14 June 2011

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

Good morning everybody on this bright and sunny day. I’m looking forward to going to see the first day of the second test against Sri Lanka tomorrow at Lords, although I haven’t quite recovered from our victory on Monday at Cardiff. Exciting times for us cricket lovers...

I visited Google at their central London Office on Tuesday. I wanted so see some of their latest office applications in practice and discuss the opportunities that technology like this could offer us in Wiltshire. The latest generation of email and applications such as spreadsheets and word processors can all be based on the web which means we don’t have to pay for expensive software on every personal computer. The opportunities for us are huge. If we adopted such technology, we could dramatically reduce the costs of ICT provision to the organisation – freeing up money for use on other front line priorities in the Business Plan. Watch this space...

Today I met with the managers of our new team – Transformation & Resources at our monthly Departmental Leadership Team (DLT) Meeting. I took the team through the set up and management planning arrangements for the new team. We covered the following areas for the new team: purpose, vision, objectives, people, structure, governance, budget, methods and models and communications. I have asked that managers to share this information with you and discuss it in your team meetings. This is important because I want all our staff to have the opportunity to shape this moving forward. If you want me to come along to your team meetings to share this with you then please just ask.

The biggest challenge we face as a new team is to explore the alternative delivery models that we might pursue in the future. This is more complex than the traditional in-house or out-source alternatives. The government are keen that we look at other models based around social enterprise principles such as mutual’s (for example, the John Lewis Partnership which is not owned by shareholders, but is owned by its employees). We will be getting into these and other options over the coming months to evaluate the potential benefits or otherwise for the citizens of Wiltshire.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton

Friday 20 May 2011

I hope you will have seen the communication on the Electric Wire today outlining some changes of roles and responsibilities of senior management. These are designed to ensure we maximise delivery of our ambitious Business Plan over the next two years. The key changes are as follows:

• The two statutory officers, legal and finance (incl. procurement) together with their teams are moving from resources to work to the chief executive. This creates capacity for:

• A new team leading on all corporate programmes and transformation, specifically our work on systems thinking and Campuses And Operational Development (CAOD), all asset management and technology. The new team, called transformation and resources comes into effect immediately. It will have three service directors: business services (shared services, customer services, ICT and property); HR & OD; and transformation (programmes, systems thinking, CAOD, asset management, technology)
• Housing will transfer to community services to maximise the opportunities and synergies with adult care
• Performance will be combined with policy and partnerships to ensure we integrate these roles and will move to Carolyn Godfrey.

These changes are important and will ensure we are focused on delivering the key elements of the Business Plan. Business transformation through people, systems and organisation is my passion, so these changes are very exciting for me personally. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into this agenda over the coming years.

The new leadership team has already had a number of planning sessions with our Cabinet and portfolio holders to agree the set up of the new team, objectives, and how we will run the programmes and activities. Service directors will share these plans with you all over the coming weeks. The important aspect to communicate now is that we shall run a single, co-ordinated transformation programme. This will ensure all activity is joined up and focused on the key political objectives in the Business Plan.

The new programme office will have a key role. We have well over 300 projects and programmes underway across the organisation at present and these need to be brought together in a coherent way to ensure we maximise success, minimise risk and ensure a return on our investment. This is an exciting time for the authority as we strive to improve outcomes for customers across the organisation. A co-ordinated programme will enable us to achieve this in a way which reduces duplication and maximises outcomes.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton

Thursday 5 May

First off my apologies for not blogging for a while. I took the opportunity to take some time off between Easter and this week. I waited for my invitation to the wedding but it never came so I spent a whole day watching it on telly with the family. And tremendous it was too.

This week has been dominated by the AV referendum for me. I am performing my usual duties as deputy returning officer (counting officer for a referendum) so it’s been a week of planning, checking, rehearsing and getting ready for a very late night tonight and a long day tomorrow. In my patch we will be taking in 87 ballot boxes tonight. These will be sorted ahead of an early start tomorrow when we will start the verification (counting the number of ballot papers in each box against the number of votes cast) before we start the count for real tomorrow afternoon at 4pm. It should be a fun couple of days...

I chaired the Procurement Programme Board yesterday. We’re making excellent progress towards meeting our Business Plan financial targets. We set ourselves a first year target of saving £9 million and to date we have opportunity assessments totalling nearly £13 million. We’re now firmly in the delivery phase to ensure we get the cash in month-by-month to support our budget position.

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again next week.
Carlton

Friday 15 April

Hello all. At our recent team day, we had so many questions that I only had time to answer about 75% of them. I promised answers to the others in my blog so here we go. Thanks for reading and speak again next week. Carlton

1. Why haven’t we got a Financial Director on CLT? It makes like extra hard for us finance bods.

The Finance Director has sat on CLT for the last six months, along with the Solicitor to the Council, HR Director and Communications Director. 2. Why do we need to go through the service desk to get added / removed from email meeting lists? What a waste of their time. Let us do it ourselves!

Good point. This is being changed to make the owner of the list the person who can change the list rather that ICT.

3. By Blocking facebook and other entertainment websites at work – it is like saying do you don’t trust all of your staff to be responsible. Please respond to this accusation.

Accusations shouldn’t be part of our culture or behaviour. We blocked Facebook and other social networking sites purely because their use by staff was slowing down other critical applications such as Carefirst. This is because our ICT infrastructure has insufficient bandwidth to cope with the download demand. As soon as this infrastructure is upgraded as part of the Work Place Transformation programme, we will reinstate use of these sites. For the record, I am a big supporter of social media and their use in the business for sharing information and communication in general. I don’t see their use as entertainment at work however!

4. IT – 1/ received new laptop – none of the applications ‘ programmes were installed (taken a while to sort) 2/ new phones / windows 7 onsite training would be good support

Thanks and if you could speak with Karen Perrett she will investigate and rectify. We have issued over 700 new laptops and the vast majority have had no issues so it would be good to learn from this example to improve the service.

5. Staff are not coping well with the uncertainty of their future and the changes that are happening. What is being done to help cope with the stress they are experiencing (aside from the coping with uncertain times workshops)

I recognise that some but not all staff are struggling to cope with this and I think I addressed it fully in my opening speech. As well as the two HR workshops, which I encourage people to attend, I urge everybody to keep an eye out for their colleagues – help each other and support each other and above all discuss your concerns within your teams and with your managers. If there are questions or rumours that you have please let me know and I can answer them for you.

6. Can something be done to stop disproportionate working at home on Fridays?

Team leaders and managers are responsible for agreeing with staff if and when they can work from home and also specifying work objectives to be met. This should be balanced across the working week to ensure service continuity, access and communication is optimised. The question seems to infer that when some people work from home they are unavailable to contact. This should never be the case. When working from home, calls should be able to be put through as if that person was in the office. 7. As there is no training budget how can personnel progress in their working career? Plus if staff cannot progress won’t they leave?

There is a full departmental training budget and this is an area that we have not cut as part of the budget challenges we face. Individuals will have developed their own learning and development plans in discussion with their managers as part of their appraisals and these should be used to identify specific training requirements which can then be actioned. 8. Is it true that to raise extra funds for Wiltshire council Barry is being sponsored to run the London marathon (backwards)?

Not as far as I am aware, but that’s a great idea. 9. In view of recent redundancies with more to come it is evident that managers left do not have the necessary guidance or experience to manage and lead their teams. What plans are there to ensure managers are ‘fit to manage’? This is a bit of a sweeping statement – we have some fine and talented managers and leaders across the organisation. For all managers we have the “Management Matters” suite of training and development modules to support their ongoing development and expertise in this area.

10. At a time when many are being made redundant, why do Wiltshire council allow others to get paid but not work full time and also break ‘the rules’ into the bargain?

As a good employer we offer flexible working patterns and part-time working patterns to suit the business needs of the council and individual staff. We are legally obliged to offer such schemes under employment and equalities law. We don’t knowingly allow anybody to break the rules so if you have a specific example in mind please contact your manager or Service Director to raise the issue.

11. A question about the increased workloads to staff by restructuring and redundancies, also lack of skills and experience of staff left to continue the work, leading to increased pressures and stress.

This is a real issue and one for teams and their managers to discuss openly and then address. Workload and staff capacity need to be balanced to ensure levels of pressure on individuals remain manageable and healthy. I would also encourage teams to review their work and processes to simplify and improve what they do. I still see some things happening and ask myself “why do we do that or why don’t we do it in a better or simpler way” This is an opportunity to challenge what we do and the way we do it to tackle the point raised in this question.

12. Now that the reality of redundancies may have hit home to the ostriches, have the unions been re-approached about altering terms and conditions?

The unions and the organisation are engaged in an ongoing dialogue around all staff terms and conditions. Up to this point the unions have been unwilling to consider any changes to staff terms and condition to make budget savings.

13. Re county hall change – was it not a PR disaster with the amount of perfectly good chairs / desks / cupboards thrown into skips – could it not have gone to a charity or be used somewhere else?

There was a lot of spin around this as you might expect when the press are involved. The vast majority of furniture was old, broken in some way and generally not fit for purpose. Such furniture was scrapped. Some other furniture in better shape was passed to other individuals and organisations.

14. “Employees are not entitled to take ‘smoking breaks’ during normal working hours. Employees may smoke in their own lunch breaks . . . . . . .”Can you please advise why this non-productive ‘pastime’ is allowed to continue. If we all went outside 4 or 5 times a day a lot less work would be done?

A tricky question to answer. Some smokers need our help to give up – and some don’t - rather than punishment and attack. Our HR policies in this area are clear and should be followed.

15. If domestic recycling is so important, how come business is not? My local pub, who pay high business rates, would have to pay extra for a glass recycling bin (so they don’t) Their bottles – lots – go into general waste

An interesting question. I shall talk to my friends in the waste service and see what the experts say.

16. Senior managers / corporate team are not as visible as you seem to think. Perhaps an area for improvement?

I definitely agree. All managers need to be more visible. I’d like to engage staff to see what they mean by visibility though. Speaking personally, I don’t have an office, I sit open plan and I spend less that 10% of the week sitting at my desk. At all other times I’m out and about with the teams and the 1100 staff who work in our team. I still feel somewhat invisible though and I’m sure others agree. So I’d like to understand what staff mean by visible leadership, and then we can work together to try and deliver that.