The team are back again ready for Phase 2 of the Future Work Design: Wellbeing. East Riding of Yorkshire Council, Hull City Council, North Lincolnshire Council, North East Lincolnshire Council and the University of Hull are proud to welcome on-board Microsoft as part of the project team.
Previously we have had success using funding from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to develop a Risk Assessment Tool which will support local authorities to understand the impact of new ways of working, that have been adopted due to Covid-19, on the workforce. Apart from being available on the Centre for Human Factors page through the University of Hull website it has actually been recognised by HSE nationally as best practice and they are hosting it on their site pushing it out to over 500,000 organisations AND it’s being evaluated by two other countries with the potential to adopt it. That’s not forgetting the fact that local authorities across the country are now actually using the tool already. Don’t forget…..it’s FREE to use and any organisation can download and use it.
Building on this success we applied for further funding at the beginning of the year and celebrated our success in February. The aim of this Phase 2 now is to focus on staff and look to develop in collaboration with experts in their field evidence based well-being tools that staff can choose to adopt as part of personal interventions to address the psychosocial stress risk that remote workers have identified affect them the most using the Risk Assessment Tool from Phase 1.
The work aims to explore the potential for features that currently exist within the Microsoft 365 suite, but which are not yet being utilised, to be rolled out as interventions that respond to the needs of staff highlighted during Phase 1 of this work. The work will employ a quasi-experimental approach, including a control group, to explore the features available and their potential as interventions, and to explore different approaches to the intervention process, so that other local authorities can learn from this work.
I am excited to be part of this enthusiastic and caring project team, collaborating to help our friends and colleagues who may be experiencing a negative impact on mental health and wellbeing. This is whilst councils continue delivering the quality services we are passionate about to our communities.
Keep an eye out for regular updates, blogs from the team and insights from staff across the organisations who are participating in this. These are exciting times with huge leaps in new processes designed through technology but we need to ensure that the most valuable asset an organisation has is looked after….people.
