Summit Workshop Innovation: "One Oxfordshire"
From Future of Local Services to the Public
Contents |
Summit workshop innovation - NOTES
Emergent opportunity area: New ways of working together
Innovation Concept: One Oxfordshire
Idea brainstorm
Disagreement about how to take it forward
- - Why do we need new ways or working? What isn’t working at the moment to make this an issue?
- - What experiences/success have people had around the table that does make things work better?
- – lets take collaboration as a good thing, so we need to ask ourselves why has it not happened more? because incentives are not good enough or barriers are too great.
- – we need to look at incentives and cultures, there are different ways of working where it is very hands on (eg how to deal with lockerbee disaster). Eg where do you place your office, how do you run the organisation whilst at the same time be out there mixing with the public.
- – it doesn’t always need to be the top people harnessing the personal contact.
- – so why do we need new ways of working?
- – there are rising public expectations and less money to use. Collaboration is the only way forward, the public perception does not see any barriers.
- - Managers realise that there is a lot of resources wasted in ‘stuff’? You realise there is lots of duplication in recruitment such as IT.
- – at what level is the collaboration or at what level should it be?
- – it depends on the demographics, different needs for different people.
- – preliminary conclusion so far; all of the examples we discussed use the personalisation of the change in an appropriate figure. One of the reasons why this hasn’t happened is because the sector appears to prefer the bureaucratic system. Unless the figure literature said I am going to take responsibility – I am going to go ahead and do this, it wouldn’t work.
- – would a name of collaborative leadership be a good name
- – the leadership does not need to be high up but can be very local – ie, meals on wheels.
- - Only happens if someone is really motivated to get this done, same at the highest level through to the front line staff. Part of the problem is that the leadership doesn’t care enough about collaboration, there are other things they identify as more of a priority and therefore it doesn’t get done.
- – staff are often worried about innovation without permission, and therefore worried about sharing it.
- – What it is like to be staff in local government? Would the culture allow me to innovate and not be worried, and how is that nurtured higher up?
- – You are often concerned with certain prescribed levels of performance that can be measure – these are the bits you report on higher up the ladder. There is a performance culture where performance indicators is the stuff you report not the new innovative aspects that may be harder to report.
- – would like to use personalisation not leadership as the key to working better, all the examples are something about the right person taking responsibility for the problem and sorting it. Policy often becomes de-personalised as it passes through from decisions makers to front line staff and therefore in the end people say this really doesn’t matter to me and don’t take it forward.
- – strategic and leadership/opportunities should be married.
- – if we use personalisation as a starting point. If you work it through you said it could become de-personalised. What will be the desired result in terms of personalisation?
- – what were the elements towards trust, the process is one aspect and therefore having faith in the system is important.
- – how would leading by example manifest itself – lets start with the chief exec who would take personal hands on development with a innovative project and see it through and be seen to see it through by others, even if it is a noble failure. Therefore they should personally identify themselves with a personal issue and sort it. This would soon spread a personalised culture.
- – what is interesting in organisations is that positive collaboration is happening in one part but it is not always transferable to another.
- – narratives are also important and told the story, which had a very important impact. These are not just heroic stories but they are stories of smaller personalised/collaborative projects which then grow and pass through the organisation.
- can you think of any examples, are people doing this personalised style?
- – yes people are, I am convinced that everything we want happening is happening somewhere. However every council is elected and therefore the boundary is permeable. Because it doesn’t matter to many councils what other councils are doing, they care more about what their electorate think about them.
- – there are a few councils who use the council scheme as a way to build up their reputation, but this is not a collaborative reason.
- – an nothing thing that would be interesting to discuss is about a more mobile workforce, how can we get that cross sector fertilisation.
- – where there has been success is about home visits where everyone realised that you can’t have lots of visitors.
- – if rather than recruiting individually we did one recruitment drive would this be any better.
- – I would propose that we would consider it a personal failure if we didn’t propose a Dragons Den failure.
- – ok my proposition is ask the PCT, police, contractors where everyone is only doing one recruitment between us. ‘One Oxfordshire’
- – the desired outcome result?
- – save money, better collaboration, knowledge working
- - And ultimately a better service
- - Helping to break down the different services to say that you are working for the public sector in this area. If you have more joint appointments, that itself is a symbol of working together.
- – I think it also helps in looking forward where in some areas we are struggling to recruit.
- – the first thing you would have to agree is a date to which you disable your other methods.
- – the product is combined recruitment, single recruitment, one recruitment pool.
- – it is effectively about recruitment to one single organsisation.
- – you also provide a more robust and flexible path for career progression.
- – being deployed in are area and you would have to be prepared to work in any area.
- – better public services and better collaboration, you are measuring satisfaction with services. Is this measuring retention, and empowering the staff.
- – it is better for public services because people with have gathered experiences from a wide variety of services. Obviously you would need sufficient training as you move around.
- – I think we have to spell out the benefits to better collaboration and there are some Chinese walls and you couldn’t do it for everything such as the police and judiciary. Members of the public could see this as ‘stiched up Government’
- key stakeholder, who have you got ton involve and take with you
- Three tiers of local government, PCT, police, fire services, psudeo FE college, Universities, third sector.
– what are the issues with dealing with them
- A lot of this type of thing is about getting people on board.
- Many partnerships break up afternoon a honey partnership so you would need to invest a lot of skills in how to work out differences. It requires you to be able to speak bluntly to each other.
– something like the floods, there are times of crisis where you do need to work together and partnerships are formed.
– how much of an upheaval would it be
– would be huge
– it is all back to leadership and it wouldn’t actually be that difficult
– it would all be about working up a set of joint objectives and terms. As well as looking at recruitment and training and induction is commonly dealt with.
– there is a huge amount of waste, to a point where they only using the same title or organisation not actually recruit for the same jobs. There are practical issues about it but it is more about will. If you could make this happen in the right kind of way.
what are the benefits for staff/
– career benefits. People do stay within the same area / organisation because they are settled.
are you meeting the criteria?
Shared endeavour – not sure about central government, although they would need to want to work with you to role it out once it has become successful.
is it safe to fail?
– yes, you would just go back to the old way of doing it.
– you could end up only with generic skills and risk lack of specialism
– there would have to be work done to make sure that there were the resources and facilities to provide and promote specialism within staff so that we didn’t lose that.
–
you mentioned earlier about standardising core HR skills
– there are some which are bog standard such as literacy etc..
do you know of a model similar to this that might have been tried or thought about/
– no
– yes within DWP areas but not generically within local government.
– from the candidate’s point of view there is the opportunities or apprenticeships with guaranteed jobs at the end.
– I think this could happen, we have just been asked to do a study about leadership training and one of the things we want to look at is graduate schemes, it is crazy for it to there to be lots of separate ones.
– we run a program where we try and talk strategy with people and they are coming out where they go and do different things as a result.
Dragon's Den
PITCH
Barnsley – Darlington – whomever –
LA’s combine together to recruit collectively…
In the future with 6 different recruiting and training systems –replacing the fragmented system towards training together for one Oxfordshire…building on temporary contract model…provide better understanding of public services – holistic appreciation of public services…lead in would be a year or two – investment is modest – see as an invest to save…if you don’t give us the money anyway, we’ll carry on doing it – win wins for staff –
RESPONSE
Q – application of the concept across all sorts of jobs?
A – applicability to professional jobs shared across the piece…this is running alongside the work we’re already doing…
Q – some orgs would have a wage saving – how to work out the standard ratio…recyclingpeople…
Q – are you saying the cultures are the same of different organisations?
A – there are issues over cultures but to break these down you need shared training and collective approach to start…this would have to be alongside the shared services model…
Q – individual’s loyalty to their organisation ?
A – oxford – we employ 20k staff – does it matter if they’re loyal to the place they’re working with – one Oxfordshire…broader loyalty
MONEY –
- This sounds like a public service employment agency…
100k for two years to see how they get on
- 100k for the first year…
- Excellent idea – but huge disparity between the label one Oxfordshire and shared service – danger of disillusionment…300k over two years…
