Listening to feedback

Well believe it or not I really am pleased to be back after my enjoyable and adventurous holiday down under. I am particularly grateful for the effective leadership provided by my colleagues on ELT in my absence, and I’m very impressed by the number of blogs that have been written. It was entirely gratifying to have feedback from the Jason Kitcat, the council’s leader, on my return that the organisation had continued to be well led and managed in my absence even with a number of key events and a hole in the road to deal with. So thanks to everybody, the feedback was both encouraging and useful.

Feedback is really essential for us as individuals and as an organisation. Another example of feedback informing progress came on Monday evening when we held our Corporate Parenting Board. This is the meeting where councillors and senior officers assure themselves that our 450 children in care are being properly looked after, and that we are doing for them as we would want to do for our own children. Over the last months we have directly involved young people from the Children in Care Council in these meetings. After a couple of times we received feedback that while they appreciated our intent to involve them, they actually found the meetings rather boring and intimidating! So they requested that we change the way we work together and that instead of them coming to the meeting, some of us go and attend their meetings. This is what we are going to do. We have respected their feedback and I hope that they will find the next experiment in working with them is more enjoyable. It was useful to share the final copy of our pledge to children in care on Monday and I very much hope that you will all have opportunities to see it either in hard copy or electronically. It is a really good document worked on by young people themselves and reflecting both the content and the design that they wanted to see. At the same meeting, we talked about complaints from young people and discussed how we can better receive feedback from young people. We all agreed that we don’t only want to hear complaints but also comments and compliments and that indeed feedback has got to be viewed as something absolutely essential to a well-run system.

Walking home the same evening I bumped in to one of our road sweepers on the seafront. She was pleased to have a conversation and was incredibly engaging and positive. When I asked her how she found her job, she told me that not only did she love it; she also receives tremendous amounts of appreciation from members of the public who stop her just as I did. This really gave me a spring in my step as I walked home understanding that she receives positive feedback; that indeed the council was receiving positive feedback; and that this member of staff found her job satisfying, and on a sunny evening she couldn’t think of better work to be doing.

Feedback on how we are doing as an organisation, on what’s happening elsewhere, on how we are achieving in our jobs is all vital stuff, and I hope that through your PDPs you’ve received some valuable feedback and will be acting on it in the year ahead.

Finally then, let me give a plug for the Brighton Festival which I experienced first hand last year as being a really exciting and exhilarating time in the calendar. Following excellent feedback on the children’s parade I will be going there tomorrow before taking in two performances in the Dome in the evening. I hope you are able to join in with the festival fun in May. We should be really proud of having the second biggest festival after Edinburgh in the UK. I hope you have a good bank holiday weekend. For those who are working – thank you, and for those of you who want to get some rest and relaxation, I hope the sun shines.

Best wishes
Penny