consider their work to be of value, and whether they feel it is valued.

i)       That work is undertaken to convey the inherent value of staff’s work, and the value the organisation places on it.

j)       That fuller comparative data is requested from Best Companies of the Council’s performance against other local authorities and report against this data accordingly in future

k)     That mechanisms are developed to support and develop psychological safety, whereby junior staff feel enabled to challenge senior staff respectfully or pose alternative courses of action in safety without fear of repercussions and that an additional question is added to the survey relating to this

-        That the Cabinet monitors the actions and progress against these measures.

-        That the Cabinet provides to the Committee a statement as to the actions they are taking from the political sphere to align the Council’s objectives, values and priorities with the Cabinet’s strategic agenda.