Apolitical · How Wigan Drove Change By Putting People First

Imagine being asked to identify and cut £140 million from your budget. Rather than shrink away, the former chief executive of the UK’s Wigan Council, Donna Hall, saw clearly that things were going to have to change.

“We were faced with a burning platform,” she said. “And it gave us an opportunity to completely rethink our role as an institution and the relationship between the council and the community.”

This rethink became “the Wigan Deal”, the Council’s strategy for change in the face of such deep cuts. The Deal, struck in 2012, was an informal agreement between Wigan Council and the residents of the town, designed to help them work together to create a better place to live.

Wigan Council was unafraid to have one single strategy, with one name — giving clarity and purpose to its public servants. But kickstarting a change program at this scale requires a laser focus on your process and the people working alongside you. How did Wigan manage it?

“A constancy of purpose”

Wigan, a former mining town near Manchester in the North West of England with a population of 325,000, was identified as the UK’s third-most cut local government area in the early 2010s.

But the town was no stranger to innovative thinking. Among other experimental work, in 2011-12 some of the council’s adult services team had been seconded to work with Dr Robin Pharoah, a consultant and expert in ethnographic methods, on a local currency project called the “Wigan Pound”.

Pharoah trained the council staff to help out with his research, which included giving them a grounding in ethnographic techniques.

This research approach looks at people in their cultural setting. It emphasises the importance of removing preconceptions — thinking with a "blank mind" — and taking the time to listen and see the world through the eyes of the person being studied.

The research methods explore what is implicit as well as explicit, looking at what is not being said alongside what someone is telling you.

Staff were given the freedom and permission to try different things, with the understanding that failure would be shared

The results were a revelation. “I had the Director of Adult Social Care and Health come to me, asking ‘what have you done to my staff?’”, Pharoah remembered. His training reinvigorated the people involved: they returned to their day jobs with new insights into their interactions with citizens and each other.

In particular, working with Pharoah taught staff to build relationships with service users, considering their needs with a blank mind and without judgement, before taking any action on their behalf. It played on the values involved with reciprocity — that both parties had to have a stake in the interaction.

Following the team’s experiences on the Wigan Pound project, it was quickly decided that all staff were to be trained in ethnographic methods. This push was driven by the dynamism of the senior team, particularly Stuart Cowley, Director of Adult Social Care and Health, Pharoah said.

“Stuart really understood that there was potential to turn some of my thinking into a wholescale programme for change,” Pharoah said. “Then he made it happen in a way that was relevant and exciting for his staff”.

It didn’t stop there. The principle of understanding the perspective of the service user before building services was central to the Wigan Deal, and as such came to inform the council's entire corporate strategy from 2012 onwards.

And so The Deal is based on the principle of reciprocity: both parties have a stake in the Deal and duties to fulfil as part of the partnership.

As part of the Deal, local people were asked to recycle better, move more and look out for one another in exchange for the Council freezing local taxes and providing better public service delivery.

Later, in 2014, came the Staff Deal, which promised council staff opportunities to learn and grow in exchange for being efficient, flexible and professional.

The Deal became part of every interaction in every department. “We weren’t just going to do it in one pocket of one department,” said Hall. “It was about having the courage to roll it out at scale.”

This gave the council a constancy and consistency of purpose, Hall argued. “It was really clear what our new role would be, and then we stuck to it,” she said. “There was no chopping and changing plans and strategies. There was one strategy, one theme through everything: the Deal.”

The process of change

Despite the shared vision, there was no ‘Eureka’ moment, said Hall, but instead a series of tweaks made, risks taken and assessments carried out.

“It was much more: ‘let’s try this, see if it works,’” she said. “But there was a complete ban on pilots — when you pilot something, then often it’s so slow to be rolled out. So it ends up not happening at all.”

Staff were given the freedom and permission to try different things, as part of this shared vision, with the understanding that failure would be shared. “Not everything worked,” said Hall. “But a lot did.”

Three simple values were developed: be positive, be tangible to residents, and be courageous

Pharoah was heavily involved as a consultant. “Wigan would squeeze me like a sponge for the day,” he said. “I would be up on the train from London, and pulled from one meeting to the next. No time would be wasted.”

Change would happen quickly: it was instilled in staff that issues would be tackled head-on, rather than waiting for the next meeting.

Pharoah’s favourite example of the Council’s reflexiveness was after a realisation that people were often using terms like job titles that meant different things to different people.

“We were in a meeting, realised that this was a problem, and we stopped immediately, scrapping the agenda,” he said. “Instead, we made a glossary.”

Pharoah was impressed by the agile approach. “Normally what would happen is that a glossary would be put on an action list, perhaps given as a task to someone who wasn’t in the room,” he said. “We solved the problem, there and then, and it enabled us to move on.”

People power

The ethnographic approach didn’t just give Wigan a frame with which to overhaul the services it provided. It also reinvigorated it as an organisation, leading to the development of new organisational values for the council and a fresh approach to the personal development of staff.

This helped the council help its staff to survive and thrive amid the vast changes at play — both in terms of the innovative new projects being launched, and in terms of the large-scale cuts underway.

Three simple values were developed: be positive, be tangible to residents, and be courageous.

“These values drilled into every conversation that we had,” said Hall. Every appraisal and one-to-one meeting tapped becoming an opportunity to build a human connection. “The first question asked is always ‘how are you?’, rather than ‘where are you up to with the project?’”

Hall also led regular cross-council sessions, named “Listening in to Action”, where staff could ask any question they wanted. She used the app, Slido, so that staff could pose their questions anonymously, and then vote on those they wanted answering.

Projects run as part of the Deal have increased life expectancy in the town’s poorest areas by seven years

She’d be asked questions like “why did you want to be the chief executive?”, or “are you going to just head off and get another job?”, and would give frank answers in return.

Hall felt a responsibility to display physical leadership. “It’s important that staff get to know their leaders, knowing that they work for the leadership, rather than seeing themselves as a cog in the wheel,” she said.

This culminated in the “BeWigan” experience, launched in 2016: an interactive half-day of training for every public servant who worked for the Council, from refuse collectors to the Chief Financial Officer. The idea came from two sparky graduate trainees, who pitched the idea to Hall.

Frontline staff hosted the experience, taking their colleagues around a local government space which had been turned into a training centre. Attendees were taking to different physical zones exploring the Council’s past and future. The staff made pledges of commitment — 4000 in total — and were prompted to share their achievements on a graffiti wall.

Carried out by in-house staff, the training saved £100,000 compared to a traditional training course. It’s a small but significant saving, speaking to The Deal’s wider cost-cutting approach: the Council is on course to save £160 million following the step change.

And across the bigger picture, the Deal is changing lives: Hall is proudest that projects run as part of the Deal have increased life expectancy in the town’s poorest areas by seven years.

For the Council’s employees, Pharoah’s training has been adapted, with a bricks and mortar bespoke training space built inside a local shopping centre.

“When I saw it, it brought tears to my eyes,” he said. “It’s bureaucratised, but not in a bad way. They know it all now — they don’t need me anymore.” — Emma Sisk

Key takeaways

  • Wigan Council was unafraid to have one single strategy, with one name — giving clarity and purpose to its public servants
  • Process wasn’t intrinsic to its success: if something needed to be done, like the glossary, it was encouraged to scrap the process and focus on the problem in front of you
  • Donna Hall saw other people’s input as intrinsic to change. She reinvigorated the one-on-one system to put people’s emotional needs first. She took an idea from graduate trainees and made it a reality

[Picture credit: "Wigan Town Hall" by Reading Tom, licensed under CC BY 2.0]