REBA Awards Winner: Total Strategy - Cafcass
Size: 2,000 employees (UK)
Sector: Public Sector
Initiative: Health and Wellbeing Strategy
What Cafcass did
Cafcass is the UK’s largest social work employer– tasked with ensuring some 130,000 children’s voices are heard in the family courts each year. In 2010, however, the organisation was facing a crisis of its own.
A 35% rise in its services (accompanied by shocking levels of sickness – 16.2 days per year), saw Cafcass branded “not fit for purpose” by the Public Accounts Committee – meaning it faced a race to turn itself around.
It didn’t just need a tweak around the edges; a completely new strategy, including a new health and wellbeing programme was needed. Up for the challenge though – and begun in earnest with the appointment of three dedicated wellbeing specialists – Cafcass impressed judges with the holistic approach taken to its revival, an approach that saw it create eight synergistic pillars to tackle to achieve optimal employee wellbeing: sleep; movement; fuel; mindfulness; recharge; focus; social and play.
Elements weren’t just introduced for staff to get on with it by themselves; each aspect was accompanied by new dedicated intranet pages, wellbeing workshops, webinars, research articles, monthly newsletters, self- help guides, and e-learning modules.
Seminars were taken out on the road, to all 34 of Cafcass’s offices, where virtual and one-to-one consultations also took place on areas from stress management, to nutrition, disordered sleep, musculoskeletal pain, and even dealing with bereavement. Judges praised Cafcass’s ability to keep the strategy fresh by it focusing on key areas – such as musculoskeletal sickness in 2016 and positive mental health during 2017/18 (which also included a partnership with Macmillan to train managers in supporting colleagues affected by cancer).
It also recognised the valuable part employee steering groups and staff champions played (including the creation of 18 Mental Health First Aiders), who regularly fed back ways the strategy could be improved. In total, Cafcass now has five ‘cancer buddies’ and a network of 47 health and wellbeing champions – all of whom provide local support for wellbeing and encourage employee engagement to extend the focus of health.
As one employee has said: “It was incredibly helpful to have time with a professional who was able to provide tailored advice to my specific needs. Such a service is a great addition to the benefits package at Cafcass.”
Why it won
Not only did the new strategy achieve stunning results (musculoskeletal sickness absence fell from 17% in 2014/15 to just 2% in 2015/16, while overall sickness absence averaged just 7.5 days in 2017/18), but judges and other stakeholders praised the deep cultural change achieved too. Ofsted, in its 2018 inspection of Cafcass, noted it had ‘created a positive culture of psychological and emotional wellbeing for employees’, while it was shortlisted in the Social Work Employer category of the Social Worker Of The Year awards.
And while other projects come and go, this is here to stay. An average of 45 wellbeing workshops (reaching around 900 employees) continue to be scheduled each year, and feedback reveals 100% of staff rate them as either good (8%) or excellent (92%). Today, those dark days seem a lifetime away, with staff rating their own wellbeing as four out of five. Thanks to all these efforts, cost attributable to sickness has tumbled from £3.2 million to £1.5 million.
