People and Culture

As of 31 December 2023, we had 907 active employees at Save the Children UK and 3,230 people were working in a formal volunteering role.

Our culture transformation programme, Organisation of the Future, was launched in 2022, and designed to bring about deep change across our organisation.

We are aiming to bolster our impact and increase our organisational resilience against unforeseen challenges by becoming truly agile in our mindset and practices.

This involves introducing an adult to adult mindset across the organisation, which is about increasing autonomy and responsibility, releasing potential at individual level, and fostering more collaboration and learning across the organisation.

We are supporting teams towards higher performance, and the development of a new way to manage and lead, including by piloting flatter structures with self‑managed teams. We are also focusing on increasing psychological safety in teams and groups, to increase belonging, learning and innovation.

To do so, we have started introducing a new performance enablement approach across all teams. This involves connecting all teams to a clear purpose, aligned to our wider vision and strategy, and supporting them to continuously learn and assess their performance, as well as build on their strengths.

Additionally, we are preparing for the digital future by fostering collaboration among our workforce, refining processes, and leveraging technology to establish a workplace that is not only digitally ready but also data enabled

We are committed to making our organisation more inclusive, equitable and anti-racist.

We now have a well‑founded Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) ecosystem that consists of our DEI team, Wellbeing Team, a staff member with a specific inclusive programming role, DEI representatives and Staff Equality Networks.

Here are some examples of the progress we made towards implementing our Free to Be Me diversity and inclusion strategy in 2023:

• Successfully delivered training sessions on disability awareness, anti-racism, power and privilege, and inclusive resourcing, along with e-learning modules specific to our organisation. Along with this we designed dignity and respect in the workplace training sessions, offered to staff across the organisation.

• Launched a representative panels pool to ensure we have representative interview panels across the organisation.

• Introduced a guaranteed interview scheme for candidates with disability in our recruitment process.

• Increased ethnic minority representation at senior levels from 21% to 23.6%. This is proportionate to our overall ethnic minority population, which also increased by 3.2%.

• Women in senior grades now make up 71%, which is proportionate to our female population.

• Worked on getting diversity data from our staff by raising awareness of how this affects inclusion. We have run information sessions, provided written guidance, and made it easier to complete the questions in our HR information systems. We also introduced new questions that cover social mobility, refugee and carer status.

Between December 2021 and December 2023, we saw a 36% reduction in stress-related staff absences.

While we’ve made significant strides, there’s still room for improvement in further reducing stress levels among our teams.

We introduced specialised support for staff diagnosed with a neurodivergent difference, ensuring they receive the support they need.

We are working collaboratively with our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and People teams to facilitate appropriate workplace adjustments. We enhanced our support programme by introducing team workshops focused on establishing psychological safety as a cornerstone of workplace wellbeing.

We conduct annual stress risk assessments, to provide insights into the overall wellbeing of our staff and guide our strategies to prevent stress from escalating into mental ill health or burnout.

We have increased the number of staff trained as mental health first aiders to 10% of our organisation. We’ve established robust governance to support them, along with a comprehensive protocol for providing peer support.