Thursday 26th April 2007, 09:04Inspirational People I’ve said in previous Blogs that one of the things that inspires me is the people who work in A4e to drive the business day in day out. That applies to both our front line staff and the leaders in our business. Last week we held our One Vision conference and our IPL (Improving People’s Lives) awards. I was delighted to be at a table with all our award nominees who had some fantastic stories of how they deliver front line public services to a variety of different customers. I sat next to the winner – Neil – who was fantastic in his commitment to the work he does with young offenders.
It was also great to spend time talking to the leaders within A4e. Most of my time is spent outside the organisation – working with governments in one guise or another tackling difficult challenges in public service reform. Seeing representatives from eight countries represented amongst our teams, sharing experience, challenging one another’s perspective to improve services for our customers, presenting their views and ideas back to 320 people, and doing so in creative, innovative ways was a delight. Three years ago we were all UK based and it was inspirational to see the import and export of best practice and the transfer of skills to new markets and countries.
One of my tasks is to make sense of A4e’s strategy. Make the diverse range of services, across different countries, hang together in a meaningful way. During my presentation at One Vision I showed a picture of a township in South Africa and asked a simple question – if you were responsible for public services here, where would you start? Housing, enterprise, water, skills development, education services, job creation???? That sums up our challenge. It sums up A4e’s business.
And from there to a strategy day on the Primary Care Trust today where I am a non-executive. One of the things we talked about was people’s expectations of health services and press coverage of all the problems. We also talked about the massive improvements in services driven by the staff in the PCT and the challenge of how we need to tackle inequality in access to services, as well as be more proactive in getting the balance of individual responsibility for health and well being alongside improving the services provided. We were also tackling how to improve morale for the staff who care passionately about their work but often see only negative coverage in the media. Made me think about IPL – a small thing we do that needs to be reflected in some way for all people who deliver public services in the private, public and voluntary/community/faith sectors. Emma came up with a crazy idea for an ‘Oscars’ for public servants – maybe it’s not so crazy.
Recognition, saying thank you, is important. I make sure I do it every day to people inside and outside the business but you can never do too much. So for all our teams, stakeholders, clients, customers, partners – everyone – thank you for the stuff you do.
Mark
Back to posts by Mark LovellContact Mark Lovell |
Mark Lovell's Archive
|