Civil servants do a variety of important jobs, ranging from coastguards to vets and lawyers to meteorologists. Most have public facing roles, working in job centres, in our court system or as contact centre staff or personal advisers.
Good health and wellbeing, visible through low levels of sickness, can help, not only to improve an individual’s quality of life, but can also play a pivotal role in increasing employees’ levels of motivation and engagement.
It is vital that the Civil Service continues to improve health and wellbeing and attendance at work even further, so that it can continue to deliver a high level of service that the public demand and expect.
The current level of sickness absence within the Civil Service is 8.0 average working days lost per staff year – the lowest level since 1999, or 7.3 days per person. Compared to the wider economy on a per person basis, the Civil Service compares favourably to the public sector (9.1 days CIPD, 8.1 days CBI) but it is still higher than the private sector estimates (7.1 CIPD, 5.9 CBI).
Average working days lost (AWDL)
1 Average Working Days Lost per Staff Year – the total number of working days lost across the year divided by the total number of potential staff years
Department for Communities and Local Government
The Department for Communities and Local Government worked with the Health and Safety Executive to improve the wellbeing of its staff. The key aims of this exercise were to:
- find out what wellbeing meant to staff;
- identify areas and actions that could improve staff wellbeing; and
- identify the potential causes of stress.
An on-line survey, was completed by staff to examine the primary sources of stress at work, namely
- Demands – workload, work patterns and work environment;
- Control – how much say a person has in the way they do their work;
- Support – provided by the organisation, management and colleagues;
- Relationships – includes promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour;
- Role – a clear understanding of an individual’s role; and
- Change – how organisational change is managed and communicated.
Following the survey, the Department ran a set of focus groups to explore thinking on solutions to improve employees’ well being and fed the results into development of the Department’s Well Being Action Plan and strategy.
Department for Children Schools and Families
Has focussed on reducing the number of long term sickness (LTS) absence cases by focussing on 4 core elements:
- Improving policy and guidance;
- Equipping and training line managers to better deal with sickness absence;
- Improving professional HR and Occupational Health (OH) support; and
- Ensuring line management accountability.
This approach has resulted in a 40% reduction in the number of LTS cases and 35% reduction in frequent absence cases.
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) became the first public sector organisation to be awarded the Work Wise UK Quality Mark, in recognition of its flexible, efficient and sustainable smart work practices.
To facilitate flexible working, Defra has rolled out a programme of lightweight laptop provision, accompanied by briefings and awareness training sessions to 98% of its London based staff. Work is underway to roll out the programme to the rest of the core Department and the Defra Network.
The department also developed an online Work-Life Balance Handbook, held a series of seminars to increase staff awareness of flexible working and to help individuals explore ways of improving their work-life balance and re-launched its Work-Life Balance Network.
This has all contributed to the reduction of the core Department’s average working days lost to sickness absence by about 20% during the last financial year.