Cheshire East Council culture change progress to be monitored

The local authority revealed in March that it had hired consultancy firm Sticky Change on a 12-month contract worth £152,460 to help it work on a ‘brighter future together’ scheme.

It came after a Local Government Association (LGA) review into CEC, commissioned by the council itself, found that almost a quarter of council staff it surveyed were aware of workplace bullying in the second half of 2017.

Cllr Barry Moran, Conservative chairman of CEC’s staffing committee, and Cllr Dorothy Flude, Labour shadow cabinet member for children and families, are looking into the programme – and will meet next month to see how effective it has been for employees.

At a staffing committee meeting on Thursday, Cllr Moran said: “The meeting in November is important to us because we want to probe and be satisfied – with the evidence that is produced by officers – that it is working well.

“That means looking at the good, and it means looking at the bad as well.”

Cllr Flude added: “I don’t think the staffing committee realise the enormous amount of work that has had to go on in the background to set all this up. It is unbelievable, it really is.

“At present the process in the governance is working well, because it has had a tremendous amount of response. There has been a huge input from a lot of areas of the council.

“I now need to evaluate the process working well as far as our staff are concerned.”

A report presented to the staffing committee on Thursday said that from the 12 recommendations made by the LGA on improving CEC’s culture, the local authority was on track to complete 11 of them on schedule.

Sara Barker, head of strategic HR, told the committee: “I’m pleased to inform you that the programme is on schedule for delivery.

“We’ve made really good progress in the last few months, not only in the workstream that we are doing in partnership with Sticky Change, but also on the workstreams that emanated from the recommendations in the LGA report.”