In the last few years we have acknowledged that improving people’s experience at work is like changing the wheels on a moving car. There is no final destination, and there will always be new people with new experiences and different challenges. We are freeing ourselves from the expectations that we will arrive at perfect culture, and instead aim to keep pivoting, keep learning, keep adapting in the direction of more balance and better belonging. We’re adjusting our approach to data collection along the way, and improving it where we can.

Watershed is well known as a values-led organisation, and our approach to people and culture regularly influences others across the sector. One of the key things that informs and guides us each year is our Balance and Belonging staff survey – which usually we share as a stand-alone report. However, this year we decided to offer a bit more context, so as the Head of People, I am sharing how it impacts our wider people strategy and the changes it supports us to make. 

This is the third year that we’re sharing the results of Balance and Belonging. Our survey is carried out in April each year and the results reflect a snapshot of the organisation at the time. It tells us the balance of lived experience in our teams and the experiences of our staff at work. The results of the survey help guide our people and culture strategy, and give us an idea of what to focus on in the coming year. 

This Year’s Report

Over the last few years of publishing this information we’ve learned that it is quite a complicated document with a lot of information so in our preparations for sharing this year we spent time working on the formatting to help people make sense of the data. We’ve shared the data in two formats – a simpler, easier to read version as well as the full report so that the information is there if people wanted to delve deeper.

Full report 2024 (pdf) Summary report 2024 (pdf)

We have seen an increase in the balance of our teams in terms of Ethnicity, Age, Disability, Neurodiversity, care giving, and socio economic background. Despite this increase some teams are still lacking in balance and there is more work to do in recruitment and in retention to improve this. On belonging; 86% of employees rated their experience of working at Watershed as excellent or good and we scored highly on organisational culture. We know however that staff felt less favourably about having their voices heard, about their opportunities for development and ways they can grow at Watershed.

How Do we use the Report?

The survey results are a reliable snapshot of the time it’s filled out, however it is not the full picture. We also use other forms of data to give us insight into how people are experiencing work at Watershed, and which areas need improvement. eg; exit interviews with staff leaving Watershed, annual reviews held by managers and anecdotal reporting from the People Team on issues being raised throughout the year. 

The last published Balance and Belonging survey was from April 2023 and over the last year and a half we have put some key initiatives in place in response to the themes and feedback that came out of the survey. 

Taking a more collaborative approach

We’ve looked at the way we make decisions at Watershed, and worked with a staff focus group to take a collaborative approach to producing new guidance on handling challenging behaviour. Working in a focus group format enabled staff to contribute to their own training and guidance, and ask for exactly what they felt they needed. My hope is that this positively impacts the way the guidance is absorbed by the wider team, and staff have a greater sense of ownership.

Widening access to our coaching offer

Our staff coaching programme was previously available to anyone in a supervisory or management role. Following feedback about challenges around growth and development at Watershed we extended the programme offer to include all members of staff who identify as being from a racialised minority background, who identify as neurodiverse, Deaf or disabled or who have a long-term physical or mental health condition. This widening of the offer was a small way for us to acknowledge the structural inequalities faced by people with these experiences and formed the beginning of an equity scheme at Watershed. So far the coaching programme has been accessed by over 30 members of staff since its introduction two years ago. 

Support for Line Managers

The People Team have supported line managers to have more autonomy and consistency in their approach to team management. This has involved taking a person-centered approach when dealing with challenges at work and working to build trust among teams, and improve the HR function in general. Alongside this we have developed clear guidance on what is expected of line managers at Watershed in terms of their responsibilities, but also their behaviors. This work aims to provide clarity and consistency, and enables managers to highlight where they need training or more capacity and resource to properly meet these expectations. 

We held workshops with managers and supervisors to talk through the Balance & Belonging data from their departments. These workshops gave the teams the space to reflect on  data from their teams, and decide on the areas they felt needed focus. Giving departments ownership over their own data, supported more strategic thinking about team culture and their influence within it as senior members of staff. 

New Annual Review

We introduced a new annual review process again created in collaboration with line managers to improve the experience of staff, make room for better conversations about development and people’s experience of work. 

We added new questions including ‘Consider this line management relationship, is there anything you’d like to feed back?’ to encourage more open conversation about management styles. We also added questions around our organisational values, allowing us to establish whether they still feel relevant for people and ensure staff feel the values are showing up regularly in their experience of work at Watershed. All staff will have received their first review using the new process by the end of 2024. 

Staff Forum

We’ve established a staff forum, facilitated in a similar way to the focus group, which is representative of all parts of the organisation. The group is meeting three times in three months, they are reviewing the findings of this year’s survey and suggesting ways we can improve on key areas that scored lowest. 

We hope that utilising a staff forum for this piece of work will improve autonomy over the outcomes, and will help senior management understand exactly what is impacting staff and why. The survey gives great insight because it’s anonymous, but there can be context or detail missing which can lead to assumptions being made by the people analysing it. The staff forum can represent the experiences of staff at all levels, and fill in some of that context. This should lead to more informed actions and focussed changes, and we hope to see that reflected in next year’s data with higher scores in those areas. 

Balance in teams

Over the last couple of years our teams have focussed capacity and resource on people’s sense of belonging. This decision was made whilst acknowledging that teams were not as balanced as they should be. We believe that before making an active invite to new people with new perspectives we should seek to embed a positive and welcoming culture into the work environment. We do not rely on new team members to ‘fix’ our culture, as we know that this approach has the potential to cause harm. 

We have developed feedback mechanisms, training opportunities and team cultures with an aim to create positive working environments and we’ve arranged dedicated time from Tony, our Inclusion Producer to support Line Managers in the careful work of intentionally addressing our balance across their teams. 

In the last few months we’ve had a huge amount of recruitment happening in our front facing teams, and have worked with them to look at ways we might remove barriers in our recruitment processes. We’ve had conversations about unconscious bias, and ensured all teams are utilising group interviews as a way of meeting more applicants. We have made it our policy for front facing teams to use group interviews for this reason, and we’ve found real benefit in being able to invite more people into the building at this stage of the recruitment process. We recognise that there could be barriers to the hospitality industry in general, and so we’re also embarking on a longer term project over the next few months with those teams to create development opportunities for people who might not already have experience in coffee, bar work or venue work. 

Internal Communication

We’ve recently made some changes to our internal comms which comprises of a weekly staff email among other things. We include all job opportunities to encourage internal staff development. We’re sharing more about what is happening around the venue, and to include why those things are happening so teams have context on decision making. We are sending out more ad hoc surveys so staff have accessible ways for consultation and sharing feedback throughout the year, rather than waiting for our annual survey to share their ideas.

HR processes and procedures 

Finally we’re working with TCM this year to embed restorative practice within our HR function. Many HR procedures are focussed around a punitive approach, but restorative practice provides alternative ways of handling conflict or challenges at work. It creates a structure for different ways of resolving issues such as mediation and facilitated group conversations. It has space for more nuanced issues and acknowledges that intersecting identities and experiences are at play for people when they’re at work. These new approaches should be embedded by spring 2025.

In the last few years we have acknowledged that improving people’s experience at work is like changing the wheels on a moving car. There is no final destination, and there will always be new people with new experiences and different challenges. We are freeing ourselves from the expectations that we will arrive at perfect culture, and instead aim to keep pivoting, keep learning, keep adapting in the direction of more balance and better belonging. We’re adjusting our approach to data collection along the way, and improving it where we can. 

Please do have a read of this year's report which also includes the details of our approach to processing the data. 

If you would like any further information you can get in touch with us by emailing inclusion.data@watershed.co.uk