The organisation
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) is a UK animal welfare charity. Founded 200 years ago, the charity investigates and rescues animals experiencing cruelty or in organised animal crime, while also supporting people to care for animals. The work varies from animal rescue to treating and caring for sick or injured animals, rehoming animals, welfare advice and campaigning.
The problem
In 2019, an employee engagement survey revealed that only a third (37%) of RSPCA employees believed that the organisation cared about employee wellbeing. A similar proportion, 39%, felt that the charity helped employees achieve a good work/life balance.
The veterinary profession has the highest suicide rate of any profession in the UK. Individuals can develop professional fatigue, where they become “numb to the fact you’re constantly seeing horrendous things happen to animals, and having to potentially put them down”, explains Jeremy Gautrey-Jones, assistant director of employee experience. “If you can’t help an animal survive, that has an impact on your mental health.”
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At the RSPCA, there was also a “lack of trust between employees and the organisation because of fear, and a lack of psychological safety,” he remembers. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem, says Gautrey-Jones, who joined the organisation in March 2020. “For most of 2020, wellbeing was at rock bottom.”
He recalls: “When I joined, we faced uncertainty around the fact we had furloughed staff. We went through a restructure as well, and lost a third of our workforce.” Added to this, frontline RSPCA employees had to continue working in the field during lockdowns, investigating reports of neglect and cruelty.
The RSCPA also had an organisational issue at the time, Gautrey-Jones noted, its contractual requirement for every operational inspector to carry a firearm. “In those days, if you couldn’t carry a firearm, irrespective of how often you needed to use that firearm, you effectively couldn’t do your job, and could be dismissed.” If an employee did not have a good mental health record, they would not be allowed a firearms licence.
“People were concerned about raising mental health issues, because if they did, they might have their licence taken away, which could result in them being dismissed.” This created a culture where employees felt they could not talk about their mental health.
The method
In 2021, Gautrey-Jones implemented a three-year wellbeing strategy. This started with coffee mornings and virtual yoga sessions, but it soon became apparent that these weren’t going to address the underlying issues around burnout.
Gautrey-Jones introduced an anonymous reporting platform, Work In Confidence, that allows employees to raise issues with the relevant person within their organisation without revealing their identity. “If the person feels comfortable, they can tell the person who they are,” he explains. “If not, that’s fine. We give them advice to support on how they can take the issue forward, or try to address the issue through that conversation.”
Employees were also trained as workplace mediators, equipping them with the tools to resolve conflict at work. Additionally, managers received training to identify where their direct reports might be struggling.
Partnering with mental health charity, Mind, the RSPCA’s HR team created a bespoke training course, ‘Managing mental health at work’, which is delivered for new managers and supervisors quarterly. The HR team also encourages lone workers to meet with colleagues face-to-face, daily.
Alongside Mind, HR created a course for inspectorate employees to learn about the mental health conditions they might encounter in the field. “There is a link between mental health issues and animal cruelty and neglect,” Gautrey-Jones explains. “It’s important that our people understand why an animal is neglected, and how to support that individual to care for themselves.”
The RSPCA team also introduced trauma risk management (TRiM), a service that allows risk assessment for colleagues who have witnessed a traumatic event. “If it’s identified in that assessment that it could be impacting on their mental health, which could later mean they get PTSD, they are pointed to appropriate support”.
Gautrey-Jones previously worked as head of HR for HM Coastguard, the UK’s national maritime emergency service, and knew that TRiM was used there, and at other emergency services. “While [the RSPCA] doesn’t advertise itself as an emergency service for animals, our inspectors are effectively going out and dealing with that, so it’s very similar. TRiM seemed a natural fit.”
Rebuilding trust within the RSPCA wasn’t simple. The HR team conducted a review, and one of the outcomes was a decision to remove the contractual requirement for employees to have to carry a firearm. This gave employees the confidence and ability to discuss mental health issues. “It really changed things,” Gautrey-Jones recalls.
HR also took a more consistent approach to mental health. “That involved authentic messaging from leaders but also making sure that in any decisions we made about sickness cases or conduct cases with an angle around mental health, we intervened,” Gautrey-Jones adds.“I spent a lot of my time intervening in cases, making sure that the outcomes were right for the individual and also the organisation, that we showed compassion in our decisions, and support for people with mental health issues.”
The result
In 2023, 100% of people who had used TRiM said they would recommend it to colleagues, while 100% rated their experience as good or excellent. In the same year, the staff survey showed the number of employees who agreed the organisation cared about their wellbeing increased by 27%, to 64%. The results also showed an 18% increase in people who agreed they were treated with respect at work, from 62% in 2019 to 80% in 2023.
The proportion of employees who agreed that the organisation cared, increased to 70% in 2024, and the number of people who thought the organisation helped them achieve a good work/life balance increased by 31%, to 70%.
The impact on the organisation is palpable, Gautrey-Jones remarks. “There is a real openness now,” he says. “We have people who now say they feel okay talking about mental health.”
While the growth has been immense, Gautrey-Jones recognises there is still work to be done. The team is currently working on mental health monitoring, set to come into force next year, which will regularly assess frontline employees. “It will be a bit like a mental health MOT for an individual to identify any issues or any warning signs that allows us to ask people what support they need.
“We’ve got to really identify why 30% of people still aren’t feeling the love. We’re giving people huge responsibilities, and there’s some long-term issues there we need to uncover.”
This article was published in the November/December 2024 edition of HR magazine.
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