Raraunga Ohumahi 2022 — Te hauora i roto i te mahi Workforce Data 2022 — Wellbeing at work

In Te Taunaki Public Service Census, 69% of the participants said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their job, and only 4% were very dissatisfied. This compares to 77% of employed New Zealanders who were satisfied with their job in the most recent General Social Survey 2018.

Wellbeing data for New Zealanders: job satisfaction — Stats NZ

Some organisations regularly survey their staff to measure the level of engagement and identify where to focus to lift engagement. Results from these staff engagement surveys are collected as part of the Workforce Data collection and these are published in the table below.

There are complications in comparing staff engagement results across the Public Service. First, organisations use different providers to survey staff engagement and results are not easily comparable. Second, some organisations survey staff engagement less often than others.

We have worked with the health and safety functional lead, ACC and Stats NZ to produce two Health and Safety metrics (as shown in the visualisation below).

• All ACC claims in the Public Service per 1,000 FTEs.
• Entitlement ACC claims per 1,000 FTEs (serious claims that involve additional payments beyond medical fees).

The incidence of such claims in the Public Service workforce is around half that in the wider New Zealand workforce. Since 2007 the rate of workplace injuries resulting in an ACC work-related claim or entitlement payment has, on average, declined across New Zealand. In the Public Service, these rates have remained relatively unchanged until 2020, when both rates fell. There was also a sharp fall in all work-related claims in the wider New Zealand workforce in 2020, and Stats NZ notes that this coincided with the national COVID-19 lockdown in the first half of 2020.

The health and safety functional lead was established in August 2017 within the Public Service to work with organisations and the sector generally.

Stats NZ has the latest official workplace injury statistics.

Injury statistics: work-related claims: 2021 — Stats NZ

Unplanned turnover measures the rate that organisations lose permanent staff due to reasons they hadn’t planned for, such as resignations, retirements and dismissals. The 2022 figure is 17.3% which is up from 10.5% recorded last year and is the highest rate since measurement began in 2000.  This is likely being driven by the tight labour market conditions affecting the wider economy.  There is also likely to be a degree of catch-up from the below average turnover during the preceding COVID period.

In the year to 30 June 2022, public service employees took on average 8.3 days of sick and domestic leave, up from 8.1 days in 2021.

The 2022 Workforce Data shows that the average length of service of public service employees decreased by 0.2 of a year to 8.2 years. This measure is based on tenure within a single organisation, not the Public Service as a whole, and excludes those on fixed-term employment agreements. This measure has been trending down since 2016, when it was 9.5 years.