Inland Revenue works proactively to understand and manage risks to our people's health, safety and wellbeing - we want our people to go home healthy and safe every day. The risks to our people include those that can arise from isolated and remote work when visiting customers, driving and risks from COVID-19.
Managing psychosocial risks
One of the most significant risks at Inland Revenue is a failure to manage 'psychosocial' or psychological risks to our people's mental health. These include the negative impacts on our people's wellbeing from encountering offensive customer behaviour or work stresses such as work load or difficult workplace relationships. We've considerably strengthened the controls and initiatives that protect and support our people, including the following.
- We monitor that leaders in our customer business groups are having wellbeing check-in conversations with team members following an interaction with a customer that may have a negative impact on their wellbeing.
- We've incorporated a framework 'Mentally Healthy Work by Design' into our organisation-wide health, safety and wellbeing controls. We can apply it directly to high-risk roles or tasks. For instance, we've used it to review work our people do to close the accounts of deceased customers, and then made improvements to our recruitment process and training for new starters in this area.
- We've given more support and tools to our health and safety representatives around wellbeing to assist them in arranging initiatives on their sites.
- We're introducing a new reporting tool to better track incidents where people are put at risk and the support provided to them, and identify areas where we need to make improvements.
Monitoring how people are doing
Inland Revenue offers an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) to our people—we monitor usage levels, and why people are taking it up, to better understand key risks to health and safety. Use is comparable to other organisations.
907 of our employees sought EAP assistance during the year, which is 18% higher than in 2020–21, and this is good. We have found that our people are generally accessing assistance proactively before their wellbeing and work performance has been affected.
Monitoring illness and work-related injuries
This year, average sick leave was 11.3 days per person, up from 10 days in 2020–21. The number of ACC claims has continued to trend down this year, with 24 accepted claims this year, compared with 29 claims in 2020–21.
The average number of days lost for work-related injuries has increased from 9.02 days per injury in 2020–21 to 29.9 in 2021–22. This is still slightly lower than in 2019–20, when it was 36.37 days per injury. The results for this year are primarily due to 2 of the 9 claims lodged, which amounted to over 100 days in both instances.