What our staff and residents think about us

We are committed to listening to our people and insight is at the heart of everything we do. Obtaining regular feedback and data from our residents and our staff on what is important helps us to understand what our residents think about our services or how we can build better work cultures for our staff is important. This supports continuous improvements.
The results from our latest Resident Insight Survey and Staff Survey shows that on most measures not only has the Council improved but we are above both the London and national averages.

Resident Insight Survey (Autumn 2022)

Some of the top line results:

64 per cent of our residents are satisfied with the Council (compared to the London average of 48 per cent)
87 per cent are satisfied with their local area (the London average being 65 per cent)
73 per cent of residents trust the Council (National average is 58 per cent)
56 per cent of residents agree the Council provide value for money (11 points above the national average of 45 per cent)
63 per cent of residents feel the Council keeps them informed (National benchmark is 57 per cent)
66 per cent of residents believe people in the borough have an equal chance of succeeding regardless of background
82 per cent residents would recommend Waltham Forest is a good place to live and 86 per cent feel strongly they belong to Waltham Forest

Residents top five concerns are: rising cost of living, crime and violence, lack of affordable housing, litter and dirty streets traffic congestion

The resident insight survey is carried out every six months and uses the Stratified Random Locational sampling approach, and fieldwork is completed in just over a month. During this survey, 762 households were interviewed face to face.

Staff Survey 2022

At the end of last year, we ran our staff survey and we’ve had some really positive and interesting results.

Some of the top line results:

71 per cent of staff feel proud to work for Waltham Forest Council (this is up 5 points from our last survey in 2019)
Regular 1-2-1 with managers is good at 86 per cent and up 13 points from 2019 and plus 6 points compared with other local councils
66 per cent of staff would recommend the Council as a good place to work, which is up 6 per cent from 2019
83 per cent of staff understand how their work contributes towards the success of the Council (which is 11 per cent more than 2019 and 15 per cent more than the Local Authority benchmark)
74 per cent of staff feel they have more choice in deciding how they do their work ( + 4 from 2019)
71 per cent agrees that their manager leads by example, 25 per cent increase from 2019.

The Your Voice Matters Staff Survey 2022 was made available to all colleagues across the Council via an online survey emailed to work accounts or a paper survey posted to home addresses.

The survey was live for six weeks and we received a response rate of 55 per cent