When I first stepped into the Royal Greenwich Town Hall, I was an apprentice. Over my time here – 38 years to be exact – I have seen how the council works under different leadership, both political and corporate. It's now my turn to take that experience and knowledge and steer the workforce in a new direction so that we continue to evolve and meet the needs of our residents whatever comes our way.
We're all well versed in the huge financial challenge facing local government nationally and, as Greenwich has done, many local authorities will have made administrative, managerial and process-led efficiency savings before even thinking about making cuts to frontline services. However, this in itself comes with its own set of challenges. One of the most important of these is ensuring our hard-working staff feel valued and remain motivated – after all, staff are the biggest asset of any successful organisation.
With Government funding reducing and demand for services increasing, there's no doubt in my mind that we're asking staff to work harder, to push as hard as they can to continually squeeze more out of less money. And it's our job in the senior leadership team to make sure we all work together, find new approaches and ways of working to keep delivering.
Staff values and awards
When I was confirmed in the role of chief executive towards the end of last year, one of the first things I wanted to do was recognise the great work happening across the council. Last month, we launched our staff values, a set of core principles that underpin the way we work, alongside our staff awards.
It's important that as a workforce we have a very clear understanding of what we're trying to achieve and how we each contribute to it. When we understand what our organisation is about and have a great sense of how we're going to go about it, then our workforce will be more effective.
Our values have already had a really positive impact across our workforce with people feeling a sense of belonging. The awards are a way of celebrating and recognising good work, when a member of our team demonstrates a commitment to our values. It's been inspiring to see how staff have really got behind this initiative and we've had hundreds of nominations from a wide range of teams.
New approaches
Reducing the strain on our workforce by encouraging collaborative working is another of the challenges we're addressing at Greenwich. Local government has traditionally been silo-based, with the thought that if you want to work collaboratively, you need to restructure. But restructures, while occasionally necessary, put staff in fear of their jobs and suck energy and pace out of any service. If this is the tool we continue to reach for when things need to change in local government, we're going to fail. We need to think creatively and change the way we fundamentally work. If we want to succeed and bring our staff and communities with us, we need to change our approach.
Working collaboratively is a cornerstone of the new values – it's one of the ways we can get more for less. We want to change the culture across the organisation so that if an officer gets a call about something outside of their remit, rather than ignoring the enquiry, they forge links with other teams and departments to find a solution. This of course requires buy-in at all levels of an organisation, including managers, so we all understand we're working towards the same goal.
Alongside this we are being innovative with how we allocate resources, concentrating them in the spots that need them most. This approach has been successful in our ‘Love Plumstead' and ‘Love Woolwich' groups – sharing information and engaging with residents and with colleagues across the council to target our limited resources to the places they'll have the most impact. This in turn empowers staff to make decisions and do their job in a way that best serves our residents.
Debbie Warren is chief executive of Greenwich RLBC
