Friday 15 April

Hello all. At our recent team day, we had so many questions that I only had time to answer about 75% of them. I promised answers to the others in my blog so here we go. Thanks for reading and speak again next week. Carlton

1. Why haven’t we got a Financial Director on CLT? It makes like extra hard for us finance bods.

The Finance Director has sat on CLT for the last six months, along with the Solicitor to the Council, HR Director and Communications Director. 2. Why do we need to go through the service desk to get added / removed from email meeting lists? What a waste of their time. Let us do it ourselves!

Good point. This is being changed to make the owner of the list the person who can change the list rather that ICT.

3. By Blocking facebook and other entertainment websites at work – it is like saying do you don’t trust all of your staff to be responsible. Please respond to this accusation.

Accusations shouldn’t be part of our culture or behaviour. We blocked Facebook and other social networking sites purely because their use by staff was slowing down other critical applications such as Carefirst. This is because our ICT infrastructure has insufficient bandwidth to cope with the download demand. As soon as this infrastructure is upgraded as part of the Work Place Transformation programme, we will reinstate use of these sites. For the record, I am a big supporter of social media and their use in the business for sharing information and communication in general. I don’t see their use as entertainment at work however!

4. IT – 1/ received new laptop – none of the applications ‘ programmes were installed (taken a while to sort) 2/ new phones / windows 7 onsite training would be good support

Thanks and if you could speak with Karen Perrett she will investigate and rectify. We have issued over 700 new laptops and the vast majority have had no issues so it would be good to learn from this example to improve the service.

5. Staff are not coping well with the uncertainty of their future and the changes that are happening. What is being done to help cope with the stress they are experiencing (aside from the coping with uncertain times workshops)

I recognise that some but not all staff are struggling to cope with this and I think I addressed it fully in my opening speech. As well as the two HR workshops, which I encourage people to attend, I urge everybody to keep an eye out for their colleagues – help each other and support each other and above all discuss your concerns within your teams and with your managers. If there are questions or rumours that you have please let me know and I can answer them for you.

6. Can something be done to stop disproportionate working at home on Fridays?

Team leaders and managers are responsible for agreeing with staff if and when they can work from home and also specifying work objectives to be met. This should be balanced across the working week to ensure service continuity, access and communication is optimised. The question seems to infer that when some people work from home they are unavailable to contact. This should never be the case. When working from home, calls should be able to be put through as if that person was in the office. 7. As there is no training budget how can personnel progress in their working career? Plus if staff cannot progress won’t they leave?

There is a full departmental training budget and this is an area that we have not cut as part of the budget challenges we face. Individuals will have developed their own learning and development plans in discussion with their managers as part of their appraisals and these should be used to identify specific training requirements which can then be actioned. 8. Is it true that to raise extra funds for Wiltshire council Barry is being sponsored to run the London marathon (backwards)?

Not as far as I am aware, but that’s a great idea. 9. In view of recent redundancies with more to come it is evident that managers left do not have the necessary guidance or experience to manage and lead their teams. What plans are there to ensure managers are ‘fit to manage’? This is a bit of a sweeping statement – we have some fine and talented managers and leaders across the organisation. For all managers we have the “Management Matters” suite of training and development modules to support their ongoing development and expertise in this area.

10. At a time when many are being made redundant, why do Wiltshire council allow others to get paid but not work full time and also break ‘the rules’ into the bargain?

As a good employer we offer flexible working patterns and part-time working patterns to suit the business needs of the council and individual staff. We are legally obliged to offer such schemes under employment and equalities law. We don’t knowingly allow anybody to break the rules so if you have a specific example in mind please contact your manager or Service Director to raise the issue.

11. A question about the increased workloads to staff by restructuring and redundancies, also lack of skills and experience of staff left to continue the work, leading to increased pressures and stress.

This is a real issue and one for teams and their managers to discuss openly and then address. Workload and staff capacity need to be balanced to ensure levels of pressure on individuals remain manageable and healthy. I would also encourage teams to review their work and processes to simplify and improve what they do. I still see some things happening and ask myself “why do we do that or why don’t we do it in a better or simpler way” This is an opportunity to challenge what we do and the way we do it to tackle the point raised in this question.

12. Now that the reality of redundancies may have hit home to the ostriches, have the unions been re-approached about altering terms and conditions?

The unions and the organisation are engaged in an ongoing dialogue around all staff terms and conditions. Up to this point the unions have been unwilling to consider any changes to staff terms and condition to make budget savings.

13. Re county hall change – was it not a PR disaster with the amount of perfectly good chairs / desks / cupboards thrown into skips – could it not have gone to a charity or be used somewhere else?

There was a lot of spin around this as you might expect when the press are involved. The vast majority of furniture was old, broken in some way and generally not fit for purpose. Such furniture was scrapped. Some other furniture in better shape was passed to other individuals and organisations.

14. “Employees are not entitled to take ‘smoking breaks’ during normal working hours. Employees may smoke in their own lunch breaks . . . . . . .”Can you please advise why this non-productive ‘pastime’ is allowed to continue. If we all went outside 4 or 5 times a day a lot less work would be done?

A tricky question to answer. Some smokers need our help to give up – and some don’t - rather than punishment and attack. Our HR policies in this area are clear and should be followed.

15. If domestic recycling is so important, how come business is not? My local pub, who pay high business rates, would have to pay extra for a glass recycling bin (so they don’t) Their bottles – lots – go into general waste

An interesting question. I shall talk to my friends in the waste service and see what the experts say.

16. Senior managers / corporate team are not as visible as you seem to think. Perhaps an area for improvement?

I definitely agree. All managers need to be more visible. I’d like to engage staff to see what they mean by visibility though. Speaking personally, I don’t have an office, I sit open plan and I spend less that 10% of the week sitting at my desk. At all other times I’m out and about with the teams and the 1100 staff who work in our team. I still feel somewhat invisible though and I’m sure others agree. So I’d like to understand what staff mean by visible leadership, and then we can work together to try and deliver that.