Entry received from: Te Awa Kairangi Hutt City Council
Category: Excellence in Organisation and People Development
At Hutt City Council (HCC), we're proud of our commitment to staff wellbeing and ensuring our people have a positive employee experience. Our people work hard to serve our community and while extremely rewarding, there's no denying that working in local government has its challenges.
To meet this commitment we have our Wellbeing Programme in place, which seeks to create a workplace culture where people feel safe, connected, and belong. With 570 employees, spread across customer-facing and back-office roles, our programme is flexible and provides a range of options to meet the needs of our people, especially given the psychological risks related to working in local government.
In 2021 an evaluation of our wellbeing programme identified the need for change including recognising the impact of COVID-19 on people's wellbeing and the need to enhance our employee value proposition (EVP) in what was a tight labour market. Following this, the below enhancements were made to our wellbeing programme:
- Introduction of wellbeing leave - one day per quarter (non-accumulating),
- Introduction of birthday leave - one day per year (non-accumulating), and
- Increase in our wellbeing benefit from $200 to $300 per annum.
The changes have been received positively with staff feedback reinforcing the impact these enhancements have had in supporting our people's wellbeing.
Thank you to our category sponsor