Thanks to everyone who responded to our 2024 employee survey. We asked you what you like about working for the council and what you think could be better. Your feedback helps us improve processes to make your working day easier, increase learning opportunities, speed up decision-making and overall create a positive working environment.
Since we sent out the survey last year the Human Resources and Organisational Development (HROD) team and senior leadership have been working on actions based on what you said.
Your feedback
When asked for your feedback (average out of 5) on the following areas, here are the overall ratings for each key area.
Themes for action
Thanks to your comments and feedback from our focus groups we now have a list of themes. Based on each area, this enabled us to develop a series of actions.
What have we done so far?
We have listened and have already started to make changes to help make working life easier and improve your employee experience.
Here are just a couple of examples.
“Having lots of approvals or delegations at one level slows things down” (recruitment for example)
We have reduced the number of approvals required to just manager and finance.
“Can senior leaders be more visible?”
The Executive Team (Chief Exec and Exec Directors) and heads of services have all committed to making time, at least once a quarter, to meet colleagues in person who deliver services in their teams. This provides opportunities to meet and discuss your work and any challenges or suggestions you have to create a positive work environment.
“We need to engage more with all employees including non-networked front-line staff.”
The communications team have developed a new email subscription service for non–networked colleagues to receive council news updates. In addition, The Link is our new employee sounding board and includes representatives from frontline services. It provides an opportunity to share projects, plans and proposals, insights and feedback from a diverse group of colleagues. The Executive Team is keen to meet front-line colleagues as outlined above.
Next steps
- Make meetings more productive, outcome focused to save time
- Protective learning time for teams to help embed new technologies including Microsoft 365
- Review our strategic workforce planning priorities as part of growing our own programme
- From 2026 managers will produce and implement a Growing Our Own plan, report on this in their Workforce Plans and complete all their workforce planning priority actions
- Issue an employee experience pulse survey in September to gather more feedback to help develop and improve your employee experience
As part of the next steps and to keep the momentum going, we’ve created a shorter survey to hear your thoughts on your experience working with the council. Your feedback will directly shape the actions we take over the next year. It should only take a few minutes to complete. Thank you for your help.
