The challenge
‘It was clear that a new approach was needed,’ said Jane, Assistant Director Adult Social Care. ‘We wanted to improve the way our people manage their wellbeing, give them tools to understand and improve their ability to deal with change, and encourage staff to be mindful of each others’ wellbeing.’
How we helped
Working with 100 frontline social workers and mental health professionals over three months, we delivered a comprehensive resilience training programme that:
- Built personal and team resilience skills
- Developed cognitive agility for complex decision-making
- Strengthened social connections and peer support
- Created psychological safety for open wellbeing conversations
- Equipped staff with practical tools for managing compassion fatigue
- Trained Resilience Champions to embed skills long-term
- Developed strength-based supervision approaches
RESULTS THAT CONNECT DIRECTLY TO BUSINESS IMPACT
Worst-performing London Borough → 2nd best in Adult Social Care
Social workers challenges
The demanding nature of their profession makes the development of resilience skills and techniques necessary:
- High caseloads
- Emotional demands
- Compassion fatigue
- Complex decision-making
- Regulatory pressure
- Organisational change )
- Budget constraints
- Public scrutiny
Without resilience skills, burnout is inevitable – impacting both staff wellbeing and service quality.
SUSTAINED IMPACT
Two years after the programme, the impact continues:
- Resilience Champions maintain skills across the team and train new members
- Strength-based supervision template co-created using resilience skills, now used borough-wide
- Open wellbeing culture – “normal to talk about our wellbeing”
- Individual strengths celebrated as standard practice
- Teamwork emphasis embedded in daily practice
- Resilience is now part of their culture – not a one-off intervention
"Challenging targets were overachieved by 10%, and we saw improvements in engagement, talent retention, employee satisfaction and wellbeing. Equating to a financial saving of over £500k per annum and we moved from the worst-performing Borough in London to second-best, achieving Beacon Status."
AWARD WINNING TRANSForMATION
We are also very proud The Public Sector Transformation Awards have awarded the Adult Social Care team from Kingston Council (RBK) a Certificate of Excellence.
Gemma Blunt, Corporate Head of Service Adult Social Care, described how recent improvements had laid the groundwork for this new success:
” We’re so proud of the way everyone contributed to developing the new strength-based service. This has helped change the team’s culture and make it normal to talk about our wellbeing, to celebrate our individual strengths, and remind ourselves of the importance of teamwork.”
Developing champions
We supported the development of resilience champions with six additional team coaching sessions. Two years later, Resilience Champions within the team continue to focus on maintaining everyone’s resilience skills and training new members. The champions have also used the resilience skills to create a strength-based supervision template that’s used across the borough. Resilience is part of their culture.
"Providing the tools our staff need to look after their emotional resilience and create an environment in which people can talk openly about their mental and physical wellbeing has had a really positive impact on everyone."
