Dan’s Weeknotes 2022–07–22

Hi there. Thanks for stopping by.

I feel totally wrung out by this week. Right here at the start I’ll state that there are some things I can’t write about on the internet. That is not to be a tease, they are not interesting. This is professionalism. These things are difficult though, yesterday in particular I was consumed and couldn’t switch off. I’m grateful for the support available, one colleague in particular has been brilliant.

Then also Monday and Tuesday were record breakingly hot in London (UK) and it was so unpleasant I can’t even. Afterwards everything outside smelled like an empty takeaway pizza box. The hot wind blowing on Tuesday was like an oven draft. There was a grass fire down the road from me in Leytonstone and they closed the roads. Houses burned down further east in the city. It was very bad and I experienced the two days as something to endure, like a bout of illness.

When I wrote about it last time I talked about feeling like I’m living on the edge of a global catastrophe that right there in plain sight and nobody’s doing anything about it. I was reminded of the heatwave in India and Pakistan earlier this year. That was appalling. And of course once again much of the media coverage here in the UK was disgusting¹. Particularly the contrarian talking heads harking back to 1976 and suchlike. This is the defining issue of our times. Its reality should not be up for debate in any way.

One of the tough things to manage at work is when there are such wild swings between good and not good, often in the course of one day. Between one meeting and the next even. Plus I don’t know about you but I am convinced my concentration has taken a battering as a result of the past couple of years. Not across the board, I can pay attention much of the time at least. But getting into the thing I need to work at for a couple of hours type stuff is noticeably harder than it used to be.

A good thing was putting together the monthly update from the team for the Product Board, one of our internal governance boards. As the months go on we’re getting more momentum, more variety, things getting delivered, and outcomes achieved. It’s great. And I appreciate not writing it all myself, but rather getting contributions from the leads in the data science team.

Another good thing was some unsolicited feedback I got from a colleague about the ‘Start the week with data’ sessions I’ve been running on Monday mornings. So positive. Made me feel like I’m doing a good thing.

We had our monthly team meeting focused on wellbeing and development. A really nice session, good vibes. Bit sad I couldn’t go in to the London office to see some of the team in person. Suzanne (data science lead) did a superb show and tell about her experiences visiting a couple of the 260ish local Citizens Advice recently. It was so insightful. The main thing I recognise here is just how different these organisations (which are independent charities in their own right) can be. And that plays out in the data too — aggregating at the highest ‘national’ level doesn’t always tell the best story or give the best insight.

Tom (chief analyst) was away on Wednesday so I led the fortnightly session we run looking at the trends on our Service Dashboard. The Service Dashboard is one of our main data products and it brings together a wide variety of operational data from across our channels and services. The strength of the fortnightly session (which is open to all staff at the national Citizens Advice organisation) is that you get to sit in the narrative of what’s happening in our service as it changes. I think it’s great. This week one of the main takeaways for me was how we started this product during the pandemic and that led us to make certain choices about what data to track. Now, conditions are different² and we need to adapt. An example would be the significant increase in demand for advice about fuel vouchers as a result of the cost of living crisis.

Another thing I did was a regular 5 minute data update to the leadership team I’m in at our weekly meeting. This involves me doing some research up front. There’s something odd happening with demand for advice about Universal Credit. It’s there in society from what I can see in certain data, but it’s not presenting at Citizens Advice in the way I’d expect. One to investigate further.

Part of the 5 minute update process is a commitment to writing it up. I didn’t get around to that this week, along with a long list of other things. Sadness.

Finally I got really wound up about the latest round of staff survey results from the team. We do this survey twice a year across the national organisation. We use a system from Workday. I have slight misgivings about the principle behind the method. I have stronger misgivings about how the results are interpreted. To my point earlier about aggregating at the highest level or in this case looking at the headline figure it doesn’t tell the best story or provide the actionable insight. And finally there’s something about the inevitability of an anonymous survey leading to staff providing feedback on structural issues outside of a team leader or manager’s control BUT the burden of responsibility for that feedback falling on said team leader or manager regardless.

All that said, it is all rather useful and I appreciate it. Still, from an initial look at my results this time round I am disappointed. They are not as positive as I’d expected given recent 360 feedback I received and my day to day experience of working with the team. Let alone all the work I’ve put in since the start of the year to change and improve our collaboration and regular practices. There are some positives — recognition is definitely improved. Strategy is really strong. Autonomy is good. There are several positive references to wellbeing including mental health. But hey I can’t lie I was hoping for a higher score³.

And also with the rather useful there are some clear areas for attention, including one (growth and learning) that we’ve explicitly tried to address and that clearly hasn’t worked. I wanted to get across this with a write up before the end of the week but again that ended up uncrossed on the long list of other things too. Sadness, sadness.

That’ll do. Hope you’re keeping well, and thank you for reading.

Footnotes

¹ I went to write irresponsible but that doesn’t cut it

² Although there’s still a pandemic

³ Yes this is ironic given everything I said in the paragraph above but I want to win at staff survey ok?