Cornwall Council flipped digital training on its head to focus on job-specific needs and frustrations, with digital as the hidden solution – saving a million minutes of staff time.
What was the challenge?
Employees tended to avoid all non-essential training due to lacking time and permission. Digital training was often seen as a ‘nice to have’ and therefore avoided.
What they did
The Council re-designed digital training to focus on job-specific inefficiencies and how to address them with digital solutions, rather than focusing directly on technology. This included rebranding digital training to remove the term ‘digital.’
The Council has two main digital training offers, both of which downplay technology:
- The ‘Immersion Programme’ – workshops to help employees identify their own digital solutions The programme brings together groups of staff from similar roles to work on process improvements – with an expert facilitator to explain how digital tools could help. Groups learn about continuous improvement concepts and design new processes – for 1 day a week over 8 weeks.
The first cohort were front-line workers from regulatory services (e.g., restaurant inspectors, civil enforcement officers) many of whom struggled with numerous paper forms.The group identified new ways to streamline these processes, sometimes with something as simple as a Microsoft form, but often introducing automation too. Success is measured against improvements in Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost, Morale and Environment. After strong results, the Council have run seven more sessions and are hiring an extra facilitator.
- ‘A Better Way’ – the rebranded digital training platform
The Council worked with an external agency to develop a digital messaging playbook that avoids off-putting language, such as ‘‘digital’ and instead talks about better ways of working.To drive interest in training, the Council asks workers at away-days to fill in postcards about daily frustrations and what they would improve about their ways of working.The Digital Skills team then reviews and addresses the submissions, finding that roughly 85% are digital quick wins that could have a significant impact. In response, the team:
- Sends links to relevant online digital resources (for the majority of issues).
- Invites employees with similar challenges to joint workshops (if potential improvements could have a major impact).
The results
The first ‘Immersion Programme’ as a whole generated savings of nearly a million minutes of officer time, while rebranding training as ‘A Better Way’ increased interest in digital training from negligible levels to 25% of message recipients.
Interview with Chloe Rickard, Digital Future Academy Lead at Cornwall Council.
For more on how cross-sector employers are building suessful digital skills programmes and boosting the digital capability of their workorces, see the ‘Learning that clicks’ report from FutureDotNow.
