PRC WORKFORCE
Northgate Facilities Group. Single site. Fieldwork 4 to 22 August 2026. Report issued 1 September 2026.
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 printed on the front so you can weigh everything that follows. One thing to carry through the whole report: the people least likely to reply to this are the same people least likely to use the provision. That runs one way. Every reach and willingness figure here is therefore the best case. Your true position is no better than this report says, and probably worse. Nothing in it should be read as the middle of a range.
Sixteen of the 178 people who replied used the provision at some point in the year. The other 162 did not. This is a figure about the people who answered, not a headcount of your whole workforce: applying it to all 460 assumes the 282 who did not reply behave the same way, and they almost certainly do not.
Your provider's own utilisation report covers only the people who made contact. This figure covers everyone who replied, including people who never appear in any provider report and never would. It is the number this audit exists to produce, and the direction of its error is known. See the note below.
One in five of the people you pay to cover does not know the cover exists. That is a separate problem from the 71 per cent who knew and did not use it, and it has a separate and much cheaper fix. Reported as one number, as it usually is, the two are indistinguishable.
Asked of the 162 respondents who did not use the provision. One answer each.
| Main reason | Share | People | What fixes it | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Concerned it would change how I am seen at work | 31% | 50 | A route that does not pass through the line manager. Anticipated judgement is not corrected by describing the service differently | You, for the route and the managers. The rest is the model |
| Did not think my situation counted as serious enough | 19% | 31 | Threshold wording, at no cost. Beneath it, a person has to classify themselves as having a problem before they qualify | You, for the wording. The rest is the model |
| Did not know it existed | 17% | 28 | Communications route, physical rather than digital for the groups in section 9 | You, at no cost |
| Would rather deal with things myself | 13% | 21 | Nothing you can do to the current provision. Read it carefully: these people are declining a conversation, not declining help | The model |
| Not confident a record of it would stay private | 6% | 9 | Say where records are held, who can see them and how long they are kept. A paragraph | You, at no cost |
| Did not want to have to tell anyone at work to get it | 4% | 6 | Nothing about records answers this. The worry is the conversation, not the file | You, for the route. The rest is the model |
| Could not find the time | 6% | 10 | Most schemes already run outside office hours. What is reported is time scarcity, inflexible schedules and nowhere private to take a call | You, for time and space. The provider, for access |
| Knew it existed but not how to start | 3% | 5 | One named route, one step, on the same page as the offer | You, at no cost |
| Have not needed it | 1% | 2 | Nothing. Treat a high figure here with caution rather than relief. It is the easiest answer to give | Nobody |
| Tried it before and it did not suit me | 0% | 0 | The only row that would point at the quality of the provision. Nobody selected it | Your provider, if ever above zero |
Percentages are rounded and total 100.
The finding. Forty two people are held up by something they have not been told: that it exists, how to start, or what happens to the records. All three are yours, all three cost nothing, and they are the first three actions in section 10.
Forty two out of 162 is better than most. HCML found only 27 per cent of employees realised a scheme existed at all, so close to three in four did not. On that comparison your communications are working. This is not an organisation that has failed to tell people. It is one that has told them and is still not reaching them.
The other 120 are a different kind of finding. Being seen using it, having to classify yourself as having a problem, preferring to handle things yourself, not believing it is discreet. None of those is a gap in what people know. They are positions already arrived at, and wording does not move them.
Neither does promotion. The most generous published claim for promoting an existing scheme is a relative lift of about 30 per cent. Applied to 4 per cent take-up that is 5.2 per cent, and 94.8 per cent of the workforce is still outside it. That arithmetic is the ceiling on everything in this report that costs nothing.
What moves the 120 is something that asks for no name, no conversation and no admission that anything is wrong, because each of those is the thing they turned down. Section 4 sizes the group. This table shows what it is made of.
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.
Everyone was asked how likely they would be to use the provision if something outside work started affecting their work. Scored 1 to 10.
Group mean: 3.4 out of 10.
This is the forward-looking number and the most commercially useful figure in the report. Current reach is 9 per cent. Stated future intent tops out at 17 per cent, and that is people saying they would probably use it, which always overstates what they actually do.
Read plainly: better advertising of the existing provision would move you from 9 per cent towards a ceiling somewhere below 17 per cent. Further spend on the same model buys you access to that band and no further. Eight in ten of your workforce have told you in advance that they will not present to it whatever you do.
Seven measures, scored 1 to 10 for the previous two weeks, whole workforce, lowest first.
The shape matters more than the level. Output quality is the highest score and reset between demands is the lowest, with 2.6 points between them. Your people are protecting the visible output and paying for it everywhere the organisation cannot see. That pattern is what precedes a drop in the top line rather than what follows it.
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 weakest external anchoring of the seven and is reported here as a PRC item only. Correspondence is not equivalence: 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 is externally calibrated.
Spread, not just averages: 34 per cent scored 3 or below on reset between demands. On output quality, 11 per cent did.
Absence is the number you already hold. The 22 per cent is the one you do not. Those people were at work, were counted as at work, and rated their own output at half or less.
The performance item is the absolute self-rated performance question from the Health and Work Performance Questionnaire, Kessler and colleagues, 2003, asked over a four-week window. It has been calibrated in published work against employer payroll records and supervisor ratings. It is the only item here with that external anchoring, and it is included so that one figure in this report is comparable outside it.
Two questions: how heavy the demands were, and how much control people had over how and when they worked. Split at the group midpoint.
Mean demand 7.6. Mean control 4.8. The 41 per cent in the top left is the group Karasek identified in 1979 as carrying strain, and the finding has held since. The 22 per cent alongside them are under equal load with the discretion to manage it, and are not the same group. Do not treat them as one population.
Separately: 52 per cent said work was still on their mind outside hours most days or every day.
What this is not. This is a description of how the workforce is distributed, not a claim that control cancels out demand. The evidence for that buffering effect is inconsistent and this report does not rely on it.
Asking for help on a task scores 6.1. Saying you are working at less than full capacity scores 3.9. The gap between those two lines is the finding. Practical help is available here. Admitting reduced capacity is not, and 50 people in section 3 gave exactly that as their reason for not using the provision.
Comfort raising a drop in output with a line manager: 4.6 mean. People who manage others scored 5.9. People who do not scored 4.2. Both groups cleared the 30 reply threshold, so both are reported.
| Work pattern | Share of respondents | Used provision | Did not know it existed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mostly on site | 46% | 11% | 16% |
| Hybrid | 33% | 12% | 14% |
| Mostly remote | 9% | 6% | 25% |
| Shift or field based | 12% | 2% | 48% |
Nearly half your shift and field staff did not know the provision existed. They are also the group least represented in the replies, so the real figure is likely to be worse rather than better. If your provision is communicated by intranet, email or an induction pack, this is the arithmetic behind that choice.
Four patterns are possible. Yours is one of them, with a bit of a second.
Eighty per cent know the scheme is there. Most know how to start. Nobody said they had tried it and disliked it. What the figures describe is a workforce that has thought about being seen to use it and decided not to, and that says it would decide the same way again. Nine per cent used it. Seventeen per cent say they would.
This is the one pattern of the four where a better version of the same thing does not help. Anything that asks a person to put their name to a request will reach the same seventeen per cent.
Fifteen people were not confident it would stay private, and the question now separates two quite different worries. Nine were worried about a record of it. Six were worried about having to tell someone at work to get it. That split decides what you do next, and it used to be invisible.
Had the nine been the larger share, the answer would have been cheap: say where the records are held, who can see them, how long they are kept. That is a paragraph, and it would have moved a real number of people.
They are not the larger share. The six worried about telling someone sit alongside the fifty who are worried about how they would be seen, and neither group is asking to be reassured about data. Both are describing the same thing from different angles: to use it, somebody at work finds out. Fifty six people, better than a third of everyone who did not use it.
Forty eight per cent of shift and field staff did not know it existed. That is not a ceiling, it is a letter that never arrived. Cheapest finding in this report and entirely yours.
What we would do, in order.
1. This month, costs nothing. Get word to shift and field staff by something other than email. Expect two to four points of reach on its own.
2. This quarter, costs nothing. Change the threshold wording. Thirty one people said their situation did not count as serious enough. That is how it has been described, not what it is.
3. This quarter, costs nothing. Publish where records are held, who sees them and for how long. Nine people asked for that. It is a paragraph, and it closes their part of it properly.
4. This quarter. Take the line manager out of the route, so nobody has to ask permission to use something they are already entitled to. Then the work behind section 8, because the 3.9 is what holds the rest down.
5. Then, and only then, look at a different way of delivering it. Once one to four are done, fifty six people are still standing where they were, because none of those four changes the thing they objected to. Something nobody has to be told about is the only thing that reaches them. That is what we do, and it is the only line in this report where buying something is the answer.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Instrument | 24 items. Seven capacity measures and one performance item scored numerically, the rest single choice. Nothing to type. |
| Windows | Capacity measures: previous two weeks. Performance and absence: previous four weeks. Provision use: previous twelve months. |
| Fieldwork | 4 to 22 August 2026. One invitation, two reminders. |
| Suppression | No figures below 30 replies overall. No cut reported where either side is below 30. Nothing shown below 5 in any cell. Cuts are reported one at a time and never crossed with each other, because crossing two or three of them produces groups small enough to point at a person even when each one on its own does not. Thirty is the point at which figures can be issued, not the point at which this report is at full strength. Sections 3, 7, 8 and 9 need around a hundred replies to carry any weight. Below that the report reduces to sections 1, 2, 4 and 5, and says so in place of the missing sections rather than printing thin figures. |
| Not collected | Names, email addresses, staff numbers, job titles, department, site, grade, free text, your spend. |
| Repeat | Same 24 items, same windows, twelve months from fieldwork close. Sections 2, 3 and 9 move first. Sections 5 and 8 move slowest. |
Sources. Kessler et al., 2003, 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.