At Leapwise, we’re excited to be delivering a new national wellbeing survey for policing, in partnership with Oscar Kilo (the National Police Wellbeing Service). This new survey focuses on the organisational drivers impacting motivation, performance and wellbeing – ensuring that officer and staff voice can be at the heart of action across policing.
Crucially, this will enable Oscar Kilo and other policing bodies to identify the most pressing areas for improvement. It will help to share best practice to improve existing resources and develop new programmes to promote positive working environments.
In this external voices blog, Oscar Kilo Service Director Andy Rhodes gives us his view on why staff engagement is more vital now than it has ever been. What does it really take to put employee voice at the heart of police wellbeing?
Putting the voice of your workforce at the heart of wellbeing – Andy’s view
My journey around engagement surveys started when I was a Superintendent in Lancashire, given the task of managing corporate development. Up until then, I’d been in operational roles. But as I absorbed a lot of new information, I found my interest was really sparked by systems thinking around wellbeing.
I proposed an all force survey in Lancashire. I still remember the meeting where I presented the results to the whole senior leadership team. As we went through the findings, I could sense the anxiety in the room. It wasn’t pretty reading! It felt like 1906, not 2006. But, despite some initial resistance and outright rejection, the Chief was very open and committed to taking the findings forward – my journey around driving workforce wellbeing had really begun.
Some of my other early experiences involved reviews of specific high-risk areas of policing, including safeguarding and contact management. I found that most people doing mentally and emotionally demanding work had never been asked how they felt about their work or the impact it had on them.
I often use the ‘iceberg of ignorance’ to cause a stir with senior leaders – you can’t always see what’s under the surface. It’s normal to believe you understand what’s happening daily at the front lines. Quite simply, you don’t.
And the more I worked in this area, the more I realised the importance of leaders engaging colleagues to support them through their work. Each frontline employee knows the complexities they face and leaders probably only see 3% of it. Staff engagement is your early warning signal; it’s your canary in the coalmine.
Oscar Kilo: staff engagement to improve wellbeing
In 2015, I set up a national working group on wellbeing. We started small – creating toolkits to support colleagues across policing – but later secured transformational funding for a formal national capability to support police wellbeing. With that, Oscar Kilo was born.
With a shoestring budget, we had to really prioritise our spend, so we developed the first national wellbeing survey to inform our decisions. Continuously listening to officers and staff has kept us grounded ever since and helped drive our innovation.
Based on colleague engagement, we’ve expanded our support: from Oscar Kilo vans reaching hard-to-engage people, to health checks, peer support networks and soon, a dedicated mental health crisis line for police officers and staff. Our close collaboration with stakeholders and focus on employee voice also helped us play a key role in supporting the NPCC, Home Office, Police Federation and others to set up the Police Covenant.
Five lessons on capturing voice to support employee wellbeing
Employee voice has been at the heart of everything we do at Oscar Kilo. Based on my last 19 years across policing, here are my five key lessons which have guided our efforts at Oscar Kilo, including around the new National Police Wellbeing Survey:
1. An annual survey isn’t the whole answer – it’s just a big piece of the jigsaw
An annual survey can only be one piece of the jigsaw – if a big one! It requires skilled interpretation and sensitive handling. A well-designed and communicated survey can provide your organisation with lines of enquiry, but it won’t give all the answers. You need multiple engagement channels to help you keep engaging with your employees.
2. Abandon your ego and get ready to really listen
Listening to how people feel can often be a struggle for some leaders. At times, they may take it personally, find it stressful, and react by becoming defensive. However, ‘employee voice’ can highlight the challenges people face working under intense pressures and sometimes in highly traumatic situations.
My advice: remember it’s not always about you. Sometimes feedback reflects system problems, not personal failings. Don’t take it to heart, because doing so can cloud your judgment and make it harder to respond constructively. But when it is about you, your leadership, your decisions, do take it personally. Good leaders should listen, take responsibility, learn from it, and act.
3. Bust myths and assumptions
Try to recall the last rumour you heard about your organisation, and where it ended up. When there is no psychologically safe space for people to ask questions, challenge or speculate openly, concerns go underground, often leading to damaging consequences.
Strong staff engagement channels provide an early ‘heads up’ about issues troubling the workforce. They offer an opportunity to get ahead of the curve – or even highlight behaviours or practices once accepted as the norm but now seen as unfair or outdated.
4. You can have your say, but not always your way
Be upfront about this from day one when you engage; you must avoid raising unrealistic expectations. While it’s crucial to listen to employee voice and everyone’s voice is important, this doesn’t mean leaders should act on every piece of feedback. I recall one outraged response officer questioning why Roads Policing had better cars than his team did. Simply put: ‘Because you don’t need a high-powered car, and we can’t afford it!’
What’s important is to share the dilemma and be honest with your employees about the constraints you face. People will respect that even if they don’t like the decision.
5. Finally, don’t just do something… Stand there!
Policing is often focused on urgent action and rightly so. But take time to interpret results. Most people may be doing OK, but some aren’t. Your mission is to drill down deeper and deeper into the data until you get as near to the truth as you possibly can.
Armed with effective insights, you can prioritise and discern between someone who’s just annoyed they haven’t got a BMW and someone who’s telling you something you didn’t know. With that proper consideration, you can then identify which issues you really care about fixing.
Supporting wellbeing through insights
These five lessons have shaped my approach to using workforce insights and helped Oscar Kilo target our resources to drive maximum impact for colleagues across policing.
Working with Leapwise, the new National Police Wellbeing Survey will help us get closer to understanding what’s really going on in organisations across policing. Leapwise Director Tanvi’s recent blog also gives a sense of what drives wellbeing, if you want to hear more.
If you’re interested in the new National Wellbeing Survey or any of Leapwise’s work around workforce wellbeing, do reach out – you can contact Leapwise below or message Andy on LinkedIn.
