Friday, 22 February 2013
Friday 22 February 2013
I wanted to share with you some of the detailed messages from the staff survey that we conducted in October last year. The results are now analysed and published today. Details for each service will be shared over the coming weeks so that we can understand and target our actions to specific areas. I’m pleased to say that 60% of you took part in the 2012 survey – up from 55% in 2011. We have improved our results in all ten sections of the survey this year and our philosophy of continuous improvement across the business is starting to show, something I’m very proud of. Specific improvements are:
Change up 32%
Your role up 4%
Wellbeing & safety up 12%
Reward & recognition up 4%
Communication up 12%
Management & leadership up 10%
Learning & development up 8%
Employee engagement up 19%
Team work up 1%
Customers up 1%
The staff survey was designed using many of the same questions as in previous years so that we could compare results year to year. Employee engagement – a key measure of how engaged our staff are in our business and its objectives – is up by 19% this year. This is a tremendous result. Overall, you are telling us that we need to focus on the following four priorities during 2013:
1. Wiltshire Council employees need to receive more consistent and regular information and, in particular, clarity is needed on why changes are being made by our leadership team.
2. Communication needs to be open and honest in order to give staff confidence in our leaders.
3. The council needs to further develop a culture where respect and recognition is embedded.
4. Wiltshire needs to ensure that it is committed to customer satisfaction and that all our staff are part of this.
As Priorities 1 and 3 were highlighted in the 2011 survey, they remain vital to improving employee engagement. We will prioritise these and redouble our efforts to excel in these important areas. Priority 4, for me is the most important. It’s the very essence of this organisation and why we do what we do for our customers, clients and communities. We need to redouble our efforts to understand what our customers and communities want from us and then to design our systems and services to deliver these reliably and robustly.
I would welcome any feedback on these results personally so please get in touch with your views, observations and comments.
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
Friday, 15 February 2013
Friday 15 February
The last few weeks have all been about finalising the budget for ’13-’14. You will have read the highlights and key messages elsewhere, our Leadership column, The Wire – even the Cabinet papers. In local government, we get a little obsessed with budget setting – I sometimes think that it becomes our sole purpose as an organisation, at least for long periods. Now that it’s out of the way we can think about our next business plan – the one for the period 2013-17. As I keep saying to those attending staff induction sessions, the biggest challenge we face as an organisation over the next four years is not financial, but behavioural (although I am hearing that government will cut our funding again by a further 30-40% over the same period). We need to think and behave very differently to meet this challenge. If we can, then the money will take care of itself.
To illustrate this I wanted to share with you a great article by one of my heroes, Tripp Babbett. Tripp is a systems thinker and perfectly, I think describes the problem we face and the thinking we need to adopt to address it. It would be great to hear your views about this. Please email me...
“The rhyme we all learned as children rings in my ears: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall / All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. I like to use Humpty Dumpty to describe companies that have functionally separated their work. These companies group similar tasks together, which shatters any cohesive workflow. For service industries especially, this can be extremely counterproductive
My British colleagues describe this as “functional specialisms.” I call it the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome. Regardless, the functional separation of work has long penetrated the design of most organizations. Functional separation is in our DNA. Frederick Winslow Taylor and proponents of scientific management introduced this design of breaking work into functions and optimizing the pieces. Scientific management theory was a breakthrough—100 years ago. A century later our work structures are still designed in the same way except that modern organizations grapple with information technology (IT) more often than physical layout.
As organizations attempt to manage the increasing dysfunction of these archaic designs, more analysts are brought in. They know how to break things down into pieces, but like the king’s men, they can’t put things back together again (i.e., synthesize). Ultimately, the pieces don’t work well together, and sometimes they don’t work at all. W. Edwards Deming used the word “suboptimization” to describe the phenomenon.
Organizations increase their costs by clinging to outdated thinking and design. A company’s bottom line takes a direct hit when customers must struggle to navigate through various departments to find answers to their issues. Getting lost in a quagmire of electronic voice routing and speaking to multiple specialists to resolve a single problem makes no sense.
Like an archaeological find waiting to be uncovered, many organizations have buried incidents of some poor sap who called in to get his problem solved. One service organization I know of had a customer who made more than 25 contacts over nine months to get an issue resolved. When customers have to work so hard for service, they begin to look for other hassle-free alternatives.
Some will say this is an accountability issue, that the person who answered the first call should have solved it. However, management is responsible for the work design that prevents a customer from getting her problem solved on the first attempt. Ownership must be built into the design of work itself. Outsourced back offices and other organizational “parts” have become commonplace. Misguided management believes it is saving money with this approach. However, managers fail to realize the effect multiple calls have on customers or the loss in revenue from customers who walk away—and there are many.
Contact centre agents must be able to work problems through to completion, and they need access to resources to do so. Too many agents simply add information to a database and pass the caller on to someone else in the organization.
Although it has been labeled as the glue that holds the pieces together, IT has exacerbated the problem by locking in the waste of a separated work design. My experience has been that IT makes things worse by being poorly designed from the beginning, and the problem is aggravated every time a new functional patch is added.
Looking at software development, we can see the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome at work there, too. The process has been fragmented. Business analysts write requirements, developers do the coding, testers make sure it works (whatever “it” is), and then we need project managers to put a plan together so that deadlines are met. The result is cost overruns and software that doesn’t enable the work. The work design is ignored in favour of schedules and managing scope and costs.
Functional separation is one reason why process improvement is so futile. The problems that need to be tackled by organizations are systemic and not process-related. Today’s organizational problems are larger—and strangely, much simpler—than we make them out to be. Trying to solve them by separation of work is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.”
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
To illustrate this I wanted to share with you a great article by one of my heroes, Tripp Babbett. Tripp is a systems thinker and perfectly, I think describes the problem we face and the thinking we need to adopt to address it. It would be great to hear your views about this. Please email me...
“The rhyme we all learned as children rings in my ears: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall / All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. I like to use Humpty Dumpty to describe companies that have functionally separated their work. These companies group similar tasks together, which shatters any cohesive workflow. For service industries especially, this can be extremely counterproductive
My British colleagues describe this as “functional specialisms.” I call it the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome. Regardless, the functional separation of work has long penetrated the design of most organizations. Functional separation is in our DNA. Frederick Winslow Taylor and proponents of scientific management introduced this design of breaking work into functions and optimizing the pieces. Scientific management theory was a breakthrough—100 years ago. A century later our work structures are still designed in the same way except that modern organizations grapple with information technology (IT) more often than physical layout.
As organizations attempt to manage the increasing dysfunction of these archaic designs, more analysts are brought in. They know how to break things down into pieces, but like the king’s men, they can’t put things back together again (i.e., synthesize). Ultimately, the pieces don’t work well together, and sometimes they don’t work at all. W. Edwards Deming used the word “suboptimization” to describe the phenomenon.
Organizations increase their costs by clinging to outdated thinking and design. A company’s bottom line takes a direct hit when customers must struggle to navigate through various departments to find answers to their issues. Getting lost in a quagmire of electronic voice routing and speaking to multiple specialists to resolve a single problem makes no sense.
Like an archaeological find waiting to be uncovered, many organizations have buried incidents of some poor sap who called in to get his problem solved. One service organization I know of had a customer who made more than 25 contacts over nine months to get an issue resolved. When customers have to work so hard for service, they begin to look for other hassle-free alternatives.
Some will say this is an accountability issue, that the person who answered the first call should have solved it. However, management is responsible for the work design that prevents a customer from getting her problem solved on the first attempt. Ownership must be built into the design of work itself. Outsourced back offices and other organizational “parts” have become commonplace. Misguided management believes it is saving money with this approach. However, managers fail to realize the effect multiple calls have on customers or the loss in revenue from customers who walk away—and there are many.
Contact centre agents must be able to work problems through to completion, and they need access to resources to do so. Too many agents simply add information to a database and pass the caller on to someone else in the organization.
Although it has been labeled as the glue that holds the pieces together, IT has exacerbated the problem by locking in the waste of a separated work design. My experience has been that IT makes things worse by being poorly designed from the beginning, and the problem is aggravated every time a new functional patch is added.
Looking at software development, we can see the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome at work there, too. The process has been fragmented. Business analysts write requirements, developers do the coding, testers make sure it works (whatever “it” is), and then we need project managers to put a plan together so that deadlines are met. The result is cost overruns and software that doesn’t enable the work. The work design is ignored in favour of schedules and managing scope and costs.
Functional separation is one reason why process improvement is so futile. The problems that need to be tackled by organizations are systemic and not process-related. Today’s organizational problems are larger—and strangely, much simpler—than we make them out to be. Trying to solve them by separation of work is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.”
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
Monday, 4 February 2013
I read this fantastic article over the weekend on the website http://thinkpurpose.com/2013/02/03/purposeful-parts/. It struck such a chord with me that I wanted to share it with you in full. For me it describes very simply some of the dynamics I observe in our own organisation where different parts, departments or teams compete with each other for the same space. As they compete, anger and frustration rises until sometimes we lose sight of our overarching organisational vision – to create stronger and more resilient communities in Wiltshire.
Organisms and organisations are systems that usually have purposes of their own. However, the parts of an organism (i.e., hearts, lungs, brain) do not have purposes of their own, but the parts of an organisation do.
An organisation with purposeful parts almost inevitably generates internal conflict.
An organisation is a system whose major deficiencies arise from the ways its parts interact, not from their actions taken separately. This is a basic premise of systems thinking as described by Ackoff!.
Doing different things does not necessarily mean having different purposes.
Having different purposes is a sign that everyone’s lost sight of the customer. The real one that pays everybody’s wages.
Common symptoms include frequently getting annoyed at another part of an organisation about the same things.
I used to work in an organisation where another part of it was commonly called “s***bags”. Their real name was “Sales”.
Sales thought that the part I worked in had the purpose of cancelling sales before they were fulfilled with the customer. My part thought that Sales had a purpose of “slamming” or putting as many sales, wanted or unwanted, onto customers accounts as they could to maximise bonus.
We were both right. Sales often oversold customers with inappropriate products, as they were monitored and rewarded on sales. More = better.
We often did delight in cancelling sales on the slightest pretence, over zealous because we resented cleaning up the after-sales mess that Sales often left behind them.
We were both reacting to system conditions, creating de facto purposes that worked against the customer, and getting paid for it from the money that came from the customer.
There’s only one loser in all this, and that person sadly is almost always the customer.
Tackling the issue described above is the biggest challenge we face in this organisation over the next four years – far bigger than the financial challenge that we face from central government.
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
Organisms and organisations are systems that usually have purposes of their own. However, the parts of an organism (i.e., hearts, lungs, brain) do not have purposes of their own, but the parts of an organisation do.
An organisation with purposeful parts almost inevitably generates internal conflict.
An organisation is a system whose major deficiencies arise from the ways its parts interact, not from their actions taken separately. This is a basic premise of systems thinking as described by Ackoff!.
- What part of an organisation are you in?
- What’s its purpose?
- Think of another part of your organisation.
- What’s its purpose?
- Same or different?
Doing different things does not necessarily mean having different purposes.
Having different purposes is a sign that everyone’s lost sight of the customer. The real one that pays everybody’s wages.
Common symptoms include frequently getting annoyed at another part of an organisation about the same things.
I used to work in an organisation where another part of it was commonly called “s***bags”. Their real name was “Sales”.
Sales thought that the part I worked in had the purpose of cancelling sales before they were fulfilled with the customer. My part thought that Sales had a purpose of “slamming” or putting as many sales, wanted or unwanted, onto customers accounts as they could to maximise bonus.
We often did delight in cancelling sales on the slightest pretence, over zealous because we resented cleaning up the after-sales mess that Sales often left behind them.
We were both reacting to system conditions, creating de facto purposes that worked against the customer, and getting paid for it from the money that came from the customer.
There’s only one loser in all this, and that person sadly is almost always the customer.
Tackling the issue described above is the biggest challenge we face in this organisation over the next four years – far bigger than the financial challenge that we face from central government.
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
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