Friday 22 February 2013

I wanted to share with you some of the detailed messages from the staff survey that we conducted in October last year. The results are now analysed and published today. Details for each service will be shared over the coming weeks so that we can understand and target our actions to specific areas. I’m pleased to say that 60% of you took part in the 2012 survey – up from 55% in 2011. We have improved our results in all ten sections of the survey this year and our philosophy of continuous improvement across the business is starting to show, something I’m very proud of. Specific improvements are:


Change up 32%

Your role up 4%

Wellbeing & safety up 12%

Reward & recognition up 4%

Communication up 12%

Management & leadership up 10%

Learning & development up 8%

Employee engagement up 19%

Team work up 1%

Customers up 1%


The staff survey was designed using many of the same questions as in previous years so that we could compare results year to year. Employee engagement – a key measure of how engaged our staff are in our business and its objectives – is up by 19% this year. This is a tremendous result. Overall, you are telling us that we need to focus on the following four priorities during 2013:


1. Wiltshire Council employees need to receive more consistent and regular information and, in particular, clarity is needed on why changes are being made by our leadership team.

2. Communication needs to be open and honest in order to give staff confidence in our leaders.

3. The council needs to further develop a culture where respect and recognition is embedded.

4. Wiltshire needs to ensure that it is committed to customer satisfaction and that all our staff are part of this.

As Priorities 1 and 3 were highlighted in the 2011 survey, they remain vital to improving employee engagement. We will prioritise these and redouble our efforts to excel in these important areas. Priority 4, for me is the most important. It’s the very essence of this organisation and why we do what we do for our customers, clients and communities. We need to redouble our efforts to understand what our customers and communities want from us and then to design our systems and services to deliver these reliably and robustly.

I would welcome any feedback on these results personally so please get in touch with your views, observations and comments.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again in a week or so.


Carlton