Total Support Usage Audit

Short of time? Read the one-page summary →

What a smaller return looks like: the same report at 150 replies →

Before the figures. A low usage figure is not a verdict on the people who run the support. Any support a person has to ask for by name meets the same limit, however well it is run. Section 4 shows where that limit sits and what can still move it.

Every figure in this report is a group figure. There is no breakdown by department, site or grade, no free text was collected, and no answer can be traced to a person. The two counts above are on the front page so you can weigh everything that follows. The 460 invited is the site headcount agreed before fieldwork, agency staff not included. The employer sent the invitation and two reminders from its own email, with one shared link. People answered on their own phone or computer. Nothing on the form stops one person answering twice, or the link being passed on. Sections 11 and 12 say why, and how small the effect is. Carry one thing through the whole report. The people least likely to reply to this are the same people least likely to use the scheme. That runs one way. So every figure here about usage and willingness is the best case. Your true position is no better than this report says, and probably worse. Do not read any figure here as a middle estimate with room on either side.

SECTION 1The usage figure

Sixteen of the 178 people who replied used the scheme at some point in the year. The other 162 did not. This figure is about the people who answered. It is not a count of your whole workforce. To stretch it to all 460 you would have to assume the 282 who did not reply behave the same way. They almost certainly do not.

A support provider's usage report counts only the people who got in touch, and the line manager and HR route has no usage report at all. This figure covers everyone who replied. That includes people who never show up in a provider report and never would. It is the number this audit exists to produce. It is also more likely to be too flattering than too harsh, for the reason given on the front page.

Kind by kind

Question 10 asked about each kind of support separately, using the names your staff know, over the same twelve months. Every row is a share of all 178 who replied. Each box shows the share, then the number of people.

Why the rows do not add up to 16. Some of the 16 used more than one kind, so the five "used it" counts come to 31. The 9 per cent in the headline counts each person once, whatever they used.

No single kind of support was used by more than eight people, under 5 per cent of those who replied. The line manager and HR route is the best known and still only eight people used it. The app is the least known: 70 per cent did not know it was on offer. Only 26 people, 15 per cent, knew about every kind of support on offer. Adding another kind of support to the list does not move the headline if each one stops at the same place.

SECTION 2The three-way split

One in five of the people you are paying to cover does not know any of it is there. That is a separate problem from the 71 per cent who knew about at least one kind and used none, and it has a separate and much cheaper fix. Most reports give one number for both. Put together like that, you cannot tell them apart.

Whether people would know how to start. Everyone was asked: if you wanted to use it tomorrow, would you know how to start?

Ninety six people said yes, 46 roughly, 36 no. Eight in ten could find their way in. The 20 per cent who could not is the same size as the 20 per cent above who did not know any of it existed. This audit never crosses one question with another, so it cannot say they are the same people. The size matches, and the fix is the same either way: one named way in, on the same page as the offer. This is why section 10 reads the problem as a decision people have made, not a signpost they have missed.

SECTION 3Why not. What stops people

Asked of the 162 people who replied but did not use the scheme. One answer each.

Two columns need a word of explanation. What fixes it is the cheapest thing that would move that row. Who owns it says whether you can fix it yourself or whether the design of the scheme is the problem. Where it says the model, it means the way the help is built: you have to ask a person for it, by name. No wording change alters that.

Percentages are rounded and are shares of the 162. The eight printed rows come to 96 per cent, or 155 people. The folded row is the other 4 per cent, seven people, split between two reasons that are too small to print on their own.

On the two privacy rows. Older versions of this question asked one thing: were you confident it would stay private. That bundles two worries that need opposite answers. One person is thinking about a record with their name on it. The next is thinking about having to tell a manager, and would not care if nothing were written down at all. They are asked separately here, and section 10 shows why that matters.

Sources for this section. Barrier categories adapted from the Barriers to Access to Care Evaluation, Clement and colleagues, King’s College London, 2012. Awareness figure from HCML, 2024, an employee survey run with Censuswide among 503 employees at companies with 50 or more staff. Self-reliance and difficulty acknowledging one’s own need are reported as leading barriers to seeking help in Gulliver, Griffiths and Christensen, 2010. The categories are an adaptation and carry none of the original instrument’s validation.

SECTION 4The ceiling. How far this can go

Everyone was asked how likely they would be to use the scheme if something outside work started affecting their work. Scored 1 to 10.

Group average: 3.4 out of 10.

This is the forward-looking number, and the most useful one in the report. Today 9 per cent use it. What people say they would do tops out at 17 per cent. People always say they will do more than they go on to do.

In plain terms: advertising it better moves the figure from 9 per cent up towards a limit somewhere under 17 per cent. That limit is not a mark on how this has been run. It is built into the design. Any scheme a person has to ask for by name meets the same wall, in any organisation, because the people outside it are staying outside the asking rather than the service. Eight in ten here did not say they would come forward. Half said they were unlikely to. The rest said they did not know, which is a different answer and is not counted as a yes here.

SECTION 5Capacity profile

Seven measures, scored 1 to 10 for the previous two weeks. Each bar is the average of everyone who replied, lowest first. Two of these need a word. Reset between demands means switching off between one task and the next, and at the end of the day. Perceived capacity means how much they felt able to take on.

The shape matters more than the level. Output quality is the highest score. Reset between demands is the lowest, 2.6 points below it. Among the people who replied, the work a manager can see is holding up. The scores a manager cannot see are the low ones. This audit cannot say whether that gap leads to a fall in results. Your repeat audit can show whether it widens.

Where these seven come from. They are PRC’s own items, not a published instrument, and they are not presented as one. Each maps to a construct with a validated measure behind it, and the two-week window is the one those measures use. Output quality and perceived capacity sit closest to the output demands scale of the Work Limitations Questionnaire, Lerner and colleagues, 2001, which covers quantity, quality and timeliness of completed work. Focus and concentration sits closest to that instrument’s mental and interpersonal demands scale. Energy management and presence in meetings correspond to vigour and absorption in the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, Schaufeli, Bakker and Salanova, 2006, validated across 14,521 respondents in ten countries. Reset between demands corresponds to psychological detachment in Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007, validated on 930 respondents. Decision confidence has the least outside backing of the seven and is reported here as a PRC item only. Close is not the same as identical: these are shorter, plainer items answered on a different scale, so they are comparable against your own repeat audit and against nothing else. Section 6 carries the one item that has been checked against outside records.

Averages hide the spread. On reset between demands, 34 per cent of those who replied scored 3 or below. On output quality, only 11 per cent did.

SECTION 6Present, but not producing

Absence is the number you already hold. The 22 per cent is the one you do not. Those people were at work. They were counted as at work. They rated their own output at half or less.

This question is taken word for word from the Health and Work Performance Questionnaire, Kessler and colleagues, 2003. It asks people to rate their own work over the past four weeks. Published studies have checked those answers against payroll records and against what managers said. It is the only question in this audit that has been checked that way. It is here so that one figure in the report can be compared with the world outside it. Used with written permission from Prof Ronald Kessler at Harvard Medical School, granted 13 September 2026. The published wording is used unaltered.

Where it starts outside work. Question 21 asks, over the same four weeks: on how many of the days you worked did something outside work make it harder to do your job?

One hundred and seven people said none, 44 a few days, 15 about half, 7 most days and 5 every day. So 71 people, 40 per cent of everyone who replied, said something outside work made their job harder on at least a few days last month. Twenty seven of them said it was half their working days or more.

Set that beside section 1. Nine per cent used any of the support in the whole year. Forty per cent had something outside work getting into their job in a single month. The audit never crosses one question with another, so it cannot say how far those two groups overlap, and the two figures cover different periods. The arithmetic does not need them crossed, though. Only 16 people used any of the support at all. So at least 55 of the 71 had something outside work getting into their job and had not used any of it all year.

SECTION 7Demand and control

Two questions: how heavy the demands were, and how much control people had over how and when they worked. Everyone above the group average counts as high, everyone below it as low.

Average demand 7.6. Average control 4.8. The 41 per cent in the top left is the group Karasek picked out in 1979 as the one under strain. That finding has held up since. The 22 per cent next to them carry the same load but can choose how and when to handle it. They are not the same group. Do not treat the two as one.

SECTION 8Whether people can say so

Asking for help on a task scores 6.1. Saying you are working at less than your best scores 3.9. The gap between those two lines is the finding. People here can ask for practical help. They cannot say they are struggling. Fifty people in section 3 gave exactly that as their reason for not using the scheme.

How comfortable people were telling a line manager their output had dropped: average 4.6. People who manage others scored 5.9. People who do not scored 4.2. Both groups had more than 30 replies, so both are printed.

SECTION 9Where the gap sits

Why use of the scheme is not split here. Sixteen people in the whole sample used it. Split four ways that is about four people a row, below the five-person floor in section 12, so it is not reported and the column is not printed. The floors in this report are applied to this report. Every row above rests on at least 30 replies, and no figure printed above stands for fewer than five people, which is why these four rows can be printed at all.

Nearly half the shift and field staff who replied did not know the scheme existed. They are also the group that replied least. So the real figure is likely to be worse, not better. Intranet, email and induction packs reach the people who sit at a desk. This table is what they miss everywhere else.

The same two figures by how long people have worked here. Each band cleared thirty replies on its own, so all four are printed.

Why a flat table is printed. Every band sits within two points of every other, and a return of this size cannot tell two points from noise. It is printed anyway, for two reasons. The agreement says this breakdown is reported wherever every band clears thirty, and it does. And flat is a finding. The gap does not sit with new starters who have not been told yet, and it does not sit with long servers who stopped listening. It is the same at every length of service, which means the induction pack is not the fix and neither is a reminder to the old hands. Use of the scheme is not split here for the reason given above the table.

SECTION 10Reading it all together

A workforce can be stuck in one of four ways. Yours is stuck in one of them, with a bit of a second.

SECTION 11What this report does not tell you

• Every figure here comes from what people said about themselves. What people say about their work and what is measured about their work are linked. They are not the same thing.
• The 178 who replied are not a random slice. They differ from the 282 who did not, and not at random. The reasons people do not reply are the same reasons people do not use the scheme. So the tilt runs one way all the way through. Treat every figure in sections 1, 2, 3, 4 and 9 as the best your position could be, not the middle of it. This is the single most important limit on the report and it is why the counts are on the front page.
• No outside body has tested the seven capacity measures. They hold together, and you can compare them with your own next audit. They are not a medical test.
• This audit says nothing about any one person. No question in it looks for a condition or a diagnosis, and none was meant to. That is deliberate.
• The kind-by-kind figures in section 1 are for the whole organisation only. They are never broken down by length of service, managing people or work pattern, because splitting five kinds of support three ways makes groups small enough to point at a person.
• "Did not know it was on offer" can also mean a person did not recognise the name. That is why each line uses the name your staff know. If the name on the line is not the one people use, that row reads worse than the truth.
• Question 21 counts how many people say something outside work made their job harder. It does not ask what, and it is never crossed with any other question. People tell a survey their employer commissioned less about home than is true, so treat the 40 per cent as the least it could be.
• This report is evidence toward your work-related stress risk assessment. It is not that assessment. It covers demands, control and support. It does not cover relationships, role or change, the other three areas HSE names.
• One audit tells you where you are. It cannot tell you which way you are moving. The second one does that.
• We did not ask what you pay for your current scheme, and we do not know. If it came bundled with an insurance policy and has no separate price, nothing in this report depends on that.
• Someone could answer twice, or pass the link to a person outside the organisation. The form cannot rule either out without recording who is answering, which it never does. Someone outside has little reason to answer 24 questions about an employer they do not work for. One extra answer among the 178 moves any figure here by less than one point. Treat this as a small limit, not as none.

SECTION 12How the audit was run

Sources. Kessler et al., 2003 and 2004, performance item. Karasek, 1979, demand and control. Clement et al., 2012, barrier categories, adapted. Edmondson, 1999, conditions items, adapted. Lerner et al., 2001, Schaufeli et al., 2006 and Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007, the constructs the seven measures correspond to. Adapted items carry none of the original instruments’ validation.

BACK PAGEWhere this report sits in your stress risk assessment

Employers have a legal duty to assess the risk of work-related stress and act on it. HSE sets out six areas to cover. ISO 45003, the international guidance on psychosocial risk, groups the same kinds of risk under three headings and names worker surveys as one way to find them. This page shows where this report gives you evidence toward that work, and where it does not.

Evidence toward, not the assessment itself. This report does not meet the HSE Management Standards or ISO 45003 on its own, and PRC Workforce is not certified against either. Use it alongside your absence and turnover records and whatever else your assessment already draws on.