Why is it important?
Because only by hearing colleagues’ views are we able to make improvements, both through our organisation action plan and within local team action plans.
In our last employee survey, which took place in February 2022, a key area employees asked us to look at was our pay, terms and conditions and employee benefits. Helen Jones, our former Executive Director of Adult Social Care and Health, led on this as part of our organisation action plan.
Working with colleagues in our HR team, we have progressed activity in a number of areas.
- in October 2022 we introduced a recruitment and retention payment policy which enables us to respond where we have significant and sustained retention and attraction challenges and where these vacancies cause the council a statutory, legal or financial risk. This policy has been applied to care workers, working in the community within Adult Social Care and Health, to address some of the challenges we’ve had in meeting the demand in this area
- in February 2023, we launched Our Derbyshire Rewards. This online platform provides all colleagues with benefits, discounts, support and advice, all in one place. It’s a one stop shop, making it much easier for you to be aware of the benefits you can access and to take advantage of the many discounts and benefits that we offer as a council. It also includes wellbeing and a 24/7 confidential helpline providing advice and guidance for employees through our new provider, Health Assured. This includes telephone and online counselling sessions and lots of wellbeing content on the My Healthy Advantage app
- in March 2023, our Appointments and Conditions of Service Committee (ACOS) agreed for us to enter into an electric vehicle and hybrid vehicle salary sacrifice scheme. We are procuring a supplier so we can start to offer this benefit to employees soon. This will give employees tax and national insurance relief on the lease fee – saving you more money. This compliments the other salary sacrifice schemes we already have in place and in particular the Cycle to Work scheme and Shared Cost AVCs which supports employees to save for their retirement and receive tax and National Insurance benefit while doing so
- in April 2023, we launched our new working arrangements policy, outlining the council’s approach to hybrid working, balancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the individual, individual's immediate team, across teams and the ability for the council to regenerate. In addition, we also reviewed the travel guide, implementing the travel policy which included simplification of our travel terms and conditions, to ensure they will now be applied more fairly across the workforce
- we’re continually reviewing our employee offer and working to consider different aspects we can consider in the future
Next week, we will share what we’ve been doing to address feedback raised through the employee survey on our work environment.