
McFadden: Positive and improving picture on staff engagement
The Legal Ombudsman is bucking the wider trend of requiring staff to spend more time in the office and is instead halving it to the equivalent of one day a week.
The news comes as the service reports higher demand than expected, which is inhibiting efforts to speed up the resolution of complaints and reduce the number sitting in the system awaiting allocation to an investigator.
According to the December report of chief executive Paul McFadden to the Office for Legal Complaints – the board that oversees LeO – it currently operates a 40% office hybrid working model.
He said: “It has been clear for some time from employee feedback across a range of mechanisms that our staff value flexibility and would welcome more in relation to the office/homeworking split.”
Following engagement with a new staff council, LeO’s executive consulted with workers on options for a revised hybrid working model “that balances greater flexibility with the need for in-person collaboration, team working and training”.
Mr McFadden went on: “Despite a shift to increasing the time spent in the office by Ministry of Justice and wider civil service departments, the executive team considers maximising flexibility, whilst retaining some office working for the reasons outlined above, to be a key component in improving our employee offer.
“Therefore, going forward the new hybrid working model will be a requirement for 20% of time spent in the office, spread over a month with a clear commitment to collaborative working and maintaining high levels of performance across the organisation.”
Attracting and retaining has been a long-term problem for LeO but there have been improvements in recent years and Mr McFadden said the headline findings of its latest people survey “show a positive and improving picture”.
The overall employee engagement score – measuring how engaged, motivated and committed staff are to their work – was up three percentage points to 59%. Experts would view this as only a moderate result, with 70% plus seen as a good score.
LeO achieved more than 70% in several of the individual elements making up the score, however, such as what staff felt about their manager, their work, their team and LeO’s objective’s and purpose.
But it only scored 26% for pay and benefits – albeit three percentage points higher than in 2023.
Nearly nine in 10 staff (87%) said they had not been discriminated against, harassed or bullied.
The report said LeO had completed a full review and update of its ‘managing unacceptable behaviour’ policy for customers, “including guidance for LeO’s staff on microaggressions to help ensure LeO staff feel safe and supported at work – and directly address feedback from safe space feedback sessions as an identified area of improvement”.
Mr McFadden reported that LeO was on track to resolve between 8,200 and 8400 cases by 31 March 2025, “at the higher end” of its forecasts. This was against the background of higher demand, with complaint volumes up 12% in the last quarter of 2024 when compared to 2023.
There was also a significant rise in the number of cases requiring in depth investigations, now expected to be more than 4,000 in 2024/25, against an original forecast of 3,450.
As a result there were still 3,362 unallocated investigations at the time of writing, virtually the same as at the beginning of the financial year. Reducing this backlog, which reached a high of 5,862 in 2021/22, has long been LeO’s single biggest problem.
The customer journey time for all cases reduced marginally to 292 days, with 45% of cases resolved within 90 days.
The average end-to-end customer journey time for cases subject to LeO’s early resolution procedure – which represent around half of all resolutions – was 50 days.
Mr McFadden said engagement with its 2025/26 business plan and budget had so far shown “broad support for LeO’s plans and highlighted further evidence of robust confidence in LeO’s leadership, our transformation and grip on operational performance”.
However, as we reported on Monday, there is strong opposition from the profession to its proposed 10.2% budget increase and elements of the plan not seen as core.
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