14 June 2011

I want to talk about work today – or more specifically how much of it we have to do in our teams. We’re a high performing team – because of all of you – and as with all high performing teams we can always analyse our current situation and learn together to improve things.

Our working lives in local government generally and specifically for us at Wiltshire Council are tough for all at the moment. We have less people in our teams and the work to be done remains largely the same. This means fewer people are having to work harder to meet our business objectives. The result of this is that we’re getting tired and we’re struggling sometimes to meet our customers' needs. I want to acknowledge that this is a fact of life – right across the public sector – and ask you to talk about this in your teams. Be open, acknowledge this and don’t hide or ignore it.

Whilst we work at this level of intensity, we will make the occasional mistake. I would ask you all to tell us when it goes wrong and we’ll support you to address the issue and ensure we minimise it happening again.

Unfortunately this trend is going to continue. The speed of change in the public sector is a reality and I think it will, and needs to increase. We have to find new and innovative ways of delivering increased value for our customers in more cost-effective ways. The way to thrive (and survive) in this new world of change is to embrace it and seek to influence it by engaging with it and driving it ourselves. This means all of us, not just managers and leaders.

The first step on this journey is to be honest about how work is at the moment; how we feel about it and start to discuss what we might do to make it work better for all of us. We need your ideas to improve things; what could we do better? What could we stop doing because it adds little or no value? How might we do something differently to achieve the objectives we seek?. It would be good at this point to also reflect on the results of the staff survey. What actions do we need to put in place in response to the survey to make our work better for our staff and therefore more effective for our customers? I encourage you to be bold and innovative here – let your imaginations run...

Please discuss these questions with your colleagues; take them into your team meetings and come up with a list of ten things, however small, that would improve the way your work works for you and your customers.

Please share these ideas with me and your Service Directors so that we can focus on helping to implement them quickly. That way we’ll thrive as a team...

Thanks for reading.

Carlton

Good morning everybody on this bright and sunny day. I’m looking forward to going to see the first day of the second test against Sri Lanka tomorrow at Lords, although I haven’t quite recovered from our victory on Monday at Cardiff. Exciting times for us cricket lovers...

I visited Google at their central London Office on Tuesday. I wanted so see some of their latest office applications in practice and discuss the opportunities that technology like this could offer us in Wiltshire. The latest generation of email and applications such as spreadsheets and word processors can all be based on the web which means we don’t have to pay for expensive software on every personal computer. The opportunities for us are huge. If we adopted such technology, we could dramatically reduce the costs of ICT provision to the organisation – freeing up money for use on other front line priorities in the Business Plan. Watch this space...

Today I met with the managers of our new team – Transformation & Resources at our monthly Departmental Leadership Team (DLT) Meeting. I took the team through the set up and management planning arrangements for the new team. We covered the following areas for the new team: purpose, vision, objectives, people, structure, governance, budget, methods and models and communications. I have asked that managers to share this information with you and discuss it in your team meetings. This is important because I want all our staff to have the opportunity to shape this moving forward. If you want me to come along to your team meetings to share this with you then please just ask.

The biggest challenge we face as a new team is to explore the alternative delivery models that we might pursue in the future. This is more complex than the traditional in-house or out-source alternatives. The government are keen that we look at other models based around social enterprise principles such as mutual’s (for example, the John Lewis Partnership which is not owned by shareholders, but is owned by its employees). We will be getting into these and other options over the coming months to evaluate the potential benefits or otherwise for the citizens of Wiltshire.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton