Public and Commercial Services Union

This is quite an accurate perception – to date no positive actions have resulted from any staff survey.

Brief history session

The last staff survey was in 2005 – it’s just been removed from Horizon so you can’t compare and contrast the responses (from 50% of staff). The main concerns are familiar - poor management from the top of the office, lousy pay and promotion prospects.

Sir David Normington was asked by PCS to give a commitment to act on the responses at a Staff Home Office Staff Event in January 2006. 6 months later a plan emerged which consisted of:

• monitoring progress in mistreatment’ (sic),
• taking ‘a closer interest in communications’,
• positive action on long hours (none),
• a review of recruitment and promotion (changed names of JSS and Assessment Centres to SSA and CSA)
• and fairer and clearer distinctions between performance levels (none).

In the meantime the Home Office had become unfit for purpose.

Ignoring the obvious

In an attempt to render the staff survey more realistic and the department more accountable, PCS drafted questions about PDR and other issues for this year’s survey but these were rejected as they were too work oriented!

Obviously it’s a bad start when the department imposes pay then invites staff to complete a staff survey.

The problem is that Home Office staff surveys are ‘attitudinal’ so the department can say that conditions are not actually that bad – any complaints or bad responses are put down to misinformed staff perceptions and so this just becomes a presentational issue.

Which is why the Permanent Secretary was briefed to say we have turned a corner and improvement (ie moderation) is under way. He even dismisses key themes such as pay and promotion as ‘current’ (ie one off) issues, when complaints about both reach back into the previous century.

So don’t expect any action here. But it’s unlikely to do anything about pay after imposition and successive years of complaints from staff and managers about promotion have not been listened to.

This is a bit of a slap in the face of those who took the time to complete the survey and thought their views would be taken account of. After all Sir David says: “The results are an essential part of our work to improve the Home Office. They tell us what you think is working well in the department and where we need to do better.”

We have nevertheless already sought a meeting to get the department to think about some sort of action plan.

Good points

The PS has identified positive results about ‘our understanding of, and commitment to, the direction, purpose and values of the Home Office and the UK Border Agency.’ This is no surprise as the survey was postponed for a week to allow these to be published. ‘The majority of people feel their managers recognise their contribution and treat them with respect and fairness. ‘So there you have it.

Promotion

HO and BIA staff concerns about limited access to and unfairness of career progression and promotion – there has been hardly any promotion under SSA (most of this is level transfer) and a limited CSA in BIA reflects the fact that BME staff had consistently high failure rates but there were majority failure rates for all staff from age 25, increasing with each decade thereafter.

Leaving the job

Staff generally also think a lot about leaving the job. The reason why the Home Office did not publicise a recent early retirement package was that it was scared of oversubscription. An enlightened employer might want to know why staff are so fed up and seek to address the causes.

BIA

UKPA (then BIA) tended to have more polarised concerns than their core Home Office colleagues. The main ones were:

Insufficient resources to do the job; ‘benefits package’ was poor; BIA was not well managed; staff were not confident about speaking out about anything.

Poor performance – big thumbs up for moderation?

The survey included a question as to whether poor performance was dealt with efficiently – to the department this means more staff should lose pay and be sacked. However the question does not say this.

Some staff may share this view but this can also mean there should be better and fairer poor performance procedures, access to improved training and coaching and better management.

As this question has been linked to justify moderation this suggests some misrepresentation of staff views. Unless we stop them, the Home Office will continue to short change and sack more staff.

Extra bad news for BME staff who have endured much higher rates of refusal of training, selection for poor performance procedures, post cutting and employment termination than other staff.

Local survey results

You are invited to tell us about surveys in your area – especially any particular problems that need looking into but also good news if there is any.

Conclusion

Previous surveys have come with a summary and diversity information. There’s nothing here and the message from the top is that everything was in hand before the survey was sent out.

We’ll do all we can to ensure the Home Office responds meaningfully to staff views and not just dismiss them out of hand.