A good week

It’s been a good week. I’ve been out and about meeting staff in Monkton Park, Corsham and various other locations which I always enjoy. It’s amazing how much you learn about the county and our organisation and what’s working and what isn’t. Whilst celebrating the former we can then get on and tackle the latter.

Yesterday I spent some time with Tim Williams in our customer care team listening to calls. I learned a lot, especially the issues caused by 1471 ring back after one of our officers has called a customer. When the customer dials 1471 and calls us back it goes straight to the customer team who of course have no idea what the original call was for. The people I spoke with yesterday get half a dozen each of these call backs a day which they can’t handle. We’ll have to think about how we can reduce this (failure) demand.

Yesterday I held one of my regular monthly managers meetings – for all team leaders, supervisors, managers, and directors to come together for an hour or so to talk about the big issues. This is open to anybody from any service area so please feel free to join in. I updated everybody on the major issues which the corporate and associate directors are dealing with including our current performance, budget (including next year's £30m reduction challenge) and our current major areas of risk.

We then had some excellent presentations from Rachel Kirby (Police systems thinking work and how this will need to link with housing and social care systems), Julie Seddon (graphical information systems deployment in highways where the new technology has saved over £50,000 this year and improved performance), Jay Gascoigne (our strategic economic plan and major projects that we have just won funding for from central government). We finished with a briefing from Paula Marsh on the upcoming staff survey which starts shortly. It is important that all managers prepare for this; encouraging staff to take part and also communicating what we learned from the last survey in 2012 and what we did about the issues raised.   

I enjoyed the Tour of Britain visit to Trowbridge last week so much that I have redoubled my cycling efforts. I’m now doing 16 kms before work every morning and it’s surprising how good that makes you feel for the day ahead. My legs are screaming a bit though…

Speak again soon. 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.
Carlton