Elected Member Briefing - Employee Engagement Survey 2024

About this Briefing Note

Report by: Greg Boland, Strategic Lead - Strategic Planning, People and Performance

Date: 21 August 2024

Subject: Employee Engagement Survey 2024

Responsible Officer: John Cassidy, Employee Engagement Officer, People and Culture

Details

Purpose

This briefing provides an update on the Employee Engagement Survey which was open for responses to all staff from 15 April to Friday 31 May 2024. 

The previous employee survey was carried out in May 2022 and with significant organisational change since then and the new leadership structures in place, it was a good time to undertake an employee survey to understand how our people are feeling.

An Employee Survey Working Group was tasked with developing and implementing the survey, members included trade unions, managers, staff, IT and HR ensuring key occupational groups were represented.  The Strategic Leadership Team agreed with Jacquie Pepper, Chief Officer Health & Social Care Partnership (HSCP) for the HSCP staff to complete the NHS iMatter Survey rather than both surveys with a commitment to connect the results and consider and address common themes and actions both across the Council and the Partnership.

Briefing Information

The response rate for the 2024 employee survey of 47% is a significant increase on the 27% return on the last survey in 2022. There is still work to do to understand why many staff are not completing the survey and to support and encourage increased engagement for future surveys.

Survey highlights include:

• 93% of respondents feel they are trusted to make appropriate decisions within their role
• 93% of respondents believe that Perth and Kinross Council recognises and celebrates diversity and inclusion
• 92% of respondents feel they have clear direction and know what's expected of them
• 92% of respondents feel they have opportunities within their team/school to share views and ideas
• 91.5% of respondents feel their team demonstrates our values often/every day
• Staff were asked to rank what was most important to them and their reasons for working with the Council and the top reason was 'Making a Difference'

Whilst most responses were positive there are areas for improvement, these include:

• When asked how likely staff are to recommend PKC as an employer to their friends and family (ranking from 1-10, 1 being the lowest) the average response from respondents was 7.2
• 72.5% of respondents feel their wellbeing is a priority for the Council
• 71.9% of respondents feel that PKC is honest and transparent around organisational change
• 66.6% of respondents said they have regular one-to-one conversations to support their performance at work
• 65.9% of respondents feel they have opportunities to get involved and influence change
• In responding to the question of whether their work was valued/recognised by Elected Members, 32.3% of all survey respondents said that this question wasn't applicable to their role. Of those who did answer, 55.4% feel that their work is valued/recognised by Elected Members.

The survey results have been shared to team level using the PowerBI platform and to protect anonymity the results are only shared with Team Leaders where there are 5 or more responses.  However, these responses and comments are included in the wider service results so are listened to and acted upon.  Guidance has been shared with Team Leaders, Service Managers and Strategic Leads along with an Action Plan template to discuss and agree with staff what we need to keep doing, what we need to stop doing and what needs to change which is to be completed by mid-September 2024.  Development sessions throughout August and September have been organised to support managers on how to have effective conversations and structure team meetings so that all staff have a voice in developing improvement actions.

Action plans will be collated and analysed to determine any development or support at an organisational, service and team level with Strategic Leads overseeing progress.  We can also identify areas of high performance which we can learn from across the organisation.  Actions will be discussed with Strategic Leads and managers on a regular basis and is now included within one-to-one discussion documents.

A collective commitment to taking actions where required and feasible as a result of this survey is expected, and regular communication with all staff on progress is imperative via news on eric, MS Teams and at team meetings to encourage an even higher response rate for future staff surveys.

The full staff survey results can be viewed via a Power BI dashboard on eric (our staff intranet).