This is a great opportunity to hear from them first-hand about the progress that’s been made on our organisation action plan which was developed last year to address a number of key issues raised by colleagues through the 2022 employee survey and engagement forums. The Executive Directors will be sharing some key messages and will share with colleagues the plan for our next employee survey, due to run across four weeks throughout June. There will be an opportunity for colleagues to submit questions too.
In our 2022 employee survey, a key area employees asked us to look at was work environment. Carol Cammiss, Executive Director of Children’s Services, has been leading on this as an area that needed improvement in our organisation action plan. Alongside colleagues from each of our four departments, they have made progress in some key activity in this area.
- The working group developed a framework that sets out what kind of communication and engagement we would expect to see happening across all four departments and breaking this down by role, from Executive Director, down to Team Leader. We are all working in more hybrid ways now so it is important that there is consistency and that we are using the right channels to engage with colleagues, whether they are fully based in a work location or working in a more hybrid way.
- The framework was shared with senior leaders in January and feedback taken on what they currently do and what more they felt they should be doing. An updated and finalised framework was shared with senior leaders again in April with the request that they begin to implement this across their teams.
- Place has already launched its Place Hub, which contains a wealth of information, guidance and short videos from senior leaders on key priorities for the department. Adult Social Care and Health have been working to get their new Connect site up and running and Children’s Services have also been setting up their new CS Info Hub. This is in addition to the various newsletters and bulletins they send out regularly. The Corporate Services and Transformation senior leadership team are discussing what platform would best serve the needs of the full department.
- In addition, there have been a number of live Teams events and department-wide sessions that have been running over the last 6 months, that all colleagues have been invited to join. There is still further work to do to implement all of the activities with the communications and visibility framework, particularly around how we share key messages with our digitally unconnected colleagues, but this is now underway.
- Our internal communications team has been working with teams from across the departments to make improvements to our internal website too. Information on learning and development, reward and recognition, wellbeing and jobs and recruitment have all been reviewed and refreshed to ensure the information is up to date and easy to find for all colleagues.
Next week we will share what we’ve been doing to address feedback raised through the employee survey on some of our key management processes.