An update on the staff forums

This week we started our staff engagement forums with two sessions in Trowbridge attended by over 1,000 staff. It was good to see everybody and there was a real buzz in the room. We have changed the format this year with more interaction, questions and the opportunity for delegates to contribute to some of the big questions we face as an organisation. There is also much less talking to slides from Carolyn and I which is always a good thing. It seemed to work well with lots of positive feedback during and after the sessions. The major theme this year was our employer brand and how we develop this to enable all staff to engage and contribute to our success.

From the floor, the key issues being raised so far include leadership visibility (fully agree), staff behaviour and culture aligned to our behaviours framework (needs to improve in some teams), reward and recognition (how do we do this in the public sector?), IT development (continue to develop our strong offer), internal communications (how do we improve and achieve consistency across the teams?) and our in-year and next years’ budget. 

Speaking about the budget, we outlined our current in year position. This is a projected overspend of £10m, but with plans in place to get this back to around £3.5m so far. So more work required to achieve a balanced position which is vital for setting next year’s budget plan. You will see that we have stopped all non-essential spend and recruitment where it is not aligned to front line “life and limb” service provision. If we can achieve a balanced position by year-end, the gap next year in ’17-18 with planned cuts from central government is £13m. We currently have proposals generated from all services totalling this amount. So a continued tough time in our business. 

As I said at the forums, we must not focus exclusively on budgets and their reductions although these are important for us to set a balanced budget (a legal requirement for local government, but not central government or the NHS). The bottom line is that next year we will have 98.8% of the funding we have this year, so let’s focus on how we spend that in new ways to achieve the better outcomes we seek.

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