Supporting Staff Through the Cost of Living Crisis

Supporting our staff teams during the cost of living crisis is something that is at the forefront of discussions for many VCSE organisations right now. There is no ‘right’ answer, and everything we do needs to be based on affordability – but I decided to share what we’ve done at Connected Voice in the hope that it might be useful to organisations who are still deciding on their own course of action. Cost of living increases are usually decided annually by our board, who take advice from the management team about affordability and any other contributing factors in that year.

We decided to give a 5% cost of living increase overall. We felt it was important to weight the increase to benefit lower earners more. Therefore we gave a 2.5% increase to base salary to the whole team, and for the other 2.5% we weighted it, so that the highest earner received a total increase of 3.6 %, and the lowest earners 6.3%. We normally award cost of living increases at the beginning of our new financial year on 1st October. We decided to bring this forward to July.

Our NHS contracts have confirmed a 1.7% uplift for future years, and our local authority contracts have no increase confirmed at the moment. We know that a significant increase is unlikely given the financial challenges the local public sector is also facing. So we took the decision to use some of our reserves to support the salary increase. We are fortunate that at the moment our reserves are at a level which allows us to do this, and I appreciate this may not be affordable for all organisations. We discussed whether a one off payment was a more appropriate option, given that many of our contracts and grants are not guaranteed into the future, and we may want to take a different decision in a year’s time. In the end we felt that it was important to make the increase a permanent increase to base salary – to give staff the certainty about pay that they need at this time, and also with a view to supporting staff retention – because we know that recruitment is challenging right now.

In order to come to a decision we talked a lot about it! At team meetings, Staff Council, managers meetings, before discussing with the board. One of the things I found particularly helpful was checking in with VCSE colleagues. I asked a lot of organisations what they were planning to do on cost of living. The responses were diverse, but they all helped to inform our thinking.

The other useful thing we did was to try to look at cost of living support more holistically. We asked staff what else might be useful, and we have put on an energy saving awareness session for staff (delivered by the excellent people at Citizens Advice Gateshead) and we are developing a ‘cost of living resources’ document to signpost people to advice they may need. Hybrid working arrangements mean staff can cut down on fuel bills by doing more meetings online. It feels like the HMRC no taxable rate of 45p per mile for mileage is well overdue a reconsideration! None of this will be enough to take away the serious concerns people will have as we approach autumn and the weather gets colder at the same time that heating bills are due to hike again – but we are doing whatever we can that is within our control during a very difficult time.

Remember, we're here to support your organisation in a variety of ways and our advice services are free to organisations working across Newcastle and Gateshead. If you would like advice around funding or finance planning, get in touch with our Support and Development team - email connect@connectedvoice.org.uk or call 0191 235 7021.

We've also recently created a new Cost of Living Support page on our website, which lists key organisations and services in Newcastle, Gateshead and the North East, as well as some national services.