Corporate report

Voluntary reporting on disability, mental health and wellbeing: workforce report 2019

Published 3 October 2019

Introduction

Introduction from Jillian Kay – Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) Wellbeing Champion

MHCLG is a department that puts health and wellbeing for everyone at the heart of what we do, we have an open, inclusive and welcoming culture and we are very pleased to share our first annual report on disability, health and wellbeing.

In November 2018 the government launched a new framework to encourage businesses to report how many of their staff have a disability or health condition and also to report on the health and wellbeing of staff. The framework is voluntary and was created in partnership with employers and charities. The Civil Service as a whole, currently reports against the framework in full - this report provides the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s report in accordance with the guidance for voluntary reporting.

Any comments or feedback on our first report would be very welcome prior to publishing our next report in 2020.

MHCLG voluntary reporting on disability

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is a departmental priority and our Permanent Secretary, Melanie Dawes, is the D&I Lead for the Civil Service. A key focus in our D&I plan is the recruitment, engagement and retention of disabled employees.

MHCLG is a Level 3 Disability Confident Leader, the highest level of recognition, demonstrating our commitment to recruiting and retaining people with disabilities and long-term conditions. The department is also a member of the Business Disability Forum and PurpleSpace and we utilise the support and expertise these groups provide to further positively improve inclusion.

At MHCLG we have a staff DisAbility Network, which has been running for 12 years and provides individual support, help and guidance to disabled colleagues and works with the department to improve and promote policy and practice that impact on disabled staff. The network is supported by a departmental Disability Champion who sits at Executive Team level and plays a key role in promoting the priorities of members.

In 2018, the Network’s main focus was continuing to provide excellent ‘Disability Confidence for line managers’ training to ensure disabled staff thrive at work and are supported by effective and inclusive line managers. To date, we have trained 119 managers to become “Disability Confident”, with a further 162 staff attending our “Disability Awareness” course.

The DisAbility Network also have a strong focus on improving the experience with workplace adjustments. We work with the Civil Service workplace adjustments team to support staff who require adjustments at work. Staff members use a “workplace adjustment passport” when moving between roles, departments or with a new line manager to ease the process. MHCLG also has an Occupational Health provider and an Employee Assistance Programme for additional support.

MHCLG is represented at the cross-government level network for Disability, as well as the more general Diversity Leads network. These are both forums where government departments can share knowledge, best practice and new ideas on how to improve inclusion.

At the end of 2018, 73% of MHCLG’s staff provided information on their disability status and 8.6% declared a disability. This represents an increase of 2.6% from 2014 when 6% of staff declared themselves as disabled.

6.3% of MHCLG’s Senior Civil Servants (SCS) have declared a disability and the department is now ranked as 4th highest for representation within the Civil Service. We want to build on this and have plans to increase the flow of new entrants to SCS roles of people who are declared disabled. Our D&I action plan aims to bring in and bring on diverse talent and we are achieving this through sponsorship, mentoring and development programmes for our disabled talent.

MHCLG voluntary reporting on mental health and wellbeing

MHCLG has recently been awarded the Mind (leading mental health charity) Gold award for the results of our Wellbeing at Work Index. This was in recognition that the department has successfully embedded mental health into its policies and practices, using a variety of best practice approaches and demonstrating a long-term, in-depth commitment to the mental health of our people.

Supporting people at work is a key priority for MHCLG. Many new staff describe MHCLG as friendly and open and our Permanent Secretary, Melanie Dawes, recently described the department as having “one of the most supportive and collaborative environments I have ever experienced in my working life.” We achieve this through a variety of actions. We have a Senior Civil Servant Sponsor for health and wellbeing for the department who represents the department at the cross-government health and wellbeing senior steering group. This group share best practice and discuss new initiatives that can be introduced across government to support and improve health and wellbeing.

MHCLG has an active “Wellbeing Network”, comprising of 132 members, which helps to develop, implement and drive our health and wellbeing plan. The members are an integral part of ensuring health and wellbeing measures are embedded in the department and that each team has a local health and wellbeing champion. In addition, MHCLG has 40 trained and committed Mental Health Ambassadors and the department has worked hard to establish a better understanding of mental health issues and how to deal with them. This has contributed to MHCLG becoming an open, inclusive and welcoming department.

We have a number of resources that promote the wellbeing of our people within MHCLG. Our “Brilliant Manager” training programme, which is delivered to all new line managers, includes a case study focussed on the support a line manager needs to provide to members of staff with mental health issues. We have also developed and published an extensive mental health toolkit on our staff intranet which supports managers in identifying and supporting staff who are experiencing mental ill-health. We also offer a “Building Your Resilience” workshop, which 195 staff have attended so far.

In addition, the department has trained 119 Mental Health First Aiders who are part of a nationwide network across the Civil Service in excess of 2,000 staff. A further 238 staff have attended “Mental Health Awareness” training. We have recently trained 8 colleagues to be TRiM (trauma risk management) practitioners, including a director who can support staff who have responded to crisis and traumatic events.

We also support our staff through our contracted Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) which gives staff free and immediate access to support on all matters relating to health and wellbeing, including crisis support to individuals and their line managers. The EAP also provides a gateway to more specialist and professional medical services. The department also subscribes to Big White Wall, a mental health and wellbeing service offering online self-help programmes and a network of peer support and guidance.

Raising awareness of mental health amongst staff is imperative and we have delivered ‘whole department’ events such as Time to Talk, Break the Stigma and World Mental Health Day designed to raise staff awareness of the support they can access and to breakdown the stigma associated with mental ill health.

In 2018, we also held a health and wellbeing festival, which included a range of opportunities including mindfulness sessions, shoulder massages, a fitness zone to test you heart rate, a lifestyle zone to get advice on diet and alcohol consumption and a health zone where staff undertook a mini-health MOT.

As of June 2019, 86% of our SCS have attended the Wellbeing Confident Leaders training. This training was designed to help senior civil servants across all departments embed wellbeing into all planning, decision-making, performance and change management.

We assess the wellbeing of our staff through the Civil Service People Survey. There are 3 positive wellbeing measures and one negative measure.

Personal Wellbeing	2014	2016	2018
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?	64	68	70
Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile?	69	71	75
Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?	60	66	64
Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?	48	48	34

All 3 positive measures have improved from 2014 to 2018 by at least 4 percentage points and the negative measure has improved significantly from 2016 to 2018 by fourteen percentage points. This illustrates that the wellbeing of our staff has improved in recent years.

To understand whether our staff are flourishing at work, we combine the scores from five of the Civil Service People Survey questions to compute an annual index score. We refer to this as the PERMA Index and there are 5 components: Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. In 2014 our PERMA Index was 73% and this has improved to 76% in 2018. MHCLG is one of the government departments that has seen the most improvement over recent years and at 76% we are now joint top across the Civil Service. The Civil Service median is 74%.

We measure the health and safety executive proxy stress index via the Civil Service People Survey, this gives a measure of the conditions which can lead to stress in the workplace. The higher the score, the more demanding the environment is to work within. In 2014, the index in MHCLG was 27% and in 2018 it was 25%, so an improvement of 2 percentage points over the time period. MHCLG has a lower stress index than the Civil Service median which is 29%.

What are we doing next?

MHCLG will continue to build on and maintain the Mind Gold award and carry on providing training on mental health and stress management for all staff.

We will develop our new health and wellbeing plan which will be launched by the end of 2019. All Divisions within the department will be represented by their wellbeing champions to ensure the plan captures the health and wellbeing needs and priorities across our organisation.

In January 2020 we are launching our new performance and development approach. The emphasis will be on holistic conversations focusing on the whole person: their wellbeing, performance, development and aspirations. We will continue to run our Wellbeing Confident Leaders sessions and roll-out the training across all levels and divisions within the department.

The Civil Service has the aim to be the UK’s most inclusive employer by 2020 and MHCLG’s D&I plan will continue to focus on inclusive behaviours across the organisation. As part of a Civil Service wide programme, the department launched a measurement index in 2019 to help us understand how inclusive MHCLG is, and what more we can do to make the department an inclusive place for everyone to work.