The start of the global pandemic required many leaders to pivot their organisations to working in new ways. This required taking risks that previously may have seemed almost unimaginable. In many cases these changes have gone far better than could be expected and led to improved services. However, serious challenges remain as we look to the future. For many there will be significant backlogs in our ‘business as usual’ activity as we spent the last year delivering new and adapted services. Also, while risks may have been mitigated over the past year, in the long term these risks will need to be properly addressed.

What are the strategic changes that we would like to keep?

Business planning and risk management processes have largely been shown to work, and in most cases have been flexible enough to cope with major overhauls of operations. Staff have built capability in managing these processes that have become integral  to the way organisations work.

The shift to online, flexible working, and our ability to increasingly deliver services effectively through technology has often been more positive than expected. Where in the past we may have been reticent to expect a certain demographic to use online services, the transition has been a lot smoother than expected.

The relationship between staff and the organisations and leaders they have been working for has changed dramatically over the past year. Many leaders recognised the opportunity, and requirement, to lead differently to accommodate the increased and very varied strains that staff were under. While this has posed challenges, there is consensus that for many staff there is pride in what has been achieved with their employer over the year. For many organisations they have seen a bumper year for productivity. Leaders will want to hang onto this pride and the positive culture that has been developed.

However, there are clear upcoming challenges that we will face in running our organisations, and building a strategy around these will not be easy.

Managing backlogs built up over the past year will not be easy. It will require prioritisation, strong planning and potentially the opportunity to try again new ways of doing things. A big concern linked to this is staff burnout. To meet this backlog is likely to require us to persuade the same people to rise again to this challenge. Continuing the use of creative and flexible processes to make the most of our employees is likely to be important, but leaders expectations may also be more challenging to employees as we consider for example ‘hybrid’ working solutions.

Some services are best delivered face to face. For the public there will be nervousness about whether our locations are Covid secure, and for staff used to working at home they may not recognise the need to deliver these services in person. The balance here will be to weigh up the customer need against that of the employee, and then determine a hybrid working solution that colleagues value. For many organisations this will be a journey towards a hybrid solution, one that is, potentially, continuously refined. Key here will be ongoing communications that demonstrate why these solutions are put in place.

There is concern of an increasing disconnect between leaders and colleagues, in particular say younger colleagues or those with child caring responsibility. The pandemic has impacted us all in different ways and any strategy will need to recognise that employees, and indeed the public who receive our services, are coming out of it with very different experiences and disruptions.

To make hybrid systems work will therefore probably require trust, with employees recognising they also have responsibility to make it work. Colleagues will need to find their own way through the transition given the differing experience we have all been through. The role of leaders, as ever, will be to inspire colleagues that this can work, being a role model for the kind of working pattern you expect to see in your staff.  

In summary, being able to deliver services digitally and remotely has been vital over the past year, but it can be seen as a monochrome service. A persuasive argument for getting people out of the home, albeit flexibly, will be to demonstrate again the value of seeing places and meeting people in person. In the context of board meetings, the opportunity for ‘discursive meandering’ is still valued. Ideally a hybrid solution will demonstrate that we can have the best of both.

Thank you to Chris Perkins, Public Sector lead at Microsoft UK, Dr Helen Philips, Chair of the Legal Services Board and Chesterfield Royal Hospital and Peter Schofield CB, Permanent Secretary at DWP for joining our speaker panel.