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
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
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