Agenda and minutes

To elect a Vice Chair to the Budget and Corporate Scrutiny Management Board.

Councillor Ellen Fenton was elected as the Vice Chair to the Budget and Corporate Scrutiny Management Board.

Apologies for absence were received from Councillors Anandou and Elaine Giles.

Members to declare any interests in matters to be discussed at the meeting.

There were no declarations of interest made.

To determine whether there are any additional items of business to be considered as a  matter of urgency.

There were no additional items of business to consider.

To receive and comment on the approach taken to date to understand and improve employee engagement.

The Board was informed that positive improvements had been made and many external reviewers such as Grant Thornton and the LGA had praised the progress made by the Council thus far in achieving milestones including the preparation of an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy and work around Council Culture. Ensuring that members and officers knew the importance of the improvement plan as well as promoting good working relationships between officers and the public were key factors in progressing further.

The difficulties faced by Sandwell Council over the past several years and over the pandemic provided important lessons on maintaining a cultural grip on organisation and staff. Additional issues such as managerial behaviour and the relationship between members and officers were also affected during this time. As a result, staff morale was low, and many officers did not feel empowered in their roles. These problems had cascaded down throughout the Council to frontline officers which, in turn, created further issues with the recruitment and retention of staff.

The Employee Engagement Survey (EES) was conducted between February and March 2022 with a response rate of 61% of employees (2,374 responses from a staff population of 3,913). The survey remained broadly consistent with 2018 and previous years. The survey was accessible via an email invitation as well as paper surveys.

The results of the EES showed that employee engagement had fallen from 69% in 2018 to 63% in 2022. Whilst scores across all five factors were lower in 2022 than in the previous survey, Sandwell scored above the local authority benchmark in pride amongst staff (7 percentage points above benchmark) and recommending the council as a good place to work (8 percentage points above).

Corporate level results were presented to Leadership Team on 12 May 2022 and with staff via an All Staff Briefing on 26 May 2022. The results were also published on the intranet.

Directorates compiled the key actions to address the top three issues in their specific areas and the top three high performing areas to ensure good practice continued. These action plans were reviewed by Leadership Team on 18 October 2022, with the agreement that the action plans would be monitored corporately on a quarterly basis.

Organisational Culture:

The organisational culture workstream consisted of two main phases. Phase 1 included conversation exercises with staff and members. The second phase would be to then utilise the information obtained from these conversations to better inform what the desired values, behaviour and culture should actually be.

A “Culture Working Group” was established, this included representatives from across the council that contributed to and provided constructive challenge to the approach, including leads on EDI and Member Development; Culture Champion volunteers were also appointed. Culture Champions were offered training sessions that enabled them to carry out listening group sessions. The sessions were to seek qualitative feedback from employees regarding the current culture and their aspirations for the future. Staff who could not attend these sessions were invited to fill out surveys.

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