The wonders of modern technology…

If you haven’t already guessed, we have all been very excited about the arrival of our video conference unit. This allows us to link with Glasgow on a much more personal level and communicate much more effectively. It has already proven very useful and we look forward to the benefits this bit of kit will deliver.

As mentioned in the previous blog "effective partnership" is one of our focus areas for the next 6 months and this is the first step in ensuring the geographical obstacles are minimised as much as possible!

Talking about "focus areas," my management team is in full swing, planning plans and shaping shapes in order to achieve the successes we identified in our 2 days offsite. I’m hoping to see some of these plans and resource requirements next week so we can focus on targets and assess the impact over the next 6 months. It is becoming apparent that this may be a tricky task as we are striving to achieve operational stability and good reputation -- and our plans will obviously involve a degree of change … We have to ensure the changes we implement are guaranteed to work or this will destabilise the operation and have a detrimental effect on our reputation.
The next 6 months are set to be very interesting!

On the "business as usual" front, this week we have appointed a new team leader in People Services. This is because we split one of our bigger teams -- the "Working" team -- in half. So: welcome on board Jacquii! We hope she settles into the hectic world of People Services well. We also have one our seniors moving into a different HR role and we wish her the best of luck.

This has also been "talkback" week. This time the entire co-op group has been asked to fill in a survey about what it’s like to work here. We’re waiting for results, and hope we can see more improvements since our internal interim survey.

Finally as you will remember from the last blog, my direct reports and I went offsite and came up with the four "focus areas." We have shared these with our HR business partners, who are fully on board with the plans and we are today sharing all our findings and plans for the next 6 months with everyone here in People Services. We believe it is of vital importance to keep everyone across the floor up-to-date and feeling involved in all the changes that occur and that will ultimately affect them. And of course then we share these with you…!

Until next time, I’m off to spy on Glasgow payroll …

Gary Booth