People Survey: Spotlight on South Central

The South Central region are working on Staff retention and Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging as our People Survey priority areas.

Tackling retention

For staff retention, our key approach is exploring exit interviews. Since unification we have improved the process, ensuring that interviews are now offered to all leavers. Results of these exit interviews enable local, regional, and national interventions to be shaped to improve retention levels. Our Workforce Programme Specialist Services Team are using the Probation Retention Toolkit to support teams in understanding reasons why employees are choosing to leave and tackle the underlying issues. ​

Singing from the rooftops

Ensuring staff feel recognised is a key factor in retention. Since unification we have seen a significant increase in staff nominations for our regional reward and recognition process. This year we aim to increase nominations for external and national awards, so we can sing from the rooftops about our fantastic South-Central colleagues.

Ramping-up recruitment

As part of a project to increase applicants for the PSO (Probation Services Officer) role, operational staff attended events to speak to students and jobseekers interested in careers within Probation. We have also ramped-up our recruitment promotion through social media and internal communications. As a result, PSO applicants have increased from 30 per month to 184 for our most recent campaign. We hope that when colleagues begin to see and feel the positive results of our recent recruitment success, workload pressures will decrease, and retention will improve.

Embracing diversity

This time we were able to analyse the People Survey results by protected characteristics. This showed that staff identifying as non-white or disabled are experiencing higher levels of discrimination in work. This has led to us to review our Regional Equalities Plan and we are now implementing several interventions to create a more inclusive South Central. These include ensuring we have diverse recruitment panels, holding regular safe space events totruly listen to the needs of those with protected characteristics ,and establishing a regional network of cross grade staff to regularly discuss EDI&B and drive forward the work in the equalities plan.