 OK, we are now live. Thank you. Thanks, Liam. Good afternoon, members, officers and any members of the public who are viewing the live stream of this meeting, welcome to this meeting of the Employment and Staffing Committee. My name is Councillor Henry Batchelor and I'm the chair of the committee. I'm going to start with a few housekeeping announcements. Please can ever make sure that your device is fully charged and that your microphone is switched off, unless you're invited to do so otherwise. When you are invited to address the meeting, please make sure your microphone is switched on. When you finish addressing the meeting, please turn your microphone off straightaway. Speak slowly, clearly and please do not talk over or interrupt anyone else. Please ensure that you've switched off or silenced any other devices you have so that they do not interrupt proceedings. If you wish to speak, could you please indicate in the chat column. If we need to take a vote for any reason on any of the items, I'll ask committee members to speak into the microphone so that their vote is clear to the committee and also to those watching the webcast. Members should respond for, against or abstain when their name is called. So the committee members present, I'm now going to invite each of you to introduce yourselves. Members, after I call your name, could you unmute, wait a couple of seconds and introduce yourself please. As I said earlier, my name is Councillor Henry Batchelor and I'm the chair of this committee. I'm now going to ask the vice chair, Councillor Dawn Percival, to introduce herself. Hello, I'm Councillor Dawn Percival and I am a member of the Willing and the Overlord. Thank you. And then, Councillor Sarah Tung-Johnson. Hi, I'm Sarah Tung-Johnson. I'm a member for Longstown Town Ward. Thank you. And we have Councillor Claire Daunton, please. Yes, hello everyone. I'm Claire Daunton and I'm one of the members for the Fendit and Fullbourne Ward. Thank you. Then, Councillor Mark Howell. Thank you, Chairman. My name is Mark Howell and I represent the Papal Ward. Thank you. And the first of two Williams is Councillor Heather Williams. Councillor Heather Williams and I represent the Mordons Ward. Thank you. And finally, Councillor John Williams, please. Good afternoon. I'm John Williams. I'm the lead cabinet member for finance and I'm one of the councillors for Fendit and Fullbourne. Sorry, I dropped out for a second there. I think everyone, all the councillors have introduced themselves now. I'm now going to ask the officers present if they could unmute and introduce themselves as well, starting with Susan Gardner Craig, please. Good afternoon. I'm Susan Gardner Craig and I'm the head of HR and Corporate Services. Thank you very much. And Patrick Adams. Good afternoon. I'm Patrick Adams, Democratic Services, and I'm clocking the meeting. Thank you very much. And I believe we also have another officer, Chloe. Would you like to introduce yourself, please? Yes, thank you. I'm Chloe Smith. I'm an HR business partner. Thank you very much. So those are the members and officers present. We have enough members for the meeting to be court, so we're going to begin. If any member leaves the meeting at any point, could they please make me aware so that I can be recorded in the minutes? Thank you. So I'm going to move on to the agenda now, starting with item number one. I don't believe we have any, but apologies for absence, please. Patrick. You're quite correct, Chair. We have no apologies. A full house. Good. Thank you very much. And then moving on to item number two, declarations of interests. Do any members have any interest that they need to declare relating to items on the agenda today? I'm seeing shaking of the heads, nothing in the chat, so I'll assume not. If anyone thinks of any while we're going through, just make me aware, please. Item three, minutes of the previous meeting. Members, we have the minutes on pages one to four of the last meeting we held. Could those members that were here indicate if there's any inaccuracies in there or anything that's been omitted? We have one Heather Williams. It was just about date of next meeting. It says Thursday, 29th of April, and obviously today isn't Thursday, 29th of April, so I'm making an assumption that that's not correct. Either that or we've got a spontaneous meeting. Indeed. The meeting was due to be on the 29th of April, but because one of the items on the agenda, the pay policy statement, needs to go to April for council, we had to bring that meeting forward to today. I hope that clarifies it, but I think in terms of accuracy of what was agreed at the last meeting, I think the 29th of April date was what we agreed, albeit subsequently we have moved it forward. I hope that clarifies that. Members, any other points of accuracy for the minutes? No. OK, we'll move forward then to the main items starting with item number four, the pay policy statement, which begins on page five of our agenda's members. I'm going to open that now and invite Susan Gardner Craig to introduce the item, please. Thank you, chair. This is the annual report on the pay policy statement for the council. Members will be mindful that in previous years I've brought this revised pay policy statement forward for your consideration. It sets out all of the requirements that were part of the Localism Act and the Hutton Review on fair pay. In terms of explaining the way that we remunerate staff, including pay, charges, fees, allowances, et cetera, and any benefits or performance bonuses that the council gives to such staff. It also considers the pay gap between the lowest and the highest paid staff within the council and gives details in terms of any exit payments that we might make in terms of redundancies or settlements. So the pay policy statement has been updated from last year to make sure that the pay points that are set out in the pay policy are the correct ones for this year. And it also has updated in terms of any other fees and charges that our officers are provided with. So I'm happy to answer any questions. Okay, thank you for that, Susan. Members also, we do have the lead member for finance here as well, so if there's any questions I'm sure between the two of them they'll be able to answer those. So I'm going to invite any questions now on the pay policy statement. We are being asked to recommend this for approval to full council. So if there's any questions, members, please do ask them now. Starting with Vice Chair, Councillor Percival. Thank you, Chair. First of all, thank you to officers for putting this paper together. I had a question on 1.6 page 11 about progression through grades. Would you mind just talking us through how that happens? Does the pay review process and increment take place on an annual basis subject to satisfactory performance? Through you, Chair. So the council's got a grading structure that allows progression through six points on the pay scale in total and performance is judged on good performance, not just satisfactory performance. That happens during the year as part of one to ones and any performance concerns that might occur throughout the year. And we assess whether people are going to be able to have their increment just after Christmas. So at the moment we are currently collecting the evidence and sign off from all managers in terms of whether an increment will be awarded to staff that haven't reached the top of their grade. Thank you. Was that okay, Dawn? Yes, thank you. Do you know, Susan, roughly, what percentage of staff do progress to the next increment on a typical annual basis? So I'd probably say that about 30% of our staff are already at the top of their grade and the remainder of the staff. And less people are on a performance improvement program or they've been issued with a warning for something under the disciplinary policy, etc. They will normally progress. And I would probably say that at the moment we've got less than six people that won't be progressing. So it's quite a high percentage. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Heather Williams, please. Thank you, Chairman. It was just on page nine. It's more about process because in the introduction it says the pay policy statement must be approved formally by full council by the end of March. Mind sending it with us today to go to April's meeting. Is that a problem or is that something that's sort of our discretion? And if so, should we change it to the end of April maybe to make it fit? Susan, can someone come back on that? Yeah, through you, Chair. So normally it would be expected to have gone through before the end of March. One of the reasons that it hasn't gone through so far this year is because we've been waiting to hear what the requirements are for gender pay gap reporting. As you perhaps are aware, gender pay gap reporting was put on hold last year because of the COVID situation. And this year employers were anticipating that we would have to do that piece of work before the end of March this year. But that requirement to report on gender pay has again been delayed until later this year. So that's why it hasn't gone through so far. But in terms of process, I think we're fine to publish it just outside of the usual 31st of March requirement. Chairman, if I could come back. Yes, please. What I was suggesting is we change our document to say full council by the end of April. Or is that not a deadline within our control if that makes sense? Because I just think if we change it to April then then all would fit and all be well. Any comments, Susan? I'm quite comfortable with either leaving it as it stands or putting it in until the end of April. The only question I've got at the moment with end of April is that we are just contemplating again some process issues and legislation about whether we will be able to hold full. Annual council in May because of the legislation around virtual meetings. So if I change it to April and we don't hold the April meeting, it's likely to slip to May. OK, so your view would be to it's fine as it is. It is fine. It might be. It might be discovering ourselves essentially. Subject to change the meeting. Absolutely. So it's probably better to leave it as it is. OK. Thank you. Was there anything else Heather? Was that it? That was it really. Thank you Chairman. Thank you. Next we have Councillor Daunton please. Thank you Chairman. So my question really is about bonus payments, page 11. If someone is recruited close to the top of the pay scale in order to recruit that person. Then they will quickly arrive at a bonus payment or might quickly arrive at the case where they would be in line for bonus payment. So how is that dealt with? Through you chair. We don't actually pay any bonus payments for staff at all at the moment. All of our staff are able to go through the salary scale, which is six points of progression. But once they reach the top of the scale, we don't actually pay bonuses. There is provision within our pay policies to pay things like honorariums if somebody has done more than their job would expect. But that is a one off payment for a specific piece of work or a specific activity that somebody has done. But we don't actually pay bonuses. OK. Thank you. Thanks. Was that it Claire? Yes for now. Thank you. Thank you. I can't see anyone else indicating members. Are there any further questions for Susan before we move on? No. I'm not seeing any indicating. So we have the report in front of us. We have a recommendation which is on page five of our reports. That is simply that Council approves of the pay policy statement for 2021. Susan surely we need to say we're referring it to full council as well. What's something about sending it to full council? Yes, of course, chair. Because we aren't actually approving it. No, you're not. Yes. OK. So do we need to edit that recommendation then to make that clear? Patrick will make sure that that's clear in the minutes. OK. Fine. And I'll make the changes to the report as it goes to council. That's great. Thank you. OK, members. So that's the recommendation we have. I haven't had any dissent at the moment. So can I assume that we can take this by affirmation? If anyone isn't agreed or would like to abstain, can you indicate now please? Otherwise I'll assume it's all agreed. I can't see anything. I'll take that by affirmation that that is approved. Thank you very much. Next item on the agenda there with paper agendas again. It's item five, which starts on page 19 of our agendas. And I'm going to flip to that now. And it's the six sickness and absence reports for the last quarter. And I believe we have Chloe Smith introducing this for us. Thank you, Chloe. Thank you very much. So this is the sickness absence report for quarter three of this year. Overall we have seen a slight increase in the number of sickness absence within our staff for quarter three compared to quarter two and quarter one this year. But it's worth noting that we are still looking at lower figures overall than we were pre-lockdown. So we have still seen a decrease compared to last year. Our BBPI figure for this quarter is 2.2 days per FDA. That's a decrease of 22.8% compared to quarter three last year. And within this period we saw a total of 1,258.5 days absence compared to 1,155 days absence in the previous quarter. So it's an increase of 103 days over a three month period. The number of employees' absence in quarter three was 110, which is the same number of employees as quarter two. So it's the same number of staff. Unfortunately that does mean that the staff are having slightly longer absences and we have seen an increase in the number of long-term absences. That represents 19% of our staff overall. So 19% had an absence in quarter three. Of the total days lost for quarter three, 60% of them were attributed to staff who work for our Shared Waste Service. So we do traditionally see a higher number of absences within that workforce. Of those 15 employees within that service had long-term absences. Those staff have mostly now returned to work. A few of those staff have either left employment or were dismissed and five of them are currently being furloughed. Of the reasons for absence, our highest categories remain stress, depression and mental health, followed by other musculoskeletal. For stress, depression and mental health, we have had 10 employees who were on long-term sick leave. And the remaining were short-term. We've had a total of 22 employees who had long-term sick leave within this period. So there were the 15 at the depot and then a further seven elsewhere in the council. And Appendix B shows a breakdown of those employees which service area they're in and the total number of days that they had off as requested following the last employment staff in committee meeting. For to remain anonymous, we have labelled each employee simply employee one, employee two, but that gives you an indication of where the numbers were and how many days they were having. Within this quarter, we've continued to work hard to try and support our employees' health and their return to work. So some of the actions that we've taken are that we've moved all of our sickness management process virtually. So we're now holding virtual welfare meetings with staff who are off sick as well as regular catch-up meetings with employees who have recently returned and any case hearings needed for employees whose health has not returned. We have also started running a weekly report within the HR department to pick up any absences in the previous week and the reasons for those and any absences that have been attributed for stress depression or mental health. An advice has been assigned to it and we've made contact either with the employee or the manager to make sure that we're offering them support. We've also continued running our mental health well-being programme including weekly well-being sessions, regular advice and tips being offered and several training courses. We've also had quite a strong push for our DSE assessments. So to make sure that staff who are working from home are working in a safe environment with their equipment set up to prevent them having other musculoskeletal injuries we've been really encouraging staff to carry out a DSE assessment and since this report was written we've actually had a further push to ensure that staff have completed that assessment. And we've also undertaken a couple of initiatives to try and encourage staff to get active so reminding them things like taking regular breaks from the screen and doing stretches as well as this month we've joined up with the Everybody Health For Everybody Run initiative so we've got a team from the council who are undertaking fundraising exercise while also getting out running and walking. And that's it from me, thank you. Thank you very much and thank you as well for including the details about COVID related illness. It's a great start meeting and it's useful to actually see the figures because I know those are different from obviously the other health issues that we just mentioned. So I'm going to ask if anyone has any questions for Chloe now on the report and we do have one from Councillor Dalton. Thank you Chairman. Well it's just a very practical question so when people report in sick and then report to work, how is that managed? I mean obviously they're not turning up at South Cubs Hall and sitting at a desk. So just the practical aspects of how you manage that. Does it differ from department to department or is there a council-wide way of doing that? Thank you. So the process currently is that employees notify their line manager on the first day of their absence and it's actually the line manager who then notifies the council so they complete a form and submit that to the HR department. When the employee returns to work it's again they contact their manager to let them know that they're signing on and the manager will then hold what we call a return to work interview which is where they complete the form number of days absence reasons and any supports that are put in place but also a chance for the manager to actually talk to the employee and make sure that they are and then we expect the employee and the manager to maintain contact for the next couple of days to make sure that the employee has recovered and there are no further issues. There is a slight variation between departments with the Shared Waste Service because they have a different reporting process and a different cutoff time obviously because they start their work. I think it's normally before six o'clock so they're expected to notify their managers earlier in the day and they may not be able to hold a return to work interview immediately upon their return but they still should hold it within the first day or two. This is also something that's in the process of changing as part of introducing our new HR and payroll system which goes live from 1st of April so it will be less of a paper based system and managers will be able to report the absences directly on to the system rather than going through HR which will hopefully help us improve our ability to contact employees when we need to and put those supports in place because we'll have the live data constantly rather than waiting for forms to be input. Thank you. Thank you for that. And then we have a question from Councillor Sarah Trun Johnson. Hi, I've got a couple of questions. On page 29 we're seeing a huge change in compared to previous quarters of last year for the genital urinary reason. Was there a specific, did something happen? Do we know why there's such a big jump? Thank you. I think from my memory there's the reason is that we traditionally don't see very many absences for those reasons and I think we've had three employees who have had fairly significant numbers of time off for those reasons so I don't think it's so much a change in trend as an unfortunate some employees have had significant absences associated with those reasons. Okay. Thank you. And then the other one was where it says other musculoskeletal so we're separating out back but is there any benefit to us creating other musculoskeletal reasons just in terms of being able to promote remedial efforts in the right way? I see what you mean about being more specific around what those actual reasons are because other musculoskeletal does encapsulate quite a wide area. I think traditionally the categories for the absences other musculoskeletal was added on afterwards but Susan may be able to add some more information to that. When we get the return to work interview forms someone within our department does review them to see if what the specific reasons are so if an employee is able to identify that they have a particular injury or condition that is sometimes flagged up with an advisor to them put supports in place the other thing we use is we have something called the other musculoskeletal checklist so when someone is returning from a other musculoskeletal related absence in addition to the return to work interview form they're also asked to complete this checklist which helps identify specific supports that could be put in place so I think if we separated it out we may be generating more work for managers in terms of having those supports and ideas all in one place understood. Thanks was there anything you wanted to add to that Susan or is that encapsulated the answer? No I think that's covered it thank you chair. Thank you was there another question Sarah for yourself? No I'm good thank you. Okay members I can't see anyone else that indicated they'd like to ask a question before we move off this item one last opportunity if anyone has any last minute questions can't see anyone indicating so I think we've purely been asked to note this so we don't need to decide anything on this one so I'll say Chloe thank you very much good report and I'm sure we'll see one of our next meetings moving on then to the next item which is item 6 which is an oral update on the disability confident task and finish group so at the last meeting we had a request from Sarah to pause the work but we promised to keep checking in to see if there was see what the current status of it was and if there was capacity to start it up again so I'm guessing it's just over to you Sarah if that's okay for a quick update on where we are. Yeah no I think we made the right decision given how busy everyone has been in lockdown I think to pause the work so I think what we should do all I will do is review with Susan how her officer's capacity is on where we are with potentially restarting that work and we can come back to the committee with a firm date that would be my decision. Okay so your liaison with Susan offline will you Sarah? Yeah I think that would be the best. Okay that's great. Well members, do you have any questions of Sarah or officers at this stage? Obviously there's not much to ask questions about but but thank you Sarah if you have any questions. Susan has a hand up. I can't see hands did you want to ask? Say something Susan. Yes it was just on the disability confident. I'm pleased to report that my officer that's been leading on this has just completed the level 2 assessment work for that so we're continuing to progress that piece of work even during lockdown but it will be good to restart the task and finish group. Okay good so sounds like we might have more of a fuller update at next meeting. That's great thank you. Chairman may I just ask when we restart the disability group can we just have a small briefing note to tell you where we got to because it's been a little while and I might need a little briefing to see where we actually got to. Just for my benefit I'm sure other people might want to see the paper as well. Thank you Chairman. I'm sure that'll be fine Susan if that's okay. Thank you very much so Chair. Thank you. Councillor Dawnton. Yes thank you I wasn't sure how to so I just wanted to ask Susan how's lockdown thrown up any issues any disability issues that we might want the task and finish group to look at? I think that lockdown has brought to the surface a number of issues particularly with people working from home and those that need proper equipment to address a disability issue there's been some challenges there specifically where they've needed accessible software and some of our systems have not reacted well to that being at home working rather than actually in the office working so I've been trying to work with my colleagues in the IT department to make sure that they're aware of those staff that need extra support and trying to put that in place but it has been quite a challenge and I suppose the other areas around an individual's ability to work from home if they need specific furniture so rising desks or specifically designed chairs for example that has been a bit of a challenge but I'm pleased to say that we've been able to overcome most of that. Okay thank you. Thank you. I think that's all the questions on that so members before we close it's worth noting that the date of the next meeting is the 23rd of July so obviously if anything pressing as it has done today comes up before then so you might be calling on you to reconvene if anything occurs between now and the 23rd of July other than that we have no more business on the agenda today so I'll just say that I've just looked on the 23rd of July is a Friday may I ask if people could look at that date once again please? I would like to second Council House request because actually schools have already broken up or just broken up on that Friday for us here so I would like to third it actually because it's not much with grants. Okay fine we'll take another look at the date and re-circulate a more appropriate one before there's a mutiny on our hands but thank you very much members, officers I'll draw the meeting to a close there and ask Liam if you'd mind stopping the live feed. I will close the meeting and confirm to you when it's done. Thank you.