With profound service pressures across policing in England and Wales, leaders have been seeking deeper insights into the wellbeing of their workforce and the stresses their people are under. With most police funding spent on personnel – police constables, staff, PCSOs, and others – this kind of information is essential to make sure forces are set up to succeed.
In response, the National Police Wellbeing Service (NPWS) recently committed to overhauling its national survey, which had seen low response rates and limited impact. For 2025, the NPWS wanted to develop a new survey that would be shorter, more engaging, and more actionable to help police leaders better understand the steps they can take to make improvements.
The Challenge
While Oscar Kilo had introduced a national wellbeing survey in 2019, it had lost momentum over time. It was paused by 2024 due to slow insights and challenges with academic outputs that were not actionable enough for busy police leaders to respond to quickly.
A fresh approach was needed. The NPWS commissioned Leapwise to help overhaul the survey and design new delivery methods from 2025. Our emphasis was on faster turnaround, actionable insights, and integration with other police workforce surveys.
Our Approach
Leapwise worked closely with the NPWS and representatives across all forces in England and Wales to redesign the national wellbeing survey. Our approach combined wide engagement with behavioural insights, analytics, and sector knowledge in 4 key steps:
1. Carrying out a needs analysis to discover wellbeing and performance priorities: we engaged with over 120 national and local stakeholders through interviews and workshops, including HR leads, operational officers, occupational health managers, representatives from staff associations and networks. This helped us identify six priority themes driving police wellbeing and organisational performance and some key design principles that would enable us to build an engaging survey product.
2. Designing a survey to maximise workforce engagement: using behavioural science principles, we created a survey that was easy for the workforce to complete and offered clarity on how police leaders could act on the findings. Through user testing to refine our approach and wider comms efforts, we built an engaging product that could took less than 10 minutes to fill out.
3. Building integrated data management and analytics: we found a lot of officers and staff felt that they were over-surveyed and under-actioned – with many sharing that they were often asked to do surveys and never heard anything back. Acting on this feedback, we developed an approach that enabled officers forces to add custom questions to the survey so that it could provide them insight locally and reduce the need for additional local surveys. We also designed the survey to produce findings quickly, through a phased approach: the new survey provided live dashboards that show results broken down for key groups, to enable identification of groups that needed specific attention and support. This helped forces (and national stakeholders ) to identify both national themes and localised workforce issues, while improving response quality.
4. Rapidly completing local reporting with insights, benchmarks, and actions: we prioritised rapid turnaround of findings, delivering a national report within 3 weeks and force-level insights reports within 6 weeks of the survey closing. Our new approach gave forces benchmarks and customisable insights to support local action planning, with further optional support and action planning modules.
Results
Our work ensured the successful design and launch of the new national survey, with key improvements including:
- Record-breaking engagement – boosting survey uptake from 18% in the previous NPWS survey year to 25% (with over 40,000 responses collected) and cutting report timelines from 6 months to 3 weeks
- Greater national impact from the survey, with increased attention from national policing partners such as the NPCC, HMICFRS, and the College of Policing
- A dedicated survey lead in each force to drive engagement and integrate the survey into rapid action planning
- A strengthened role for the NPWS in police workforce strategy, with a stronger data and evidence base to lead and convene work on strategic police workforce priorities
The survey’s redesign and successful rollout have transformed how police leaders can engage with their workforce and utilise survey insights to drive meaningful change.
“Leapwise immediately impressed me with their technical abilities … as well as their sensitive and mature approach to stakeholder management… they are really tuned in to how policing works, its complexities and the sensitivities around capturing voice, data sharing and costs.”
Andy Rhodes OBE QPM, NPWS Service Director
What other public sector organisations can learn from this
Public sector organisations often struggle to obtain tangible feedback from staff and, more importantly, translate this into action. This project demonstrates that more compelling methods of engagement can empower leaders to get the information required to take the action their people need.
If you’re a public sector leader trying to understand how to improve your workplace, employee wellbeing, and service to the public, we’d be delighted to share what we’ve learned. You can get in touch with us by clicking the button below.