Hi all, thanks for clicking through to read my latest update.
I’ve now moved into the new office on E1, right hand side of the lifts in E block, County Hall. If the blinds are up feel free to come and say hi, I genuinely would like it if you did. And as I’ve said I’m still working my way around and putting in the diary opportunities to meet more of you. For now, a few things I’ve been part of recently that I wanted to share with you:
- A meeting and presentation with colleagues from our Customer teams where I learnt about the insight and information, we have available to us through the complaints and contact from our customers. A staggering 15,000 complaints a year. There is a lot of learning and rich information we can take from that. I talk often about how interested I am in continuously improving customer experience, what our residents really need from us, and what they don’t! What more can we do? So for me I took away to think about how as an organisation we can make use of that insight and how we share that with others in the interests of our residents.
- A team day bringing all Essex Chief Execs and Essex Leaders together. An important meeting for us and one that left me thinking that while we don’t always agree, we are in a place where we can respectfully disagree and continue to talk and work together to do the best we can. At the meeting we set out our principles for how we will work together based on our shared values and that will help us design the public services of the future with the interests of our residents and businesses front of mind.
- I was invited to attend an Ambitious Women (AW) in Essex event at our Chelmsford Library. For anyone who doesn’t know, this is a growing community supported by colleagues from our Sustainable Growth team with regular networking events around the county, online webinars and guest speakers. This session was in celebration of International Women’s Day and in collaboration with our Essex Libraries team. Thank you to Cathy Whitaker (Libraries team), a great host and Eve Calderbank, founder of AW for your hard work (and the invite). I enjoyed hearing from the other two speakers - Inspector Leanne Archer from Essex Police and Cllr Lesley Wagland.
- On Wednesday of this week as a Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) we held our bi monthly strategic planning meeting. At this session we spent some time looking at performance and some of the key things we do in Essex, such as education, our outcomes, social mobility, and housing growth. We focused our conversation and thinking on how we can really continue to improve in light of Local Government Reorganisation and having a mayor.
Additional information
Book on to one of the April Devo/Local Government Reorganisation employee briefings.
Thanks to everyone who responded with feedback on the first update a couple of weeks ago. You also helped by sharing thoughts on what and how you want to hear from me and engage in the future. I really appreciate your time. Please continue to feedback – on this update – and thoughts for future communications and engagement.
Picture 1 - Cathy Whitaker and Nicole
Picture 2 (on right) Cathy Whitaker, Leanne Archer, Eve Calderbank, Nicole and Cllr Lesley Wagland
Pictured: Our Corporate Leadership Team as part of the away day on Tuesday 25 March.