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A busy week this one – two visits to Monkton Park, one to London and still a day to go. Good to see so many staff out and about though. This week we published the budget papers detailing plans to balance a difficult budget in ’17-18. This has been the toughest budget so far but of course setting it is the easier part; delivering it is always the real challenge. Even with a recommended council tax rise of 1.99% plus the social care levy of 3%, it leaves us with a gap of £13.3m to fill. We plan to do this through a combination of changes to policy, service delivery, general efficiency, procurement savings (totalling around £10m) and reducing the number of staff posts (£3m). For the latter we will target reductions in vacant posts and agency spend first as we always do.
Last week I got together with the mangers in the services I lead. We spoke about the priorities for this year, agreed the expectations from us all and then I spoke about staff engagement. I had been reading a lot about this over the Christmas period. I read that up to 70% of staff in organisations are disengaged. I am pleased that we don’t have those levels as will be evidenced in the staff survey results that will come out in a couple of weeks. I researched the impact that managers can have on staff engagement and shared what I found with those attending. Here’s what I found:
Some research & data
• 70% of employees say they are disengaged at work (Gallup, 2016)
• Engaged, motivated employees improve bottom line performance
– 31% more productive, 3 times more creative
– 87% less likely to leave
• Most organisations fail to hold managers to account for this
• 70% of motivation is influenced by an employees line manager
• Employees don’t leave jobs, they leave managers. Scary!
Making things worse – the 7 negative or demotivating behaviours
• Making a lot of stupid rules (we need to challenge ourselves here as we have some of these I think; grateful for your feedback)
• Letting accomplishments go unrecognised
• Hiring and promoting the wrong people
• Treating everybody equally
• Tolerating poor performance
• Going back on their commitments
• Being apathetic
Making things better – the 7 positive behaviours
• Follow the Platinum rule (not the golden rule). The golden rule is to treat people as you would want to be treated. The problem here is that we are all different and need to be treated differently! So the platinum rule is to treat people as they wish to be treated.
• Be strong without being harsh
• Remember that communication is a two way street
• Be a role model, not a preacher
• Be transparent
• Be humble
• Take a genuine interest in employees work life balance
Bringing it all together
• If you cultivate the characteristics above and avoid the demotivators, you’ll become the kind of boss that people remember for the rest of their lives. Oh god please let us achieve this in 2017.
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
Can you believe it is already the end of the year? As we approach Christmas and 2016 draws to a close, I want to take the opportunity to thank each and every one of you for your continued hard work, commitment and support this year. Whilst we have faced a few challenges we have achieved so much together.
Thank you for contributing towards the recent staff survey, your views and feedback is very important to us an organisation going forward.
Have an enjoyable break and I wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas. For those of you on call and working over the Christmas period, thank you.
Carlton
Just a very quick blog to remind you please to take part in
the staff survey which closes this coming Friday evening. Your views and
feedback is very important to us so that we can learn and develop the
organisation going forward.
At the moment, we have the following returns which is good
but we’re keen to get even more feedback:
(Please click image to enlarge)
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
It was great to see almost 2,000 of you at the recent staff engagement forums which we completed last week. I hope the new format worked for you. Carolyn and I certainly felt it was a step in the right direction in terms of your direct feedback and questions which we could then address. We’re keen to develop a more open and transparent approach to everything we do in the organisation and this was one of a number of steps we are taking to do that.
As an ex-apprentice myself, I would like to congratulate apprentice Sarah Woolley who has made it through a national selection process to volunteer overseas with Raleigh on an International Citizen Service placement to Nicaragua in March next year.
Sarah will be staying with a local family in a rural village for 3 months where she will be working closely with the community to adopt positive hygiene and health practices, access clean water and help to empower them to manage their resources.
The first part of her placement is a challenge to raise £800 towards the work of Raleigh, ensuring they can continue sending youth volunteers to the developing world to make a lasting difference in disadvantaged communities. Sarah is also required to complete a self-directed ‘Action at Home’ project upon her return to the UK.
Sarah says:
‘This is an opportunity of a lifetime for me but I can't do it without your support. I will be doing all sorts of things to raise money in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes open. In the meantime, any donation big or small would not only mean the world to me but also make a real difference to the lives of people in developing countries. Thank you in advance and keep a look out for more of what I’m doing!’
You can help Sarah Woolley raise money for this great cause by donating to her fundraising page www.justgiving.com/SarahWoolley97 or text ICSR55 with the amount you would like to donate to 70070. To find out more about ICS or to apply, visit www.volunteerics.org
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
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
