Hello PPMA members and friends

Winning a PPMA award brings a lot of kudos and recognition for an organisation as it allows them to showcase the great work that they have done over the year. And with just one day left to go to enter this year’s awards, we’re sharing a blog post written by Doncaster Council who were last year’s winner of the Best Health and Wellbeing Initiative award.


We were delighted to win the PPMA Best Health and Wellbeing Initiative Award in 2022 for the in-depth work we have done to personalise wellbeing services and transform staff engagement, enabling us to provide the greatest support to all our staff. We were even more honoured to also receive the overall PPMA Bronze Award. Receiving this recognition from our peers has been a real boost to our busy and talented HR team and helped to highlight even more our achievements to the rest of the organisation.

Workforce health and wellbeing has always been extremely important to us all at the City of Doncaster Council and is well embedded within our corporate workforce strategy. We had good effective provisions in place but the pandemic presented increasing wellbeing challenges for staff.  We responded quickly to transform our wellbeing offer by:

  • Introducing regular engaging wellbeing surveys to identify and respond quickly to need
  • Personalising provisions to meet a much more varied individual need
  • Transforming our staff engagement using more creative, innovative means to impact in every far corner of the organisation

 We introduced rapid staff wellbeing surveys using powerful, predictive analytics at an organisational, service and team level to highlight areas where staff needed more support and services needed to change.  We were overwhelmed with survey responses and for the first time we could track wellbeing on a range of key dimensions of fatigue, connection, support, overall comfort and performance.  Feedback revealed a need for greater personalisation of support and areas where we had never provided support. We quickly took action to enhance the range of services accessible and refocused existing services to be much more flexible and person centred using creative and innovative means.

Provisions however good, need to reach every far corner of the organisation. Engaging such a large and diverse workforce is always a challenge for us, something which was heightened by the pandemic. We knew we had to grab attention by being more creative and delivering differently. So staff contact channels were enhanced and awesome interactive documents were created to better engage our staff and enable managers to support staff wherever, and whenever, the need arose. Click on the image below to find out more:

Not only do we now have amazing content, we have transformed access from reliance on the central website to communicating directly to all, through channels that suit by email, text, social media or QR code. We now have built in analytic capability to track document visits, page views and reader interactions with inbuilt feedback forms that provide us with further insights.

The impact for staff has been amazing. As well as lots of staff emailing us with positive comments, only 4% of staff currently feel they don’t have good access to the wellbeing resources and 26% increase in staff feeling supported by managers.

This was an enormous transformation of our engagement and outcomes for staff wellbeing. We continue with this approach and have extended to transform support for financial wellbeing and other activities.  All endorsed by our success at the PPMA Awards!

 This was an enormous transformation of our engagement and outcomes for staff wellbeing. We continue with this approach and have extended to transform support for financial wellbeing and other activities.  All endorsed by our success at the PPMA Awards!

The closing date for entries for this year’s PPMA Excellence in People Management Awards is Friday 27th January and you can find out all you need to know on our website

We hope to see you at the Gala Awards Dinner at the Hilton Metropole Birmingham on the 27th April – the very best of luck!