The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) employs over 75,000 people, encompassing a full spectrum of roles, from policy advisers to prison officers and court ushers.
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, the MoJ had begun to modernise its working practices, trimming office space at its Whitehall headquarters and offering remote working to selected job functions.
Since the pandemic struck last March, the pace of this modernisation has increased, and one of the most crucial aspects is a landmark wellbeing drive spearheaded by Becky Thoseby, who was recruited just a couple of months before lockdown.
Becky, head of workplace wellbeing at the MoJ, describes how she and her team have protected employee wellbeing during the pandemic, and the excellent results they have already achieved.
Assessing the challenge
At the start of 2020, the MoJ took the landmark step of merging wellbeing and diversity under a wider umbrella, emphasising the importance of wellbeing to an inclusive culture. Becky Thoseby was recruited from the Department for Transport to oversee this transition in the wellbeing space.

“The MoJ made a very conscious decision when my role was created to place it within the diversity and inclusion team,” she recalls. “That was one of the reasons I wanted to take the job, because I think that’s what wellbeing is about, too. Where an organisation places the wellbeing function says a lot about what they think it’s for.
“At the MoJ we take a person-centred approach to inclusion and wellbeing. This approach strives to make sure everyone in the organisation feels like they belong and that they can thrive as a result. It’s moving away from an issue-focused approach towards a person-focused approach. In the wellbeing space, this means treating every employee as an individual with their own unique package of needs, not defined by any single characteristic or issue.
“If you’re going through menopause, for example, that’s not the label we stick on you and we can only see you through that lens. You might be experiencing menopause but you also might be a carer. You might have a financial challenge you’re working with. You might have certain circumstances that are causing difficulties. And all of those things will be interacting.
“We look at the person rather than the condition. That means we can use organisational resources better and it means people feel like an individual, rather than someone being put into a homogeneous group.”

Empowering departments to achieve success
Due to the nature of many employees’ roles, the MoJ has had to retain a significant workplace presence during the pandemic. Around 70% of departmental staff have attended a workplace over the past 16 months, a figure which will seem gargantuan to many private-sector companies.
However the wellbeing team has also placed particular emphasis on its approach to remote working, building a strategy that ensures staff in high-powered, often high-pressure roles do not feel stressed or isolated at home.
The approach adopted by Becky and her team is rooted in the core tenets of the broader wellbeing strategy. Every department, every individual, is completely unique: each individual business unit is empowered to decide for itself how it reaches out to remote staff.