Weeknote 5.2022

I’m fascinated by how other senior leaders align their work and agenda to the needs of their teams. If it’s too different, I’ve found you’re talking a completely separate language to your managers – and you don’t have time for the things that matter for them. If you just focus on what your teams are doing at the moment, you can’t set the pace of change. I’ve been think about that this week because of how different my week was to the delivery of customer services. Our service had a really encouraging week, and mine was ok. 

We delivered the best service to residents that we’ve achieved in months, this week. Waiting times were consistently below ten minutes and we answered around 85% of calls. Best of all, we continued to take more time to work with residents who needed extra help. 

One of our link workers helped ‘Maria’ – an older woman who hadn’t asked for a repair to her council home in two years. After speaking to us, we helped fix the carbon monoxide alarm and introduced her to a lunch club so that she could meet new people. Doing things efficiently is important because sometimes that’s all you need. Taking time to do make things better for people who need that extra help makes Hackney better for everyone. The improved outcomes have also had a noticeable effect on everyone’s morale. 

Now, we’ve got a short period that we need to use so that some of the enablers are in place to sustain the improvement. The work we’re doing to support residents who have to call frequently needs to become bread and butter. This week, our single view work has an early prototype which will enable us to test what impact it could have on call lengths. We’ve got a really simple target: for the tool to help us save 189,000 minutes a year. We’re also investing in a rota-ing tool so that we’re matching colleagues with the right skills to support the levels of demand at the right time of the day. 

On Thursday my diary resembled my hair: things came out at a remarkable rate. Previously I’ve found it too easy to waste unexpected time (to the point where I’ve actually got cross that things were cancelled). But this week I had enough energy to make good use of the time and focus on cracking through some stuff that would be far too easy to defer.

The key thing on Friday was our housing IT steering group. We’re at one of those difficult stages in a change project. Having been through a few I’ve now got enough experience to not over-dramatise them in advance. But the conversation also enabled me to reflect on how change needs momentum to succeed. The allure of ‘pragmatism today, change tomorrow’ is as effective as when my parents painted over mould in my bedroom as a child. 

All of this is a long way of saying that I didn’t quite meet my three goals for the week, but didn’t get far off. We do have a clear roadmap for the temporary accommodation work. It landed well with the leadership of the service and we’re going to use it to structure our show & tells. The Technical Design Authority meeting did help support our principles and remained action-oriented. I’m keen that we evolve the way we’re working now that we’re four weeks in, so that we don’t establish a pattern too soon and that habit reduces our creativity. I didn’t start the re-use conversation I wanted, but that was a matter of diaries and availability rather than a lack of focus on my part. 

There were also two things where we made progress this week after letting them drift for too long. In both examples, I would have been unforgiving on discovering the length of time it had taken to get it done, at the point at which I started working in Councils. Now, I can also see completely valid reasons why they’ve dragged. But I’m not comfortable with entirely abandoning the me of 2015. Part of the answer is to get more comfortable with saying ‘I can’t’, particularly when under pressure. But another part is just being a bit more candid when I’m letting things drift so that colleagues can make a more active choice about how to proceed. 

Next week is an opportunity to return to the work I’ve been doing to help teams articulate the outcomes we’re seeking to achieve. So my stretch goal is that three teams can confidently express the outcomes they’re seeking from work that’s currently underway. But I’ve also got three significant bits of paperwork to attend to – two of which have been festering on my to-do list for a fortnight. So I’d better formalise that as my second goal for the week. I’ve also got my eye on a trip to Anfield on Thursday – so two goals will be sufficient (no jokes about whether 2 goals is enough with a high line).