Donna Hall: Are you Really Listening? How to Better Hear People and Increase Happiness.

Maureen: Donna was the CEO of Wigan Council during the time it won Council of the Year, despite facing the third worst austerity cuts in the country. Her Wigan deal led to a 59% increase in resident satisfaction and a 7 year increase of life expectancy in the most deprived wards. The key was involving the citizens and the workforce rather than doing things for them. So, we would love to hear so much more Donna and I'm going to pass it over to you. Thank you.

Donna: That's great, thanks. Thanks Maureen. And, yeah, council of the century? I like that one, that sounds fantastic, good luck. 

I'm not going to talk about how amazing Wigan was, how perfect it was, because it wasn’t perfect by any stretch; but some of things we did, with staff in particular and around workforce, before, and engaging and listening differently to staff really did make a difference to the way that staff felt and to the culture. I overheard people talking about culture in the last presentation and that has always been really important to me as a Chief Exec, and now as a Chair in an NHS organisation in Bolton, and I've always kind of… I think I'm a frustrated OD person really, rather than a Chief Exec or a Chair, I just think it's so fundamental for organisations that senior leaders, and I heard the comment before under Chatham House Rules, really are interested in organisational development, in culture change, and in engagement: staff engagement as well as citizen engagement. So, going back to how we managed to be the best council to work for, according to Best Company; so we use… I don't know if any of you have used Best Company’s research to find out level of engagement but we were the top council in that, and quite close to the top for best public service organisation generally. It was, and again I'm not blowing my own trumpet, but it was my… The previous management team, that I inherited, were not that interested in what staff thought about the organisation; it was a well performing council but wasn't very engaging, quite paternalistic and that's the politicians and the senior leadership team, so there was no systematic listening at all; and one of the first things that I tried to do with my management team was to get them to listen. Not just as a one-off exercise, for everyday, systemically listening to what staff were telling us; whether it was in formal feedback or in very informal feedback, and we created something which was so simple to do and I just didn't understand why it wasn't being done everywhere else. I’d done it in a previous job, in Chorley which was a much smaller council, but it was called listening into action and it was basically listening to what staff thought. So groups of around 100 people sat at tables, having conversations, using Slido, challenging the management team. People thought it was a… they couldn't take it seriously when we first did it, 10 years ago, they just were terrified of saying anything that wasn't seen as the corporately right thing to say. But overtime that trust built and it built because we did this ‘you said, we did’ feedback loop, where if people have made a suggestion about how things could be better within the organisation or better at work for them, then we would say what we've done with it and that we were going to implement it, and that if we weren't why we couldn't. So, some fantastic ideas came from that session, in fact the whole idea of the Wigan deal was germinated in one of those sessions. I don't understand why senior leaders don't take on board the ideas of the frontline teams in that, sort of, systematic way, and also use those sessions as a bit of a Litmus test to find out what is the change in culture of the organisation and where do I need to poke and prod as a senior leader to make a difference? 

So building trust was fundamental, having those listening into action sessions, not just as a one-off. I've worked in organisations where you see the Chief Exec when they first start and they set out this grand vision and then you never see them again for the next, you know, for the next 5-10 years, and we've all been in places like that haven't we? So it needs to be systematic and it needs to be… we did it every two weeks: myself, the leader, the cabinet and the whole of the management team would do it; we did it not only with staff, so 6000 staff, but we also did it with communities. We had ‘have your say’ sessions in local communities, so really embedding listening; and not just tokenistic listening, a really different type of listening.

We used an anthropologist guy called Dr Robin Pharoah, who is based in London, a freelance anthropologist; he helped us to redesign the way that we listened, redesign the way that we… So we all became ethnographers, I don't know if anyone's ever studied ethnography? It's a type of anthropology where you basically walk in the shoes of the person, and that's what we did, again systemically. Every member of staff was trained in ethnographic techniques whether you were emptying the bins, whether you're a senior social worker, whether you are a midwife at the local hospital; we had this thing called ‘The Be Wigan’ experience which was training people in ethnography, in anthropology, in deep listening and then being able to, with what you've had, do something about it. And help to reshape and transform the organisation based on the things we weren't getting right. It takes a Chief Exec and a management team to be quite courageous to do that and to accept that you haven't got all the answers. And, being honest, some members of my management team didn't like working like that, they felt… It was a very paternalistic, top-down, transactional culture; so with the support of other politicians we made some changes and said goodbye to people, with dignity, who did not want to listen. Not just at the senior management team level but right the way through the organisation to the frontline. We wanted this very honest, very open culture: transformational not transactional, deep listening, listening to the voices of citizens when we were redesigning services, listening to the voices of staff when we were redesigning services. Bringing people together in integrated place based teams: the police, the hospital, GP practises, mental health services, drug and alcohol rehabilitation and housing, all together. Shared public services shared public servants, working with the same people but usually doing it separately. So having those, that's honestly the single biggest thing that I learnt as a chief exec was: empower frontline teams to do what they know in their heart is the right thing to do. So, if you had 7 integrated place based teams we worked on them, we built them up, and we trusted them. And empowered them. And they had written on the wall: ‘Don't do anything if it doesn't help the individual or the family.’ We found we were spending 80% of our time and money on some families, we were spending £250000-£500000 a year on transacting with that family and processing them through different bits of the public service system; whether it was criminal justice, education, housing, welfare benefits, you name it. And we worked with a woman called Hillary Cottam, I'm sure you’ve heard of her, she’d be good for one of your events actually if you haven't heard of her, but she's a great speaker. She's written a great book called Radical Help which is all about how the welfare state needs completely transforming and how we need to create the conditions for a good life for people rather than just processing them. Spending all of our time and money on the processing element and not building a relationship with them. So we embedded relational work across the children services, adult social care, environmental services, economic development, finance; you name it, we did it. And staff loved it and being really honest, this is the hard bit, the people who didn't want to do it were really, really honest with and said ‘look, this is what we are doing. You're either on this bus or get off this bus. We’ll help you off it with dignity’, and changing the mindset, and changing the leadership to be like that, and to think like that, it was honestly, it was such a liberating experience. And the King's Fund said, when it did an evaluation of it, it was that clarity of purpose and then constancy of purpose, so rather than keep having different strategies for everything there was this deal, this relational model, which held everything together. A relationship between frontline staff and the chief exec, and a relationship between citizen and the chief exec and the senior leaders. And that was it really. I hope that's ok, Henry? I hope I've not gone over time? 

Henry: You haven't gone over time at all let me put…

Donna: I'll carry on if you want.  [Laughs]

Henry: Alright folks! Do type into the chat there any questions that you've got. And also I'll share the link to Slido again. Do type in any questions there that you want to ask Donna. 

Donna, one particular example I love is the one about the swimming pools that you handed over to the community. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Donna: Yeah. So this is one of the first things we did, at the start of the deal, about 10 years ago. We were, as you said Henry, number 3 on the list of the most cut council's during austerity, and we knew that our assets were our residents. We had to make £106 million worth of savings but we knew that we had to build on the strengths of the local community, and Wigan’s quite a sporty place, lots and lots of really active sporting groups. And there's a swimming club called The Pelican Swimming Group, in Tyldesley if anybody knows it, and we were losing…  We had it as one of our outsourced leisure contracts, we were losing lots of money every week, and the swimming club came forward and said ‘we want to run it if you. Give us a budget, it will cost you less than it's costing you now. It'll be for local communities and we can get more people in because of the way that we have a different conversation with them.’. And we did it. And I remember the councillors were like ‘we can't do this! You can't just give away one of our assets!’, but within a month they were making a profit where we had made a loss. So it is that different way of thinking about your assets and how you use them and how you… It's building trust between citizen and state, and between staff and state. People living in our areas are very often working in the local areas. They are not two separate things; it's all the same thing. So building on strengths and having different conversations. 

Henry: Okay! So please can you tell us more about how you changed to ‘listen better’? What did you actually do differently?

Donna: We arranged events that were regular; and that never happened before, people did not see the Chief Exec or the Leader, they didn't know them, they didn't have a relationship with them. So that visibility, that getting the senior people out there, exposing them to what people really think. But people only do that in a place of psychological safety. So you need to get some early wins, to make sure you show that people are not going to be sacked if you say anything that you know is not corporate. And that the organisation will change as a result of it, rather than it just being tokenistic: ‘Oh yeah, that's very good… we'll get back to you on that’. You actually make a decision there and then in the meeting about doing something differently. The beauty of it was myself and the Leader, Peter Smith, we were able to make decisions there and then, based on the suggestions. For example: when we won ‘Council of the Year’ someone suggested that we should give everyone their birthday off, to say thank you, and Peter just looked at me and I said ‘can we do it?’ and he went [nods], so we did it! 

[laughter]

And that had come from the floor. So it's that kind of simple thing. We did something, which I might have told you this, Henry before, about sickness absence; so, again, having an asset based approach isn't just about physical assets, it's about other things. So the goodwill in public services is what keeps us going, I think, and the goodwill, particularly in the NHS and in councils… But sickness was a real issue in Wigan. We had a high level of short-term absence so we did things like introduce days where people if they were struggling to get childcare or if they were struggling because they weren't feeling 100% it wasn't sickness, but they could make the time up in another way. And we also had an attendance reward scheme. So thinking about: rather than a deficit model, so punishing people who have been off sick, let's reward people for coming in on a regular basis. So, the attendance reward scheme was the best bit of my job, I loved it. Every month if you weren’t off sick you went into a prize draw and you won £1,000 if your name came out of the bag. The cost of that £12,000 vs god knows how many thousands spent on interim agency staff, backfilling posts. Our sickness halved in a year, for short-term absence.

Henry: Wow.

Donna: It was called the attendance reward scheme because people were like: ‘well I'm going to go in and try and win that £1,000’, and I had to ring them up, that was my job, I had to ring them up and tell them that they’d won £1000. And I’ll never forget, I went to ring up somebody, who was one of our bin loaders, he was emptying the bins basically, and there's a rumour going round the depot; people had been pretending to be me ringing people up to say that they won £1000. So when I actually did ring him up, on his mobile, he said: ‘Eff off!’ and put the phone down, because he thought it was someone pretending to be me.

[Laughter]

Henry: Wow! Dina, you've got a similar example, tell us about it. Or that you want to do. 

Dina: Yes. A council that aren't like that at all, Chatham House Rules here, so there's a leisure centre that closed down, they built a £23 million new one that's very traditional with swimming and badminton, that kind of thing; and their old one we have social enterprise partners that are ready and willing: parkour, indoor skatepark, creative space and we just want them to listen and to give us a chance. They've gone to consultants in Gateshead, you know hundreds of miles away, to get some advice which then they've not even followed because they don't like it. And it's all behind closed doors and we're trying to influence at all levels: officers, councillors and, yeah… So any tips? Or if you could speak to them or something? Just to show that it is possible. I don't think that they believe that this kind of thing can happen.

Donna: I think it's just showing them the art of the possibility. But people… you know, I forget because I've been out of local government, I've forgotten just how… When I go to meetings now, to support them and also in the NHS, I just find there’s this obsession with governance and an obsession with, you know, making sure that every step of the decision-making process is spot on; but less so about relational working and trying new things and transformation. I think we spend an inordinate amount of time on the process, and they probably think the Gateshead consultants are the best but they have not considered anything else. Have not considered local alternatives. So I think it's just showing them the art of the possible; it took us 2 1/2 years to be able to transfer the swimming pool, you know. It's that mindset shift from ‘what we've always done’ to ‘what could be done/what is possible’ and senior decision makers… My view is that public services are broken. If we continue with the current model of public service the demand is going to kill us, whatever the government decides to do in terms of funding doesn't matter, because demand… I know the hospital that I chair gets really a lot of money donated every year, more than the council, but the demand from local people is outstripping the resources that are there. So we've got to think differently: about prevention, about building stronger communities, and about asset based working and strength based working. And creating that good life that Hilary talks about in Radical Help. 

Henry: Donna, we've got a couple of little bits of feedback on your thing. Would it punish people with disabilities or who were genuinely sick? 

Donna: No, not at all. And it was always said that this was not to punish people who are ill. We want to reward people who are coming… it was one aspect of our attendance management policy, it wasn't the whole thing, and we provided lots of support for people who are, you know, off with long-term conditions or bereavement or all sorts of things that go on in people's lives. It wasn't just on its own, it wasn't this macho ‘I've been to work and I've won £1000’ it was just one thing. It's just a small way of saying thank you to the staff for coming in when they might have had stuff going on in their personal lives. And you know there's always that kind of… there was always that kind of compassionate, empathetic management: we did lots of work on listening as part of the one-to-ones and part of appraisals so that… If you're fed up at work the reason is probably that you don't get on with your line manager… 

Henry: Yep, yep.

Donna: … so spending time on that relationship really focuses on building, on strengthening that relationship, making it much more relational instead of transactional. We did something called My Time which was a kind of structured one-to-one, which starts off with… well, the first question is: how are you? Not ‘where are you up to with this project?’ or ‘why have you been late 3 times this week?’, it's: how are you? How are you in yourself? How are your family? How is everything going? And that's… you know, very often, that is not what happens in a management or supervision kind of conversation and, again, all of it was done with the anthropologist, with Robin. I really recommend him and he’d be a good speaker for one of your events, actually Henry. 

Henry: Okay! I might get him along. And someone asked that: what difference did the ethnographer make? How did it work? 

Donna: He started by training us, as a senior leadership team, in how to listen to each other, staff and to residents. He challenged some of our ways of working. He did this thing that he created, he’ll tell you all about it if you invite him. called The Blank Mind. So, it's how do you  create a blank mind? Because of our neural synapses and how we filter information selectively, based on what happened before. How do we actually deprogram ourselves to deeply listen? It started in social care, in adult social care, where we had people prescribing the most expensive package of care for people without really understanding what they wanted, and what they liked, and how they lived their lives, the reality of their lives. So we started by retraining social workers to listen differently. They used ethnographic techniques. The ethnographer, someone's posted in the chat, was Dr Robin Pharaoh. Pharaoh as in the Egyptian king not the airport in Portugal. [Laughter] but he's really good, and I can recommend him. I can send you his email address Henry, if that's of use?

Henry: That would be very useful, yes that would be very useful. Right, okay, that's really great Donna. Amazing, amazing. Oh! One other thing: did you influence other councils?

Donna: Did I what? Sorry Henry.

Henry: Did it influence other councils?

Donna: Yeah, yeah it did. Manchester City Council took it and called it Our Manchester. It doesn't have to be a deal, it can be whatever you want to make it. You know, I think the principles are: listening to staff, deep listening to staff, different conversations, integrated place based teams, focusing on values and behaviours, and empowering the teams in the frontline practice to do the right thing. So those are the principles, call it whatever you like. It's not about a brand but it's about something that holds together a system, a place and a workforce; in really challenging times. You know, I don't know how much more can be thrown at charities and public services at the moment. There's so much, and the cost of living increases happening now…

Henry: It's terrible.

Donna: Yeah, so we need to try something different you know? If we're going to get through the next 5 to 10 years we're going to have to try something different. If you haven't read Radical Help, I sound like Hilary’s salesperson for her book, but I would read it; because it describes a different state, and that's what we need to create with citizens.

Henry: So that's Radical Help by Hilary Cottam?

Donna: Yes, that's it, that's it.

Henry: Good. There we go. Okay, thank you Donna. Big round of applause for Donna. 

[Applause]

Donna: Awww thank you. Lovely to see you all. 

Henry: Will get people to ask you questions. But first of all I’ll ask people: what would it be like to truly listen to your staff and your customers?