Friday 3 February 2012

The last 10 days or so has been great – really buzzing, all apart from the Second Test which I am still in shock over. We’ll see what today brings the England team.

Last weeks staff awards were terrific. It was great to see nearly 300 staff attend, and some of their stories were humbling indeed. The 2012 awards start again this month so please get your entries in. It makes a big difference to how we all feel during some tough times.

I presented the Planning Service Transformation Programme to Cabinet Liaison earlier this week. This is a very readable document that summarises all of our plans for the development of the service over the next 12 months or so including some radical ideas to accelerate development of our culture and behaviours work which I shall personally lead with Brad. We are getting all the staff together next week – some 160 or so – to share and discuss this with them and most importantly to get their input into the future direction of the service. This is exciting and Cabinet fully indorsed the plan developed by Brad and his team.

We completed the staff forums yesterday in Chippenham. We’ve met well over 2,500 people over the last few weeks from across the county. It has been a privilege to see such engaged staff and listen to their observations and questions about how we become an even better organisation delivering with our communities. So many great ideas. The big issue that I have heard is that of inter-team communication; service X knowing and understanding what service Y is doing and why. We need to think very had about how we address this. It’s all about connecting people I think. We’ll have to come up with novel and effective ways of encouraging this at a time when people are very busy. Twitter anybody?

Whilst at Chippenham yesterday we held our first hub session for managers and staff based in the locality. It was a great conversation about many subjects and so good to spend some quality time with front line staff. I am really looking forward to these weekly sessions in the hubs. If you would like to come along then please contact that communications team and they can let you know dates and times. It’s very informal!

I am spending all day today with the HR team working on the development plan for people throughout the organisation and the next steps on our culture change journey. I find this stuff fascinating and so important as it will be the work that starts to deliver on many of the comments, questions and observations that have come out of the staff forums over the last month or so. Watch this space for updates.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand. Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again in a week or so.

Carlton