PLA Wellbeing survey 2023 – Blog by Jacqui Joyce on behalf of the Wellbeing Committee

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Thank you to everyone who responded to our survey on wellbeing. This was run 4 years after our initial survey in 2019 and has shown interesting comparisons (see the table below). We also asked some specific questions this time about the impact of Covid 19.

The survey shows that whilst there are ever so slightly less amounts of stress, those stresses are still affecting the health of respondents at the same levels, and these are still very high (68%). There is also no real change to the triggers for the stresses - whilst there were some personal triggers from home events, most were due to ‘overwhelming workloads’ and ‘too many urgent deadlines’.

On a positive note, more respondents reported that they are mentioning their issues to someone in their working environment and it seems some firms are stepping up and offering more support. On the latter however there are still over half of people affected that considered they did not get sufficient support.

Whilst the impact of Covid 19 was seen to increase stress levels the outcome of ongoing hybrid working was mostly seen as a positive with 67% saying it was a positive and only 7.5% expressing it as negative. It also seems that Covid has prompted more awareness in employers with 75% of respondents saying that since Covid the mental health and wellbeing of employees has become more important to their employer. This is reflected in the lower numbers saying that they would benefit from a support mechanism outside that offered by their firm (from 72% to 53%) but this is still needed by over half of respondents. When asked what sort of support mechanism would be helpful most replies centred around some sort of mentoring, having a third party to talk to for advice or as a sounding board. There was a vast majority (83%) in favour of the PLA trying to continue to support members in this area.

The Wellbeing Committee is continuing to try and meet these needs and we have several events in the pipeline for next year, including more of the popular speed mentoring sessions and an interactive webinar on resilience in high performance environments. New members of the Committee would be very welcome. If you are interested, please contact our Chair Frances Richardson at Frances.Richardson@addleshawgoddard.com. Equally, if you have any feedback or ideas for events you would like us to run, then do get in touch.

Jacqui Joyce

on behalf of the PLA Wellbeing Committee