Some of you will remember my entry last year on meetings and time-keeping. I’m delighted that appeared to have an effect on the way we work, especially if the reaction that I got from staff members around the offices was anything to go by. This observation is on a similar line, about attention to detail.
I know how hard you work, and I know that you strive to give your best every day, often in trying circumstances with difficult projects. I also know that we are fewer in number in a lot of teams, and that means you are often juggling multiple pieces of work. Mistakes are a part of human nature, but they have an impact on our relationships with our partners and residents, and don’t cast us in the best light. Let’s get a grip on this by minimising the errors that creep in to our work, and ensuring that we learn the lessons when things do go wrong.
Regardless of the number of jobs created on the business parks we build, how many people benefit from the social care we provide or the difference we make by keeping hundreds of young people safe from harm, what individual residents think about the county council is generally coloured by their experience of dealing with an individual department on a single issue that they care about. It’s essential in all dealings with local people that we provide good customer care, give people the right information at the right time, and do what we say we will do. That goes for our dealings within the council to, not least with our members, who are the elected representatives of local people.
We often deal with the public in stressful situations, telling them things that they may not want to hear: their child won’t be getting a place at the first choice school; we won’t be resurfacing the road outside their home straight away; access to a child in care is limited; a service or facility that they have grown to love will change or close – the list goes on. Experience tells us that when residents disagree with our decisions, they will often attack the process as much as the decision itself. Just recently, I have come across a small number where we have made situations worse in our dealings with Staffordshire people by failing to get simple things right first time.
Not only do these initial failures cause much more work than was avoided by the original slip-up, but it has a corrosive effect on all of our activities and our reputation. Ten seconds spent just checking that everything is in order will save many hours undoing problems caused, not to mention the damage to our reputation.
This is not a widespread issue, and there is no need to over-react. Our figures from the Local Government Ombudsman this year suggest that we are bucking the trend of rising complaints, with fewer complaints than last year, and fewer upheld. All that said, part of leadership is understanding what your people are doing, and ensuring that things are being done properly. Let’s get a grip of this while it’s still a minor problem.