Mike Dymond, chair of the Finance Forum and chair of the recently held Finance HR and IT Conference, takes a look at the main issues stemming out from the successful conference held at the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel with over 130 delegates attending and a sold out exhibition.
Mike Ruddock commenced proceedings with his view of the leadership challenge faced by us all. He talked about the common identity and goals that teams share and how they strive towards achieving common objectives whilst sharing a common fate!
He underlined how important two-way effective communication is so that everyone knows what the team strategy is. He used film clips (The Office, Borat) to drive home some important lessons about how to interact with your staff. He demonstrated how success attracted positive feeling to the team and conversely how quickly this positiveness can be undone.
James Denny talked to us about the Technology Challenge and in particular the 21st Century Network. He talked about BT’s strategy in terms of defending traditional revenues whilst growing new wave technology and the figures highlighted were staggering! Themes emerging from this discussion included:-
All of the above have been achieved by introducing a flexible working policy.
James finished by requesting that we as individual HA’s and as a sector – should be aligning our businesses to utilise the 21st Century Network.
The Efficiency Agenda Session saw Richard Clark from WAG-Value Wales talk about the Making Connections Programme – bringing together the strands to improve public services. He referred to Sir Jeremy Beecham’s Report – taking stock of where we are but focusing upon the need to speed things up and the positive impact that the introduction of Local Service Boards would have – joined up public body thinking.
Nick Bennett referred to the quote of "efficiency being intelligient laziness" He expanded upon which Richard had said touching upon:-
Chris O Meara echoed Nick’s points stressing that the efficiency agenda was on everyone of the 4 Federations work plans.
She urged that we need to promote our uniqueness of not being either public nor private sector but a unique sector working in partnership with Government delivering focused services. The goalposts are forever moving and we, as a sector have wishes/demands that must be addressed to enable us to operate more effectively, such as:-
Chris O’Meara’s final point was a request for a specific Welsh Review - an independent review to be undertaken by someone trusted and respected by both sides to come up with workable solutions.
Phillipa Davies, Author and Psychologist ensured the 9am Day two slot was lively and fun as she talked about how motivation/change is experienced by everyone – her term was `churn’ - constant change. In her unique way she talked about being demotivated and highlighted what the the tell tale signs were. She drew upon similarities between home life/work talking about pattern detection and everyone’s intrinsic motivation – perhaps most important learning from mistakes.
Nick Bennett rounded off the conference by outlining the PR campaign which has been initiated to promote the work of HA’s and change people’s perceptions about social housing. He outlined what the campaign looks like and discussed where will it head.
The conference gave us all a lot to take in and digest and as the title says – we will be raising our game to address the challenges ahead. Watch out for the flying envelopes.
Some presentations and handouts are available to download from the resource column to the right. However, should you wish to obtain copies of others which aren't there, please contact rhian-robinson@chcymru.org.uk.