What do members of your workforce really think of you? The ‘100 best councils to work for’ listings have just been published.

Essential reading for all chief executives! The idea is based on The Times newspaper’s ‘100 best companies’ list. I thought long and hard about whether we should apply for this more than two years ago. Although it’s great to see what staff really think of the council as an employer – what if we didn’t do very well? What if we came 99th on leadership from the chief executive??
Scary though that thought was, we at Chorley DC, took political soundings, got the buy-in of all parties and – importantly – of our staff, braced ourselves, and took the plunge.
For those who haven’t yet, I would highly recommend it. Based purely on anonymous staff surveys – 60% of employees filled in either an electronic or hard copy survey at Chorley – there is no chance of massaging or strategically spinning the results. The questions probe into departments and measure staff’s views on overall vision and direction, quality of line management, personal leadership, team working, pay, health and wellbeing, job satisfaction and morale.
The good thing is that managers can clearly see if things are getting better or worse, and where in the organisation these trends are concentrated. 
Until you know precisely where the issues are, how can you tackle them? 
Last year, we came 10th overall.  Although we were pleased, generally, there were some areas of concern flagged up by staff about health, wellbeing and stress. 
We did a lot more intensive work through staff listening days, organised a pedometer challenge, put fruit on desks, and helped staff who had smoked for 30 years to give up. We managed to reduce sickness absence down to 7.7 days per employee from the year before, which was 10.2 days.
And how did we perform in the awards this year? We came second overall, were named as ‘most improved council’, and won the health and wellbeing award. I was most pleased about the last category, since it was an area we didn’t perform particularly well in last year.
Although the trophies are wonderful and sit gleaming in our corporate display cabinet, this is really a competition among ourselves to get better and better each year. It’s now up to us to analyse the results in more detail, and address our pockets of dissatisfaction. We now use this as our annual staff survey, and we’re not scared anymore of what our workforce tells us.
Donna Hall is chief executive of Chorley DC