This week we’ve been speaking to Linda Farley, Head of Customer First at Eastbourne Borough and Lewes District Councils.
We last caught up with Linda when she took part in our popular ‘Stories from the new normal’ blog series. At the time, Linda had told us that one surprise to come out of the Covid-19 crisis, was that performance had dramatically. We were naturally intrigued by this, and wanted to hear more…
Hi Linda – lovely to speak with you again. Can we start by talking a bit more about this lift in performance? What sort of improvement are we talking about?
Well, we’ve seen it in a lot of areas but let’s take benefit processing – our target is 23 days. Pre-covid, we’d not been in a great place, and there were occasions where it had been as high as 50. We’d already started to make improvements and had managed to get it down to around 30 days, but now it’s between 8-15 days.
Handling incoming emails is another great example. Our SLA is 10 working days. Pre-covid, we were already beating this by about 5 days – but the volume has increased by approximately 150%! Despite that, we’re now turning emails around in 24 hours!
And then there’s the contact centre. We have around 50% of people working from home and call waiting times have reduced from 30-40 seconds to 8-15 seconds.
Wow, that’s a huge difference. Why do you think this is?
Well, it’s hard to say. Initially, we put it down to there being fewer distractions in the office – people aren’t going off for long coffee breaks, or having a chat at their desks – but we also know IT and tech hasn’t been perfect and that’s slowed people down.
What I also think now, is that people are feeling engaged – they’re making a difference to the organisation and the community and they’re working together to achieve something.
It hasn’t all been easy – sadly, we have had to furlough some of our team, but where we’ve been able to, we’ve redeployed people.
The feedback from the group who’ve been redeployed has been so positive – and not just because they’re still working, they’ve felt like they’re helping, like they’re playing their part.
That makes perfect sense – we know that ‘autonomy, mastery and purpose’ motivates us – and increases engagement over compliance. Covid-19 has certainly opened up the opportunity for all three of these.
Exactly. We’ve had to do things differently – we’ve all had to learn and adjust as we go.
I’d love to hear a bit more about some of the things you’ve had to do differently – can you share any examples?
Well, one of our aims for our community is that no-one goes hungry. All of a sudden, we had people shielding, struggling to get food delivered, as well as people having to access foodbanks who’d never had to before.
So, to address the first point, we teamed up with DEFRA and Tesco to be part of a pilot scheme, which gave priority slots to those who might be vulnerable or shielding. It sounds like such a small thing, but we spoke to one man, who said it had changed his life. He was setting an alarm to go off throughout the night, so he could try and get a delivery slot for his elderly father (often with no success). Now he can rest easy, knowing that at least once a week, there’ll be someone there, able to check in on him and make sure he has essentials. We’ve since rollout a similar scheme with Iceland and we’re now looking to do the same with Waitrose too.
For the second point, we’ve been using some of our redeployed teams to help restock foodbanks and make up food packages. We’ve set up distribution hubs from theatres and other spaces not being used because of the crisis. And we’ve had donations from hotels and restaurants of non-perishables foods. It’s really brought the whole community together.
The other big shift is because of the improvements in performance. We’ve now got the space to think about we can use our resources better.
Covid has had a massive impact on income being generated in the town (hospitality and tourism has taken a huge hit), so we’ve been putting more of our resources on collecting outstanding debt and bringing money back in from those who can afford it – whilst using another new process to identify and support those whose finances have suffered as a result of being on furlough, or redundancies. Essentially, we’re focusing our energy on the right things for people and our community.
It’s amazing hearing from so many organisations about how much positive change they’ve been able to bring about, from something that on the face of it is pretty horrendous. How can you, and other organisations make sure you keep these positives going?
I think there’s a few things really – I think firstly, we have to acknowledge that it’s not one-size-fits-all. In our latest survey, there was a real mixture of how people have responded to this change. Whilst many have loved being able to work from home, finding benefits in health, wellbeing and offering a better work-life balance, others have really missed the social interaction.
At the beginning of the crisis, we’d been having regular 121s on the phone, but you still miss some of those visual clues as to how people are really feeling. Since then, we’ve brought in MS Teams for our managers, so now there are more opportunities to bring teams back together virtually.
As well as this, we’ve introduced a Friday round up from the Chief Executive – in this, he talks about some of our achievements from the week, recognises and thanks individuals and teams for their contribution and talks about what we need to focus on and do next.
For many, they’d been missing these kinds of updates when in the office – but for others, this might be the first time they’ve ever really heard directly from a senior leader like this at all – and it’s been going down really really well.
We’ve also had to make sure the support is there for those who might be struggling – we have an employee support programme, which supports mental health 24/7, we’ve been sharing headspace and calm apps with employees and we’ve run a campaign to raise awareness about our mental health first aiders – who they are, how to reach them, and how they can offer support.
So, I think back to my main point – it’s about speaking to everyone as individuals – finding out what they want and what they need. Do they want to come in? If so, what’s the driver – do they need our support? We’ve started offering desk booking now, so if people are keen to get back, we’re looking at ways we can support that wherever possible.
Overall – we need to stay agile, keep talking and listening to our employees and communities, and do everything we can to keep learn from the positives that we’ve found during this time to drive our future culture.
Thanks so much for your time today Linda and for sharing such a positive story.
Thanks Katie – I just want to say, that we have this amazingly positive story because of the people we have here, that genuinely care and want to help others, and I’d just like to use this opportunity to acknowledge this and thank them.
You can read more about what the teams at Eastbourne Borough and Lewes District Councils have been doing for their communities in this recently published case study.
