Weeknotes S2, Eps3 #RemoteNotes and Mad Max…..

Wow…..so where do we begin? what a week we’ve had and I’m sure everybody is feeling the exact same sense of surrealism a bit like we’ve all been cast in a Mad Max movie…..

I’m going to split my very raw emerging week notes into two sections from now on just to ease my brain process. Firstly I’m going to talk about actions and things that I have actually done in the week as a bit of a round up, and secondly I will try and reflect on the week as a whole as I think this will help me separate out learning to take forward whilst creating an accurate (ish) journal.

Things I have Done

So this week was an ever moving feast or shifting sands as you might say (understatement of the year) from Monday to Friday. We started the week not really knowing how the next hour would go let alone the next day but by the end of Monday in our emergency Business Continuity meeting we were preparing to send all of our teams home to remote work (well over 1000 staff across both councils)….

Now this is no mean feat although we have at least got the digital capability and logistics in place now to actually achieve this — if this had happened in March last year then we would never achieved even a quarter of the agility in deployment of staff we managed this week…This was down to the councils investment in MS Office 365 and no matter what you think of it, it has fundamentally kept huge numbers of public services operating this week (and for the foreseeable future) I I think it has been astonishing to see how seamless we went from 10% remote to 75% remote in 3 days — who say #LocalGov is not agile????

Even the often maligned use of Teams has been great this week especially for people who have not really used to remote working and I have seen embedded behaviours that would take months and years to adjust, broken in days!!!!

By COP Wednesday we had 90% of the staff in our service working at home and were operating a core skeleton leadership team in both of the offices. This is one of the most challenging times many of us will ever work through but the most important first priority in this situation is supporting our staff to manage their lives on a human level, followed swiftly by ensuring this was translated to ensuring we were prioritising the running of our services to address issues faced by the most vulnerable in our communities in this unprecedented time.

So action-wise, the week was a bit of a blur from the minutiae; talking about what do we do with answering all of the landline phones in the offices, to can people take their screens home, to can people take their chairs home, to who constitutes a key worker, to how do we think about at emergency borrowing powers, committees, events, hubs…………. The list goes on!

All of these things will take time to work through and we’ve had to step back and be clear that steady minds and considered approaches rather than knee jerk reactions are critical, and that this is a marathon and not a race!

Despite all this we have still managed to get a bit of business as usual in and ensure that we’re trying to make things tick and how people have some sense of normality. Yesterday was great to have a break from Covid- 19 by doing some work resource planning for the next 6/12 months and how we split the teams up more effectively to work a remotely.

On Wednesday I was on an internal interview pane and although a welcome change of scenery (in my brain) I reflected that it was probably one of the last moments of proper face to face contact with work colleagues in normal BAU that I would have for quite some time…

Reflections

I’m very proud of my colleagues in the last week (not saying I am not always proud) as we’ve all come together, not panicked and just got on with the job despite incredibly challenging circumstances. Reflecting back on the week sometimes feel I do my best work when stress levels are high and I guess this is positive in circumstances we find ourselves in. However I also need to also make sure that I look after myself working 12 hour days is not going to be the way that we manage this an epidemic going forward… My wife is a headteacher so we are pure public sector household and have spent the whole week using our Kitchen as a Covid war room.

Beyond this initial peak of trying to maintain service provision we need to ensure we don’t lose sight of the potential wider and more indirect issues that will begin to affect us; challenges around how we continue to make face to face contact with each other and ensure that there is no social isolation whilst maintaining physical distance or isolation will be necessary but at least with technology there are already innovative virtual coffee mornings 9and wine Fridays) springing up across the teams.

The next big one IMHO is around supply chains, business rates and ensure we can start thinking innovatively around how we ensure we lose as few businesses as possible in the coming weeks. Many SMEs and even larger organisations will start to drop off a cliff financially with no reserves or limited borrowing power, and many of these are essential supply chain partners to services delivery, not to mention core parts of our local economy and vulnerable in their own right. Alongside this profiling business rate income will become a crucial daily task I would expect going forward.

Sharing seems so important right now although I know we are all bombarded with info…This ever changing situation will require going to keep sharing with each other experiences and stories and built our strongest networks yet… I will try and keep sharing with you on here as I think it’s a great place to get a live picture of the world.

Sadly not a great deal of time for reading this week although I’ve read a great deal of the prime minister’s statements from end to end and a lot of the information coming out of government which I do anyway but a little bit more than I’d like to usually do anyway stay safe see you next week…