Moving forward into the new normal

I am keen to look at what characteristics, culture and skills should we be encouraging in our council to support the new normal. How do we support staff to cope with constant reinvention and endless change.

One of my highlights working in my past role for the Scottish Local Government Digital Office was supporting the development of the digital leadership maturity model (introduced by Colin Birchenall based on Gartner). It was a real privilege to visit 14 different council areas and interview over 150 senior leaders to find out where they were on their transformation journey and most importantly where they wanted to be. There was always a real appetite for digital transformation but there was a fear that staff were not equipped for the change. There was also a real reluctance to introduce business models which would cause difficulties for people who do not have any digital access.

I know if I were to repeat the assessment now for the council that I work for, things would have changed significantly. Am I still measuring the things that matter? So I started to look at how to create a service maturity set of criteria around innovation and culture.

What does the right culture look like and what skills should we be nurturing?

Being quick to react and having staff who can continually redesign services to follow citizens needs and keep everyone safe has become a must.

I think most of the criteria in the diagram above still apply but after recent events I would also include or emphasise the following:

I’m sure we will all be moving away from writing lengthy digital strategies to adhering to some principles around which we redesign service delivery using different models.

So what skills do we need to encourage in the workplace to be able to keep up with the every changing world and to create innovative solutions to the problems we have in delivering effective services.

So how should we develop our approach to remote working so it works for staff and citizens? This article and diagram below describes a valuable model with five level of remote work (credit to Matt Mullenweg and Steve Glaveski).

Steve explains how many organisations are moving from just recreating the office online to adapting to the medium by changing the way they communicate using collaboration tools. You should be looking at whether you really need a meeting (keep them to 15 mins) and maximise effective written communication.

With the move to using more informal ways to communicate internally, there is an opportunity to communicate differently with each other.

In level 4 of the model you are aiming to get to asynchronous communication where you are selecting the mode of communication based on real response requirements. Steve says that “the reality is that most things don’t require an immediate response. For most things, a one-way email or instant message should do the job, with the recipient responding when it suits them. Aside from the obvious and massive benefit of giving knowledge workers time to think, create and get into the flow state (a psychological state whereby we are up to five times more productive according to McKinsey), but asynchronous communication predisposes people to making better decisions.”

It would be good to further develop the innovation competencies/ culture diagram and use the remote working model to ensure we progress and continue to develop. If you are doing a similar exercise just now it would be really interesting to catch up and hear your ideas.

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