Staff Update
Message to Staff – 27 June 2025
Dear Colleague
A few important updates as we enter the last leg of the academic year, with a number of wonderful celebrations of learner and citizen achievement starting next week.
Staff well-being survey
Thank you to the 198 people who filled out the survey in February and sorry it has taken me so long to feedback on this but I haven’t done a comms in a while.
The survey is 36% of staff and hopefully represents a wide range of different jobs across the Charity group.
The majority of respondents gave positive answers about awareness of the support we provide and the relationship with line managers in talking about mental health.
Between 15 and 25% of respondents had a negative view on these themes (depending on the question) and that is still a worry for me and the senior team. I know you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but I would like to keep building a culture where more of our staff felt confident in discussing mental health issues and that they would get support from their line manager or other management colleagues.
In response to the feedback we plan to:
- Offer smaller, more frequent mental health and well-being events across the year.
- Continue with awareness raising campaigns.
- Examine how we can support individual teams to have team building activities aimed at improving communication and trust.
- Tackle a culture of gossip in the workplace. This was mentioned by several respondents and they are finding it makes coming to work unduly stressful.
The last point about gossip brings me nicely to my next section.
Professionalism the Portland way
As a charity, providing a wide range of services for people with disabilities and mental health difficulties, we have a great reputation for our friendliness. Visitors always comment on our happy, relaxed vibe.
Comments like that fill me with joy. Portland Charity offers a place where the vast majority of people can feel safe and really feel like they belong.
You also don’t need to have worked here for very long to know an awful lot of hard work, expert skills and experience go into to creating and sustaining our relaxed vibe.
One crucial ingredient of the magical Portland mix is professional conduct. All of us need to conduct ourselves as role models of high professional standards. Our colleagues, our learners and citizens, our volunteers, visitors, commissioners and inspectors will quickly form an impression of us and judge us on it.
People will form a very positive impression of us if:
- we speak politely to others and show respect
- we are dressed appropriately for the job we are doing
- we avoid gossiping about other people behind their backs
- we don’t ask intrusive, personal questions
- we don’t start rumours or speculate on things we know nothing about
- we think carefully about the impact that our words, including on social media, might have on others
I hope you will already know that these positive behaviours are all covered by our Code of Conduct. Sadly, there are one or two recent disciplinary issues where a tiny minority of colleagues haven’t been able to follow these simple, basic rules.
Star Awards
A reminder to get your catering preferences in by next Friday, 4th July. The Star Awards is a lovely way for us to celebrate the contributions of our staff and volunteers to making Portland the outstanding organisation we all love.
I wish I had more opportunities and more ways to say thank you for your contribution to Portland and I do hope you can make it. The fundraising team are organising the event this year and they are keen to make a splash with family friendly attractions and entertainment. It’s going to be bigger than ever.
Anyway, I hope you are well and managing to find some cool spaces in all this heat.
Take care
Mark