4.05 — weeknotes — nice to start the week with a major issue !— time to talk, our hints for a healthy mind
Well just to add some excitement to the week we had a priority one issue at the start of the week — 9 o’clock on a Monday morning is never good for something to go wrong. With the majority working at home there is still a huge reliance on the technology to work! As usual the team sprang into action and identified the issue promptly and resolved it within an hour or so. Whilst the issue was hopefully forgotten about by the rest of the organisation by Monday afternoon, as services were stable, some of the team have worked the weekend to apply a number of patches to resolve the underlying issue. Always very grateful.
One reflection of this issue this week is that cyber security is very much in people’s mind. I was asked several times at the start of the issue: Is this cyber related? How concerned should we be? After every major issue like this we do a review and one of the things that we need to do differently next time is reassure early that it isn’t a cyber security issue, ‘just’ a ‘thing’ that we need to sort. Nick and I were chatting about it and said that very quickly in these situations you have a gut feel of what is going on and in this case wasn’t a cyber issue, but that we didn’t necessarily communicate out that as needed. Always able to improve.
Just to show the diversity, and perhaps randomness, of the things that we end up talking about in digital, we had a conversation this week about how to get the Mac address for a robotic vacuum cleaner. These are being trialled in Hounslow House and they need to be connected to the Wi-Fi don’t you just love technology.
On Monday afternoon we had our digital strategy board for our Councillors, where we took them through the latest projects and programmes. We had a focus on the digital inclusion work that we are doing across the council and an update on the Hounslow connect website.
On Tuesday I presented to the Integrated Care Partnership SLT, an update on all the digital work. Whilst there is some progress being made, if we joined up more with the other priority areas and saw digital as enabling innovation and transformation we could be bolder. I proposed that we find some resource for a delivery manager and a business analyst to enable us to join things up and try and move things along in a different way. As part of this workstream information governance is also really important and have proposed that we have a subgroup focusing on making sure that we have the right information governance arrangements. It was all received really well, we’ve just got to work out the what and how, to make it happen.
We had an hour on Thursday as part of the Mind time to talk day focusing on mental health. The council had run a number of different events over the last week or so. I wanted to do something with digital and IT, just to create some space to get together and have a catch up and talk about the importance of mental health, what’s available in the organization, and to get some hints and tips from colleagues. This was building on the live Q&A that was done earlier in the week with the Assistant Chief Exec and Director of OD. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go or whether anybody was going to turn up but what we had about 25 people attend and some really amazing conversations. Colleagues really felt they were in a safe and trusted space and we’re really able to share into the discussion.
Some of our top tips!
- Dont feel guilty about taking breaks
- Create time in your calendar to stop
- Space to walk / run
- Develop the small things into habits
- Try and ensure meetings are focussed and have less of them!
- Office is open if needed
- Dog walking
- Requests to bring back Laughter Yoga!
- Mindfullness sessions
- Talk!
- The importance of tea breaks — which then led to a long conversation about Earl Grey and Biscuit Tea!
We were also asked about enabling colleagues in the service desk, who can’t stop answering the phone, to attend events like this. Love that we then sprung into action and closed the service desk for 30 minutes in the afternoon and allowed a similar conversation — so important. Really pleased we were able to do this — thinking about doing it regularly as well — shows how seriously we take this as an organisation.
Whole thing was really well received and several comments made that, this wouldn’t have happened in previous places — made a comitement to do it monthly! Awesome!
I had Friday afternoon off to meet up with people I used to work with and have lunch — was nice and odd to get on a train after so long — first time for ages — spring is definately on it’s way!
