Brendan O’Keefe on implementing the Happy Manifesto when moving from public sector to private sector

Just over a year ago we were part of Kensington and Chelsea Council. We were the youth service for Kensington and Chelsea Council. We're now, as Henry said, an independent social enterprise operating for ourselves. And it's a very exciting, maddening, frustrating, invigorating, motivating experience.

And that can be just one day. It is quite a roller coaster. That that we're on now. I'm gonna be talking about the happy principles and how we've used the happy principles in helping us in our journey And I'm going to be talking a bit about the public sector as well who here works in the public sector Okay, not too many people.

That's good because I'm going to be quite rude about the public sector, actually So bear with me and it's to be fair. It's based on my own experiences It's not necessarily a generic picture of the public sector Of the public sector is my own experiences, but they are quite lengthy. I've been in the public sector all of my adult life, and for the last 20 years of that, as a manager in the public sector, which has been a very interesting experience.

So, I'm going to talk about Epic CIC , a little bit about who we are, what our journey is, but very particularly, how we're using the principles of the Happy Manifesto in the workplace. Okay, just do down on here, is that Henry? Yeah, it's a clicker. I'll use that for the moment, but Okay. Just a brief overview of who we are.

We are, we're quite a large organization. Alright. It's buried there. Thank you. We're quite a large organization. There's 160 of us. We've started as 150, but we've grown in our first year. We've made a, a reasonable profit. In our first year, our turnover has increased, our profits increased, and our staff numbers have increased and we have got.

Five more contracts than we started with a year ago. I'm not saying that not just to boast, but I'm saying that because this is language a year ago, I didn't know what that meant. This is language we've had to learn because we are now a company. A company that has to look after cash flow. A company that has to look after a balance sheet.

A company that has to understand profit and loss. These are not natural skills within the public sector. They're new skills that we've had to learn along the way. So 160 staff providing youth support services in Kensington and Chelsea, but latterly and recently also in Westminster, in Hammersmith, recently into Camden, we're currently negotiating a contract in Brent.

So you can see our plan is to grow. We, we don't want to stand still, we want to get bigger and better. We deliver a wide range of youth support programmes. Now, back in a few years ago, when the financial crisis hit, We looked at the future, a bit of future gazing, and we did some future focusing.

I think people have mentioned that already. And I found those flip charts about 18 months ago. They were written about four years ago. We thought they were grim outlooks on the future. They now look like rose tinted optimism. Because that's how the world has changed. So, when we were in the council, we were very well regarded by the council.

We did a good job. Whatever we set out to do, we pretty much achieved. Council liked what we did. But we were very reliant on central government and local government funding for what we were about . And in 2010, I think that is one of our scenarios. It did not look a good place to be in 2010. Youth services fared very badly in the in the first round of cuts.

There were, the local government association did a study, the three top services that were cut by councils right throughout the UK. Libraries Sure Start centres, libraries. and youth services, and the rest we're following in the wake. But we were getting hit really hard. So, we looked around, thought to ourselves, what do we need to do about this?

You know, what are we just gonna sit there and take it? This is myself and a small group of managers. Are we just gonna sit there and take it, or are we going to try? And do something about it. So we really examined certain scenarios things that we thought we might do. But looking back on it now, it really was deck chair shuffling.

Can we make the deck chairs better? Can we shuffle them in a different way? Can we make them look nicer? It just, it wasn't going to cut it. And at the same time, we were hearing some really interesting things that were going on in the NHS, the way parts of the NHS were opting out to form independent companies and independent social enterprises in order to deliver better patient care.

We went to visit a few of these NHS enterprises. And there's some very interesting things going on. First of all, we liked the business models. They were becoming independent. They were creating this new thing I'd never heard of, a community interest company. They were actually contracting back with the NHS to deliver services.

And they had some interesting thoughts about making profit and expanding. Really, really, really interesting stuff. But the thing that interested me most of all was what the staff were saying about the new environment in which they were working. What they were talking about was Being better focused on patient care.

Being less governed by bureaucracy. Feeling much more of a sense of ownership about the task. And we kept hearing this phrase everywhere that we went in these new NHS mutuals. We should have done this earlier. And we will never go back. And I thought what an incredibly powerful thing for a public servant to be saying.

Some of these people we were talking to had worked in the NHS 20, 30 years. We will never go back. It gave us a real insight into how things can be different. So, interesting things going on there. We were very much inspired by what we were hearing. And myself and a small group of managers within the local authorities thought, Do you know what?

This is the way to go. This is a group of staff who always had interesting ideas. But we, almost like we met in dark corners. Away from the mainstream to talk about, you know, this is our way of thinking about how the public sector could be delivered differently, because we didn't want to be seen as bonkers mavericks.

We wanted, you know, we had salaries to earn, we had line management change to exist in, and so being seen out as, as, as a maverick is not necessarily a good thing when you're in the public sector. But there are, there is a lot of innovation in the public sector. I always think of it like this.

People know this team, Barcelona. To my mind, the best football team of all time. It's not only the way they play, it's just the attitude, the joy, and the sheer love of football they bring to a football pitch. Any Chelsea fans in the room? They don't do this. They don't do this. That's why I love Barcelona.

And I did this innovators in the public sector. We're trying to play like Barcelona. We're trying to have a flow, have a commitment and a real joy about what we do. But the environment in which we work in the public sector is that's the pitch that we're playing on. It's a pitch that is compliance.

It's unregulated. It's a pitch that is requiring 18 levels of permission before you can actually do anything. It's a pitch that discourages innovative thinking because it just weighs it down in its, in its processes. And so that is a real pitch. That's Dundee United football. That's what Scotland looks like, by the way, if anybody, anybody was wondering.

So anyway, this is the, this is what we're left with. So, it's troubling. So we started to think, look, if we're gonna do this really innovatively, we can't just shuffle the deck chairs. We've got to do something radically different. And so we proposed to the council a business strategy that was based on us exiting the local authority completely to form an independent social enterprise And employee led mutual, which is EPIC CIC.

I won't give you the presentation of how we went about that, because that's for another time or another place. I'm going to talk more about how we incorporated the Happy principles. But I will say this, I was fortunate to work in Kensington and Chelsea. And fortunate indeed to have a very open minded, innovative, and creative chief executive.

Derek Myers. If anybody knows Derek in the public search, he's very well known. Sir Derek Myers, now, quite well, very well deserved. Actually, what is inside it? He's been sent into Rotherham to sort out Rotherham. He's supposed to be retired. That's a tough gig. Anyway, having Derek sanction the project, open the doors, and really once we had his buy in, it was inevitable what we do.

But even though we had the full backing of the council, and everybody wanted to do it, just to give you a sense of how, the pace of change in the public sector, it took two years. The plan was about 15 months. Do you know what I, do you know what I blame for why it took two years? People know Prince too.

Prince 2. People familiar with Prince 2. Prince 2 is the work of Satan. Actually, I have another theory about Prince 2. It's a project management tool that has absolutely taken off like wildfire in the public sector for reasons that I simply do not understand. It's actually designed for massive infrastructure projects and yet it's applied in the public sector to shall we change our team meeting day from Tuesday to Thursday? We've all been trained in Prince 2 and made to do it. And so I had to dust down my Prince 2 manual and take it from the fire door that it was holding open. There were several like that. We had to form a project group. We had to write a PID.

We had to go to, I mean, this is what normally happens. And people do this and. After six months, they forget why they were meeting in the first place. That's, that's Prince Two. That's Prince Two for you. I'm convinced that the Soviets in the Cold War invented Prince Two as a means of undermining capitalism.

No project on Prince Two has ever come in on budget or has ever been completed on time. And the, you know, Putin's going, They're still doing it. They're still doing it. Anyway, I'm getting off the subject. Keep me on the subject. Thank you.

Yeah, it's a good day. It's a good day. Okay. We've taken our organization out. We formed a community interest company were completely independent. We contract back with Kensington and Chelsea for 75 percent of our business. 25 percent of our business is with other public bodies and other local authorities.

We want to grow that side of the business, particularly because we can't be so dependent on one contract for too long. But to do this, we need a different culture. We need a different way of working. We've got the business model, right? We've got a new way of working. We're employee led, which is a very interesting new dynamic that I've had to get used to when I worked in the local authority.

I mean, I was successful in the local authority. I got to senior management level, well paid and respected. And pretty much when I issued a dictatorial instruction, most people would follow it. Most anyway, not all. And now I have a board of directors that consists of five non executive directors whom we've recruited from the business community.

This is an idea about innovation. We thought we need people who know about business because we are now running a business. We don't know about business. We've never run a business on this scale before. We need people with business skills in there. So we just put an advert in the Evening Standard. Wanted business brains and boffins.

That's it. to help fledgling social enterprise. What response do you think we got? Zero? We got 32 CVs dropped through the door. From blue chip companies of a calibre, That was quite extraordinary. It became embarrassing. We didn't know who to choose. We had to have an interview process, and they're blinking volunteers.

It was terrific. And they have been fantastic. Now the other part of the board, the bit I've really had to get used to, I have five elected staff reps, who I now answer to. And don't they make me answer to them. But it's a very different and interesting dynamic, and very different from how we've worked before.

Okay, so, but we've taken out with us a big public sector culture. So we've got the business model, we've got a growth strategy, we understand how our finances work. We've got this big public sector culture. And that's the other bit, that's probably the hardest bit, in fact, to work on. Because this is how I see the public sector culture very often.

We have quite a few people for whom the glass is half full. There are stars. They're the people who are, who are motivated, always have been, and always will be. We have a lot of people for whom the glass is half empty. If you work in a public sector, I'd be very surprised if you're not familiar with this scenario.

And we have another group of people, and they're quite numerous as well, for whom there is no glass at all. They cannot see the glass. They do not know where the glass is. They don't care that there is no glass . They like it like this. So we've taken out that culture with us. What I've been trying, I mean, you know, I focus very much in the early days quite, quite rightly on the business model and convincing the council that we had a business strategy and a business case for a viable business.

Because we have a five year contract worth 25 million pounds. That's a lot of money. A lot of public money. The counsellors who are signing that contract, are signing off a lot of risk. They had to be convinced that we knew what we were doing, or where we didn't know what we were doing, we had to write people in to help us with what we were doing.

So I focused a lot on that. Didn't focus quite so much on the culture issues. I thought that would just naturally follow. As soon as we get over the, into the, into the new environment, everybody will be so excited, like me, that they will suddenly change overnight. It's cool. And it's not been like that at all.

Now I'm going to pause just for a moment because my question to you is, what do you do with people who think like this? How do you motivate them? Just pause on that for a few minutes. So any examples of how you've helped people find a glass when they just don't know where it is?

Audience Member 1: Encourage them to leave.

Brendan: Yeah. Yeah. That can be a solution.

Audience Member 2: Help them to find a direction that makes them happy.

Brendan: Yeah. And I think it's also about they sometimes don't know that's how they're coming across. And do you know why? Nobody's ever told them. And that happens a lot in the public sector. You can go into a job there. This has actually happened to me.

I've gone into an office. I work for the probation service. I walked into an office that I knew was in difficulties. That's why I sent in to sort them out. And I've met with my new management team. They told me all about the bad people. First day. You always get this. You quite often get this.

You get the bad people. I said, how many of these bad people know they're bad people? And the subject was changed. They didn't know. This has quite often happened. So, what this slide is, is what we're trying to achieve. Because we felt by going out and creating a new and independent social enterprise and just doing the same thing all over again, would be a hugely missed opportunity.

So what we're about is this. We want to create a dynamic social enterprise that delivers public services in a different way. So the public sector ethos is important to us. We want to provide good services to the public. That's what we're about. I have many talented people in my organization who could earn a lot more money in different sectors, but they choose to be in the public sector because that's where their values lie.

That's very important. We want to bring in an enterprise dynamic. Everybody has to understand the whole issue around cost, around efficiency, around making money. That's what we're about now. We have to make a profit every year. Our contract with the council goes like this. And as we fill in that gap, we either have to keep laying people off, or we're going out of business.

And in our first year, we've been quite successful at that. But we're not complacent. The challenge is not likely to get easier between 2015 and 2020. It's actually going to get easier. Much, much more difficult. And the third thing is around the culture of innovation. We want to create a vibrant culture of innovative staff who are committed to the work we're doing, flowing full of ideas, and really wanting to make EPIC our aim to be the best youth support services provider in the UK.

And I know everybody's saying, Oh, we're the best in the UK. We really mean it. So we want a different way of delivering public services, and away from the control and compliance routes that many public services are delivered through, with freedom and flexibilities applied to staff. And that's what we're about, bringing those three things together, because they're all of equal importance.

It's not just about bottom line, it's not just about being nice to the public, it's also about bringing those three things together in order to create. A dynamic first class social enterprise. Now as we, our starting point was how are we going to help the youth service in Kensington and Chelsea to survive.

The point we've reached now is we think all public services can be delivered like this. All of them. I don't, people often say child protection can't be done like that. I don't agree, but a colleague over here was in child protection and you are a CIC aren't you? Adults, you're adults, yeah. Anything that's statutory care, people say can't be done.

I think possibly the army. We won't make the army a community in Dresden. We'll leave them, we'll leave them where they are. That's I think all public services can be delivered in this way. Now, during our journey, we came across this chap. That's his LinkedIn picture taken in 1977. And, I started, I read this book.

The Happy Manifesto. I was absolutely captivated by it. I've actually read it three times. Oh, God, what's that say about me? It's a great book. And I started to think all organizations, especially the public sector, should be delivered on these principles. But I think it is particularly difficult in the public sector, and I'll come on to that in a moment.

But I was absolutely, taken by the book. I thought, that's the culture shift we want. That is the third segment. On that circle thing that looked like what's that game? Trivial Pursuit. That's the bit that's missing and this is what I want to pursue. So I bought hundreds of copies of the Happy Manifesto.

Henry's now built the inter extens, haven't you, Henry? This has done good, good, good. Littered the office with them, littered the organization with them and thought everybody would be as thrilled and excited by me and we'd be a happy company over and over. But of course it didn't quite work like that.

You know. Cynicism, because that's what the public sector specializes in sometimes, is cynicism. Started to emerge, and one staff member in a conference said, Yeah, go on, make me happy then. I've read the book, now make me happy. He didn't read it properly, did you? It's a two way flow. He was the glass not there, person.

One of many, so it didn't work. So we actually have had to think of a much more systematic way of going about Happy manifesto. So we're training with Happy limited at the moment. We're training three groups of staff and we didn't do what we traditionally would have done in the local authority, train down a hierarchy.

We've had to train the senior management group first because some of my senior management group colleagues didn't get it and didn't really support it. I thought I have to bring them on board. I have to get them to understand it, because the culture is modelled from the senior management team. They are, if I'm saying to staff, we're going to be happy, we're going to be innovative, you're going to have freedoms and flexibilities and a manager micro manages them.

That just kills the whole thing. You say, well, your senior management colleagues, colleagues, your co directors are not following the principles. It started with the senior management team. Then subsequently, we've trained two cohorts of staff who are They put themselves forward and they are going to form the core of the champions that are going to be delivering the Happy Manifesto throughout the whole organisation.

And we're in that process at the moment. So this is us, Epic CIC. This is an early test of my commitment to the principle of pre approval. You're familiar with that if you've read the manifesto. When I said to a group of staff as we were setting ourselves up. Sorry, I'm still waving this around. I've been told not to wave that around.

What I said to a group of staff is, look we need a logo, we need a name, and you as a project group, together with young people, you're going to come up with it. Now, that's not very different from the public sector. We've done that in the past. But except for one crucial difference. I said, whatever you come up with, we're going with.

It's not going to a project team. It's not going to an approvals board. It's not going to be signed off by counsellors. Whatever you come up with, we're going with. And this is what they came up with. The logo I really like it. And I think it's a nice clean image. I'll take, just give an example of giving staff that level of permission means they understand the task, they've got to be good.

And they take it very seriously. Now one member of staff found out that in Kensington and Chelsea there's an institution called The Museum of Brands. Only Kensington and Chelsea would have a Museum of Brands. Anyway, the Museum of Brands has a corporate social responsibility section. So you phone them up and say, Will you help us design our logo for nothing?

And they did. We had corporate branding experts come in to help us with the logo, the name, everything. We learnt a lot from them. So that's, give staff serious responsibility, they do great work. But I said it was a test of my commitment to the pre approval process because they've come out with a name I don't like.

That was the fact. My first reaction was I don't like the name. Do I throw the happy manifesto out the window and bring in my local authority management staff? We're not doing it, guys. I don't like it. Anyway, they persuaded me. They told me about the research they'd done. They told me about the Museum of Brands.

I thought, wow. I can't not go with it now. Actually, I like it now. I really like it. But whilst I wasn't liking it, I was hopping over to Dublin to see the relatives. I came out of Dublin airport to get the bus into town. And the bus pulled up, and that's what it said on the back. This is a true story. I am not making this up for effect.

Can you see what it says? Can you see what it says? It says epic fail. I phoned them out and said, Guys, look, we've got that name again. And I tweeted them the picture. They said, No, stick with it, stick with it. Okay. So let me give you another example of what we're doing to bring in, in place the Happy Manifesto.

We now have a process where we're much more focused on recruiting for attitude and much less focused on skills experience. I'm not saying those things aren't important, of course they are. But we've changed those things there. Our very first conference as EPIC I said to the staff, I'm going to ask you to go back to your offices today and take out the council's performance management system called the REAL framework, R E A L, which stood for something, I can't remember what it was.

And I want you to take it out, and I want you to rip it up, and I want you to chuck it in the bin. The recycle bin, because we're a social enterprise. And the cheers to the rafters. Now that process was brought in by the council, by a group of consultants, starting at senior management level, getting through to staff, was deeply unpopular.

It got to about February each year, and you would get an email from HR, and it would say, it's time to start your real framework assessments. The sigh around Kensington and Chelsea registered on the Richter scale. That how popular that was. I said, okay, so we're going to rip it up. We're going to rip it up, we're going to get rid of it.

But that's not the end of the story. Today we're going to design our own performance appraisal. And we're going to design it at this conference, and it's going to be the performance appraisal and recruitment tool that we are going to use as EPIC, and you're going to do the work. So. We asked them two questions in the workplace.

What do you expect of yourself? And what do you expect of your colleagues? And threw it open to the floor. But in the middle of the day we had 48 attributes that staff wanted in the performance framework. 48, that's clearly unmanageable. So we said we had to narrow it down. So the rest of the day we spent Trying to narrow that down to, we were aiming for about eight.

It got very heated. In fact, this is a photograph of the conference. It got really absolutely, no that's not true. I just made that up. It's not, but it got very heated and I liked that. I wanted people to be engaged in it. And I remembered when we brought the real framework into Kensington and Chelsea.

Did that get heated when we were discussing, were people arguing, I don't think this should be in here. I think this Yeah, thank, oh yeah, alright, real framework. Yeah, I'll go and do it, yeah, cheers. I mean, that was the level of engagement. Now we have staff who are designing their own performance and recruitment framework and arguing the hell out of it and get very upset when their particular piece, their particular, favourite didn't, didn't get in.

And that's great, because that shows true engagement. And it didn't cost us a penny, other than the cost of the conference for the day. And we have our own. Performance appraisal and recruitment tool. No expensive consultants. Nobody, brought in to tell us how to do it because they're an expert in behavioural science and competency frameworks.

We've done it for ourselves. And we use that now, in our recruitment processes and it's been incredibly successful because what we're looking for is people who are enthusiastic, who are committed to what we're doing, who are hardworking, who Who are really determined to make EPIC a success. Not necessarily people with degrees coming out of their ears, and several placements in different local authorities.

Again, I say that's not unimportant, but that's not what we're looking for first off. And we've got many good examples of that, of how that succeeded. And one of them sitting in the room. And she doesn't know I'm going to do this. I'm going to embarrass her terribly. Really. She's going red already. Ola's sitting here.

Now, Ola joined us as a volunteer, helping us with our social media setup and our IT, and website. Yeah, setting up the website which is very good, by the way. Then when we decided we needed somebody to do this full time, in the local authority, we'd have sent out a detailed job description advertising the Guardian at four and a half, five thousand pounds per advert, and got a lot of geeks applying, all of whom.

would have more experience, more degrees than Ola. So, Ola may not have even made it through to interview. But we didn't do, we went, we were looking for attributes. We're looking for people who are motivated, people who are really determined to help us in our task. Ola is our person. She is now so important to the organization that she has very, very unwisely asked me can she have three weeks leave to go on holiday with her new husband.

For Is it four? Four. Four, shit.

Ola: Now it's time to ask for five.

Brendan: Five. The organisation is already trembling with fear at the prospect of Ola not being there and I've booked my sick leave not to be around when she can't . So, yeah. So, I'm sorry for embarrassing you, Ola, but you've helped me out there. So, I'm going to wrap up now.

Just two examples. We've been using pre approval and we've been using the recruit for attitude. Not just for skill, and we are seeing the dividends. We are seeing, we're seeing staff be producing brilliant work when they're given real responsibility. And we're recruiting staff who are enthusiastic and keen, keen to learn, even if they haven't necessarily got all the skills.

The actual core skills that you're looking for, that keenness to learn. So, are we there yet? Have we, have we, have we hit that cultural change? Well, some of my managers who are really keen on this happy manifesto malarkey are getting, oh look, do you know, we're really pressing this, we're still getting staff whinging and moaning, we work so hard.

And they're still going on about all the old local authority stuff. Can I claim this much for my expenses? What happened to the bike allowance? These things, why are they still thinking these things are so important? And I'm just fed up of them. So, I said, look guys, look, this is a journey we're on. And we heard I've got a colleague.

Simon was it from John Lewis took that 21 year gap from John Spedden Lewis when he first thought up the idea till they finally put it into 21 years. I hope we can do a little bit quicker than that, but it gives a sense of how Long these culture shifts can change. So I said to a guy, look, if you just do a quick calculation, think of us, 160 staff, add up the number of years we've worked together in the public sector and get a sense of what we're up against.

And I added it up, it's about 800 years of public sector cultural experience sitting in our organisation. I thought, what happened 800 years ago, just to put a sense of perspective, I And well, the ink was still wet on the Magna Carta 800 years ago. So that gives you the sense of the task lying ahead.

So I asked, the staff said, well, where do you think we are now in terms of our journey? I said, well, I think we've got to about the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne. So you mean about 1956? I said no, 1540. That's, we still have a long way to go. It's QE1 I was talking about, not QE2. So a long way to go in terms of cracking that culture, but the trajectory is right, and we're definitely on the right path.

It's interesting what staff value, and what, because we, we can't pay huge sums of money to staff. And alongside Henry's great book, There's another book that I can strongly recommend to you. It's written by, some of you may have heard of it. It's by Harvard professor called Dan Pink. And he's written a book called Drive.

You know, you know it. The surprising truth about what motivates people. Well, the surprising truth is it's not money. And if you're in the public sector and you haven't got any money, that's a bloody good message to have out there. It's about recognition. It's about responsibility. In fact, pink shows lots of, if you want research, read Pink's book is, and it's not an academic, well, he is an academic book, but it's brilliantly written.

It's a great book. He gives lots of evidence to show that sometimes the awarding of bonuses and pay increases leads to a decrease in performance, not an increase. And the only sector of society, or the, or, or, business where money really seems to drive performance, you'll not be surprised to hear, is in the financial sector.

But pretty much everywhere else is about recognition, about being valued, getting autonomy to do the job, being given responsibility, being given freedom. Very much the principles of the Happy Manifesto. So, where are we? Yeah, so, anyway, Magna Carta, just to give you a sense of it. I just love this slide.

We're looking for saxophone playing hamsters. This is my metaphor with staff. They thought I lost it a bit when I showed them this. But really, it is about There is actually a huge amount of untapped talent and creativity in the public sector. It's absolutely, But the systems suppress it so acutely. It doesn't show often enough.

Now we've had to take ourselves completely outside of the local authority to unleash that talent. But I do wonder if there are better ways of doing it. Oh, not a better way, maybe, maybe easier ways of doing it. Whether more public sector organisations can adopt these principles without necessarily having to go to the absolutely bonkers lengths that we did by taking ourselves out away from So I'm going to leave you with that and just a question then, really.

Just think about this for a moment. How would the public sector be experienced by its customers if it were run on Happy Manifesto principles? Just think if the tube was an employee led mutual. What would it, what would it be like? What would your, how would your receptionist in your surgery behave if he, she were thinking along Happy Manifesto principles?

What would it look like? Now, some of you use John Lewis, Dom who was here earlier, you'll have used websites that are hosted by him, but all of you use public services, all of you. So what would it look like, how would it feel, if these principles were being applied?