Wednesday 1 August 2012

Is There A Positive Side To Public Sector Austerity?

The world may be agog at The Olympics (and Friday’s spectacular was rather uplifting, wasn’t it?) but the view from where I sit is still overwhelmingly dominated by public service reform. You may all think that this new age of austerity has no redeeming features whatsoever, and on a cold, wet and gloomy day that is more redolent of late Autumn than high Summer, I must say I could be tempted to subscribe to that view.

Impressive - but is it as impressive as public service co-operation
But, I came back from the UN determined that in comparative terms, the UK had little to gloom about and in keeping with that “glass half full” mindset, I wanted to share some highlights of one of the most hopeful meetings about partnership that I’ve been to for quite a while.  For whatever else public sector austerity has done already, and will do in future, it is clear to me that it has created a burning platform for change.

In a room today, I was with colleagues from the council, police, fire, probation, health, education, as well as housing organisations. We were there to explore what partnership meant and heard examples of how service managers had woken up, smelled the coffee, realised that things could not continue as they were and simply got on with changing them – in ways that were both better for customers and more efficient for providers. As a certain meerkat might say: “Simples”.

Examples we heard included co-location of police, housing and council staff with huge benefits in terms of tackling persistent offenders; improved engagement of offenders as probation services were provided in neighbourhoods where offenders lived, rather than expecting them to make difficult journeys via public transport to a central location; and how the “trust in the uniform” enabled the fire service to effectively signpost people to the right services.

These changes weren’t the result of big strategies - in many cases, they’d been started by the “low-downs” not the “high-ups”; there had been no weighty deliberations by executives and boards, but they clearly pointed the way to a different kind of future in which new thinking about organisational roles and boundaries can deliver quick wins. In the discussions that followed, I was amazed and delighted as ideas on how to build on these changes flowed. Not once was there an organisational defensiveness, and I don’t even think that the word “budget” was used at all.

By the end of two hours, there was a list of further simple things we could make happen: closer links between the fire service and housing to identify at-risk families; better integration of sheltered scheme managers into the social and health care the residents in their schemes receive; more opportunities to share information; and a plan to train together managerial cohorts from across partner organisations in order to develop Trafford’s New Ways Of Seeing.

And as I drove away, I started to think about the values that those new managers were going to need. I came up with three: curiosity, boldness and experimentation without harm. It's not a complete list, but it’s a start. What would yours be?

3 comments:

  1. Experimentation with out the risk of litigation or blame would be a good one. I know the Trust has good core values in place that allows its staff to 'fly', but not all organisations and indeed the general public would give their staff or service providers the benefit of that unfettered environment. Also outcome over targets - too many organisations are caught up in target setting and number crunching that staff end up putting more effort into achieving targets and ticking boxes rather than making sure that the outcome is a better service to the customer.

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  2. I like " no blame" and will definitely add it to the list. And would you be happy with "focus on the customer" as the phrase to cover your point about outcomes? No litigation is a bit harder - I think that needs people with a higher pay-grade than me to sort out.

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    1. Definitely happy with "focus on customer" a recent banking experience taught me the value of your organisation's Customer Hub approach as opposed to the Call Center pass the parcel approach. The call center operative in the bank -the umpteenth one I'd dealt with on the matter - stated that they didn't put notes on the system and could only see "footprints" on the account, in other-words they could tell that there had been enquiries but no notes taken about what they were about, utterly amazing. Perhaps your Trust could teach the bank's a thing or two about a good customer focused service.

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