Find out what support your colleagues want

While it might be tempting to jump in and launch a wellbeing strategy straightaway, finding out more about what would be valued by your team is critical to a successful wellbeing strategy.

So, while you might want to get started by marking mental health days with events or having senior leaders talk about the importance of wellbeing or by implementing enhanced support for employees, there is huge benefit to doing your research.

That way you can understand what is missing from your organisation, and the types of activities and support your employees will value most.

Your research doesn’t have to be a formal survey. If, for example, you work for a small organisation or practice, an anonymised survey might be difficult to carry out. It may be that you ask your staff on a more informal basis what they might find helpful.

The important thing is to give staff the opportunity to contribute to whatever plan you introduce.

If you decide that you would like to create your own survey, so you can be specific to the requirements of your staff team and the type of organisation, there are a few things to consider.

The smaller your organisation or team, the more generic some questions may need to be to protect anonymity. In general, your survey should:

  • Allow colleagues to remain anonymous where possible
  • Distinguish between colleagues with differing levels of responsibility – for example you may want to have different questions for those at a senior or junior level
  • Cover questions around stigma and discrimination
  • Allow staff to be open about their mental health status (without sacrificing anonymity)
  • Assess challenges and issues, such as workloads, working patterns, colleague relationships, management skills and perceptions of leadership
  • Ask what wellbeing initiatives staff would like your organisation to introduce

Dependent on your type of organisation, you may want to ask more in-depth questions about certain issues. For example, gaining an understanding of:

  • The impact of demands from external clients
  • Challenges faced by those working in the court system
  • Perceptions of time-recording
  • The impact of vicarious trauma
  • The connection with non-legal colleagues for those working in-house
  • The uptake of existing mental health resources
  • Challenges caused by isolation/ remote working

See a sample survey here.

It is always helpful to have comparative data where possible, so you can benchmark your findings with other organisations or the profession more widely.

So, whether you are using an established standardised survey like the one from See Me in Work, or creating your own, we recommend using some questions that will allow you to get some context via comparative data. Some suggested surveys for reference are:

To get a more comprehensive view of challenges specific to your organisation, in addition to surveying staff members, you may want to collate information on:

  • Sickness absence rates
  • Sickness due to mental health
  • Staff turnover rates
  • Common themes raised in exit interviews
  • Level/nature of complaints made internally by staff

Designed to regularly ‘check the pulse’ of an organisation and check-in with employees more regularly than a standalone survey, pulse surveys can be used in addition to larger pieces of research. Or, if you work for a smaller organisation, you can use them instead of undertaking a big staff survey.

Many organisations run pulse surveys every month or so. If it’s much less frequent than that, you can lose the value of collecting real-time data, which is one of the main benefits of pulse surveys.

Some of the other reasons to use a pulse survey are being able to identify minor issues before they become major challenges, compile, and analyse results quickly, see trends over time and importantly, show employees you care about what they have to say and give them a space to be open.

Click here to see examples of Pulse Survey themes.