Corporate report

Voluntary Reporting on Disability, Mental Health and Wellbeing

Published 3 February 2020

Introduction from Ravi Chand, Chief People Officer

Ravi Chand, Chief People Officer

As a Disability Confident Leader, the Department for International Development (DFID) welcomes the Stevenson/Farmer Thriving at Work report and is fully committed to meeting the standards. Caring for the wellbeing of all of DFID’s staff is key to supporting all our employees across the globe to give of their best. In our People Plan, we aim to ensure we have a workplace where all:

• are supported to have confidence in bringing their whole self to work
• are encouraged to have courage and speak about their lived experiences of disability and mental health without fear of stigma
• collaborate (across business areas/networks/the Civil Service) so that we support each other and are more than the sum of our parts

DFID operates in over 30 countries. Our overseas locations can be hostile and challenging environments, where our staff work under considerable pressure, and sometimes without the support of family or friends. This makes looking out for each other’s wellbeing of paramount importance.

We have also been careful to emphasise the importance of supporting wellbeing in our work on EU Exit in DFID and across Government. We recognise it is a period of uncertainty and are committed to making sure health and wellbeing are central to our approach during this significant period of change.

We are pleased to be taking part for the first time in the Voluntary Reporting Framework on disability, mental health and wellbeing.

DFID Voluntary reporting on disability

Our work on the international stage

In 2018, DFID hosted the UK Government’s first ever Global Disability Summit. The commitments we made at this (including for our staff) are embedded in our Disability Inclusion Strategy. This includes action to recruit, retain and develop more employees with disabilities. A ‘one year on’ report published in September showed significant progress being made against the 968 commitments made by DFID and development actors at the summit.

Recruitment

We know that recruiting employees from all walks of life (including those with disabilities) is good for our business. This ensures that we have a workforce which reflects the diverse range of people we serve and the communities in which we are based, both in the UK and overseas. To support this, we have recently reviewed the wording in our job adverts to make it clear that we actively encourage applications from people with disabilities. We have also started work to reach out to attract potential applicants with a disability, targeting universities/colleges to share our adverts with their disability networks and sharing adverts with disability organisations.

We have also been working with Leonard Cheshire Disability to offer a number of internships globally and to support staff in acting as mentors for jobseekers with disabilities.

Networks

We have active staff networks. Our umbrella Disability and Empowerment Network (DEN) supports staff with disabilities and those with an interest in disability. In addition, we have networks for Parents of Children with Disabilities and Carers of Vulnerable Adults. Information about our Mental Health and Listening Network is included in the mental health and wellbeing section of this report.

During 2018 and 2019 these networks have all been involved in events – including encouraging us all to turn DFID purple for International Day for Persons with Disabilities, we are keen to continue to share information through personal blogs.

The senior Disability Champion represents disability issues with senior management, including both our own Executive Committee and as part of the broader Civil Service Champions’ group.

Data

We ask our employees to complete information about disability in our HR Management Information system. The question we ask is ‘Do you consider yourself to have a disability, long-term injury or health condition? This can be a physical or mental condition and includes common conditions such as dyslexia, cancer, diabetes, depression, heart problems etc. Based on data published in DFID’s most recent Diversity and Inclusion report, 59% of our home civil servants have answered this question with 13% of those saying that they do have a disability, long term injury or health condition.

This compares to 10% of Civil Servants across the Civil Service which is positive. We know that we have work to do on our overall level of reporting and have a further campaign on this planned for 2019/20.

Continuous development

To reinforce our commitment to learning and developing about disability and supporting our staff with best practice information, DFID is a member of the Business Disability Forum (BDF). The BDF provides us with online access to the Disability Standard self-assessment management tool, which we have used to help build our strategy around getting it right on disability. As a global employer we have also made use of the Global Business Disability Framework, the tool sets out to support and enable disability inclusion around the world

Workplace adjustments

We seek to provide quality and timely workplace adjustments which enable people to perform to their full potential – both during recruitment and in the workplace. We encourage staff to capture adjustments (hard and soft) on the Workplace Adjustment Passport and are currently working with the Civil Service Workplace Adjustment Team to review our offer so we can ensure we are providing employees with the best possible experience (including a means to more systematically gather feedback)

DFID voluntary reporting on Mental Health and Wellbeing

Our Disability Inclusion Strategy publicly states that we will hold ourselves accountable by benchmarking our progress against the Thriving at Work standards.

Data

In the Civil Service People Survey 2018 (of the 85% of DFID staff who completed the survey):

• 72% answered no to having experienced mental health problems in the workplace over the past 12 months, to the extent it has affected their health and well-being
• 83% answered no to ever having taken time off from work as a result of poor mental health (for example stress, anxiety or depression)
• 48% answered yes to having gone into work when experiencing poor mental health (for example stress, anxiety or depression)
• 52% felt that DFID does have an inclusive working environment in which staff are encouraged to talk openly about their mental health
• 51% felt that DFID does support employees who experience mental health issues

These were new questions for the 2018 survey. They were all DFID local questions. We included them to improve our knowledge on mental health in the workplace. From 2019, all Civil Service employees are answering questions on Wellbeing at Work in the People Survey.

Personal Wellbeing

Personal wellbeing levels decreased slightly between 2017 and 2018 with 68% of DFID employees rating their life satisfaction as high and 75% feeling that the things they do in their lives are worthwhile (-1 percentage point for both). While we know this shows we have work to do, we know that our employees have been working in uncertain times and we’re reassured with where we sit within the broader Civil Service picture (+ 1 on life satisfaction; + 4 on feeling that things in life are worthwhile).

PERMA index

The Civil Service uses a PERMA index to measure the extent to which employees are flourishing. This index combines measures of positive emotion, engagement, relationships, sense of meaning and sense of accomplishment. In 2018, DFID employees had a PERMA index score of 75%, 1% higher than the median score for the Civil Service as a whole. This figure was the same in 2017.

Stress Index

The Civil Service calculate a stress index score using Civil Service People Survey questions aligned to the HSE (Health and Safety Executive) Stress Management Standards. The higher the index, the more challenging the workplace environment with, for example, higher workloads, lower control over the way work is done and poorer support from managers.

The stress index in DFID for 2018 was 29%, which is the same as the score for the Civil Service as a whole.

Taking steps to understand these responses across the People Survey as well as information we have gathered for the Thriving at Work report are providing the baseline for our mental health and wellbeing plan.

Support available

DFID offers all staff support through an Employee Assistance Programme. This includes a counselling service for all staff who need personal support, available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Support is available for a range of issues, including work stress, coping with change, depression, financial wellbeing and much more.

In addition, we offer psychological health surveillance for those employees posted to our more challenging locations. This assesses an individual’s psychological readiness to deploy to these environments, and reviews and supports their wellbeing at regular intervals throughout the posting.

We are currently reviewing the support we are able to provide from our Health and Wellbeing team for those working in our most difficult environments.

Awareness raising

As mentioned above, DFID also has an active Mental Health and Listening Network. The volunteers are all DFID staff who work to raise awareness, reduce stigma and improve support around mental health and wellbeing. There are 93 active listeners (43 in Whitehall; 30 in our office in East Kilbride; 20 overseas). 43 are qualified as Mental Health First Aiders who have been trained on how to help someone in a mental health crisis and connect them to the help they need. Over the coming 12 months, we will review our offer (in the UK and overseas) and look to increase this provision if required.

The network organise events and speak honestly about their experiences through personal blogs, the most recent of which were for World Mental Health Day.

Mental Health and Listening Network meet the listeners

Development: for leaders, managers and employees

In July 2019, we trained 99 of our SCS (Senior Civil Servants) as Wellbeing Confident Leaders and have been encouraging them to cascade this learning to their teams. This training (and follow up) has been actively supported by our senior Mental Health and Wellbeing Champion.

Using information from Civil Service Employee Policy, we have developed a mental health toolkit for managers to support team conversations. This provides access to links to essential resources and signposting to sources of help. We also promote Civil Service Learning products on mental health awareness.

Whilst we recognise they will not cater to every eventuality, we aim to provide preventative measures by providing learning materials to develop both personal and team resilience.

In conclusion

DFID is fully committed to supporting employee wellbeing at all stages of people’s careers across our entire department. Some steps we are taking to work on this include:

• embedding the principles of the Wellbeing Confident Leaders training including by asking our SCS how they can share their experiences of what they have learnt, both in the UK and overseas
• developing our network of mental health first aiders around the globe
• ensuring information on mental health and wellbeing support is as easily accessible as possible for all of our staff
• compiling all of this information into an overall mental health and wellbeing plan

Finally, to support our work on breaking down stigma on disability and mental health we continue to encourage our employees to talk about their personal experiences in blogs and at staff events. This is part of our plan to help improve confidence to report disability, long term injury and health conditions so we improve our overall awareness across the Department.

This is the first year of reporting. We will be in a better position from 2020/21 to measure progress. In the future we plan to embed voluntary reporting in our annual diversity and inclusion report.

Department for International Development
22 Whitehall
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