Fantastic presentation from Zoe discussing with us issues for us all in relation to the wider determinants of wellbeing for individuals within the team and also for the whole team as an entity.

A key challenge for us at the moment is the ongoing burnout triggers especially for frontline staff with a sense of the grind of cost of living after the pandemic. We had a sense that maybe once we moved from crisis of the pandemic things would be more relaxed and balanced but this is not the reality for many of us as the poverty challenges have taken over where the pandemic challenges have shifted a gear. It seems relentless – unmet need, complexity, mismatch of demand and resources – more for less.

We discussed the fact that there are often no solutions for clients – their situation is as the state intends it to be… previously there often was something that could be done and increasingly it seems that there isn’t anything to be done – how things are for clients is how things are… an uncomfortable message for us all..and it can be very demoralising for our team members to have to give that message repeatedly.

It is recognised that some members of the team will find the work stressful and need to take sick leave as a result and we covered the issue of disability leave for those with long term MH issues – here is the link there are guidance notes on what and how this may apply.

We noted that some of us have shifted from advising on how to get help from others to being a distributor of funds and this has changed our relationship with clients – adding to some pressure where we have to make unfavourable decisions. For some this was an unforeseen consequence. Also some staff have run out of sickness entitlements and are now themselves using foodbanks or HSF payments – this leads us to question what is our role as an employer and we also face the issue of not being able to meet contractual obligations if staff on longer term sick leave – how do we balance all these challenges.

We wondered if there are lessons to learn from inner city LCAs who have had the challenges on unmet demand, no ‘answers’ for clients etc over the years- maybe those who are now going through this as a new experience can learn from such offices. Moving to remote services can alleviate some of these pressures but the theme of feeling defeated by scale of need is a constant issue.

We discussed the challenges that also arise for teams from CA feedback on client ‘complaints’ and client satisfaction – all too often the issues raised as dissatisfaction are outside of our control – ie we can’t adapt how we do things to resolve the points raised -if a client wants representation at a Tribunal and we are not funded to do that, we are unlikely to be able to change that, if we refer to a partner agency who is at capacity, we can do little about that. If a client is unhappy that they can’t get through because we are helping other clients already there is not much we can do about that. It was agreed that the negative impact of this info from CA on client satisfaction and formal complaints is detrimental to wellbeing in the team – we could consider raising this with CA on behalf of the group.

We also worried about staff who are on low pay generally – and for some on UC where an increase in pay would come off benefits pound for pound- so maybe we could consider other schemes like vouchers etc. We will feed this into the pay grade framework work stream so we can be more confident that we are the best employers we can be.

Mental Health First Aid training has been very helpful in terms of boosting team morale and openness to discuss how we feel and how we make sure that we work to maintain realistic workloads – and that we lead by example- and on that point we also noted that we need to help each other by relieving stress within the group and then avoiding passing our pressure onto the rest of our local team. Some of us are setting up networks for other postholders to do the same – ie share pressures with peers and help each other.

Zoe also told us that there is a great opportunity for us all to get involved in planning elements of CA Conference – the comms team are open to input so check that out on Workplace