The Committee considered a report that set out the staff survey outcomes and action plan.  Detailed results from the staff survey were attached to the report at Appendix 1.

The report explained that the Council regularly ran a staff survey to understand the views of staff about working for the Council and the latest survey had been carried out in July 2024. The survey had consisted of 58 questions, plus optional questions about the respondent. There had been 793 responses which had represented 43% of the Council’s workforce. This was a similar response to the previous year’s survey. Headline results for the survey had been published to all staff and a corporate action plan had been created to address the cross-cutting themes of bullying and harassment, leadership and aligning priorities. These themes had been identified following detailed analysis of the results and consideration of themes that had been presented from previous surveys but, which had not been positively impacted by previous action plans. Additionally, each Executive Director had reviewed the responses for their service areas and was in the process of agreeing their Directorate action plans.

Overall, the results had remained positive with scores broadly similar to, or showing a modest improvement on, the previous survey. The report set out areas where there had been very high positive scores of 85% or more and questions which had seen a positive increase of 3% or more.  The report also set out questions that had seen an adverse increase of 3% or more.

Analysis by Assistant Director area had suggested that there were differences between teams in respect of some questions with some teams scoring significantly better than others when responses to individual questions were compared. Work to understand the reasons behind this were underway, including understanding the patterns that had been shown between high and low scoring questions within individual teams. Work had already been carried out to understand if and where differences existed relating to different protected characteristics.

The results had been shared with the Corporate Management Team in September 2024 and three areas had been highlighted for action at corporate level, as follows:

• Bullying and Harassment;
• Leadership;
• Aligning priorities.

Resolved:       That the staff survey outcomes and action plan be noted.