The Evolve Workplace Wellbeing Podcast
The Evolve Workplace Wellbeing Podcast
Moving to agile working in policing
In this podcast, Professor Sara Connolly speaks with Chief Inspector Steve Kerridge from Cambridgeshire Constabulary. They discuss the constabulary's move to more agile working during the COVID-19 pandemic and how a research collaboration with the Workplace Wellbeing Research team at the University of East Anglia fed into the team's creation of the 'Checklist for the Pro-active Management of Remote Workers'. Steve explains the benefits of using this evidence-based tool and explores some of the barriers and enablers of more agile, hybrid or remote approaches to work post-pandemic.
This podcast is part of a toolkit of free, evidence-informed workplace wellbeing resources provided by the Workplace Wellbeing Research Team based at the University of East Anglia, in the UK. You can find the checklist to read and download at: Checklist offers pro-active approach to managing hybrid workers - evolveworkplacewellbeing.org
00:00:05:03 - 00:00:37:08
Helen Fitzhugh
Welcome to the Evolve Workplace Wellbeing Podcast. This podcast is part of a toolkit of free evidence-informed Workplace wellbeing resources provided by the Workplace Wellbeing Research Team, based at the University of East Anglia in the UK. You can find the resources on www.evolveworkplacewellbeing.org . The contents of the toolkit draw upon cutting edge multi-disciplinary research on workplace wellbeing, including insider insights and case studies.
00:00:38:06 - 00:00:55:23
Helen Fitzhugh
We want to help you take evidence-informed action to help your business evolve and thrive. Every six weeks, a member of our team will introduce you to a new piece of research and to someone whose life experience puts a human face on that same research topic.
00:00:56:22 - 00:01:31:23
Sara Connolly
Great. Hello. My name's Sara Connolly. I'm Professor of Personnel Economics at Norwich Business School, and I'm part of the Evolve Workplace Wellbeing Team. And we're here today to talk with Chief Inspector Steve Kerridge of Cambridgeshire Constabulary, who's the project manager for the Constabulary's move to an agile working future. Steve, we worked together back in the first lockdown of COVID on the Agile Working Project - or the move that the constabulary made towards Agile working during that lockdown.
00:01:32:08 - 00:01:41:01
Sara Connolly
I wondered if you could say a little bit about the context of work at the Constabulary and why this was such a big a big shift for you?
00:01:41:03 - 00:02:05:08
Steve Kerridge
Absolutely. And thank you for having me. So today. Yes. So, our work commenced at the very early stage of the first lockdown in 2020. So the constabulary was a fairly traditional workplace in terms of people going to the same place of work every day, quite traditional in terms of the 9 to 5 for those who of course would be working in the office environment and of course the 24 / 7 cover that we would have in place.
00:02:05:08 - 00:02:34:10
Steve Kerridge
As with every organization, March 2020, the Prime Minister's unprecedented announcement, we found ourselves, as all organizations did in trying to juggle with understanding how we could keep people safe, what lockdown meant in terms of providing for our customers, for our communities, how we keep our staff safe, but also a unique element for policing the potential to have to work with legislation and actually enforce what the government was talking about.
00:02:34:10 - 00:02:55:02
Steve Kerridge
So a multifaceted problem for us with some of those additional elements for policing. But we found ourselves in a situation where, of course we needed to respond, we needed to comply and we were moving from an almost 100% workplace presence to then having to think about how we could deliver our services in different ways in compliance with those restrictions so that led to our work.
00:02:56:02 - 00:03:14:03
Steve Kerridge
It led to some very early considerations around how we could make that work effectively for us. And of course, with such short notice, we had to just make that happen. We had to look very carefully at it. What we deliver is a very diverse range of services delivered within modern policing, as you can imagine, from both the warranted officers and support staff.
00:03:14:03 - 00:03:37:17
Steve Kerridge
And we had to make decisions, we had to put things in place. So we started with what we felt was a sound set of decisions to make that happen. But what we worked out very early on was two things. One was there was the necessity to continue to plan for the future and to make sure that we weren't just responding in a spontaneous way, that we were planning ahead for perhaps a prolonged period of working in this way.
00:03:37:22 - 00:04:07:10
Steve Kerridge
But what we also did is - what we try to do in policing - is whenever we deal with something, we deal with the here and now and we start to think about what's the recovery from it, so what are the opportunities and the risks, what can we learn from as we go forward? So our work, collaboration together really started from when we began to look at ‘what does the recovery piece look like?’ And if we're working in this way and we can do it successfully, there inevitably will be some dis benefits, some challenges, but potentially a great number of benefits that we could look at.
00:04:07:16 - 00:04:32:01
Steve Kerridge
So really our interaction with the Business School was starting to really understand not just some of the quantitative detail about what that could mean for us, but starting to delve down, particularly into using expertise to understand some of the qualitative impact, the effect on how people are operating in the workplace on wellbeing. And that really started off the initiative and coming together to close that gap.
00:04:32:19 - 00:05:02:16
Sara Connolly
Right. Thank you very much. So yes, all of our study was a multi-faceted study. We started with some scoping discussions with key decision makers like yourself. We ran a baseline survey when we understood, you know, people's normal working patterns and how those had had shifted. And then we ran a daily diary. So, we were able to track how individuals encountered this shift in their working and the impact on their wellbeing.
00:05:02:16 - 00:05:19:17
Sara Connolly
And then we conducted some interviews with people to really understand their experience. And so the focus of our study was really on the barriers and enablers specifically. And I wondered what your key takeaway messages were from that.
00:05:20:22 - 00:05:56:19
Steve Kerridge
Two overarching takeaways: for me, the key thing was very much around the wellbeing focus and I think the key takeaways I would suggest from this project first and foremost would be a complete change for line management. So, one of the things that came from this is, is understanding how line managers could deal with a more dispersed staff, how they could deal with people working through different forms of media, how they could work with people who potentially would not necessarily have around them the usual support structure that you would have in a traditional environment.
00:05:57:03 - 00:06:21:14
Steve Kerridge
So all of those things on face value were challenges, but then there were opportunities, there were efficiencies for the organization. And I think as we saw, we managed to secure mutual benefits for both organization and participants from that open conversation. So that was a really important one to me is around the product that actually has come from this, which has been shared quite widely now around ‘how do we manage people in this way?’
00:06:21:23 - 00:06:41:12
Steve Kerridge
How do we how do we do that? What are we looking for? What are the pitfalls? What are the traps? So there's a lot of of good. And I think what was the benefit for us of working with academic partners? Getting hold of additional expertise. But I feel the way that we operated and the way things were clearly explained allowed us to take away and develop some skills that allowed us to build our capability.
00:06:41:20 - 00:07:01:23
Steve Kerridge
So whilst we wouldn't necessarily have the time or the scope to complete a large significant study, some of the key learning around methodology, some of the key learning around approaches and some of those things really came through and we've tried to encapsulate that and take that forward with our improvement services within the organization. So a wide variety of things.
00:07:03:05 - 00:07:15:17
Sara Connolly
So Steve, we've talked a little bit about this Agile Working Checklist. I wondered if you could give a little bit more detail of what it looks like and how you've used it and also how you've tweaked it for your own purposes.
00:07:15:20 - 00:07:51:02
Steve Kerridge
Absolutely, Really useful tool, freely available. It is a proactive checklist. So it's focusing on the short, medium and long term, which obviously we have the value of this this research to really understand some of that. So we've incorporated that into our wellbeing health check that we do normally quarterly with all staff across the whole organization. And the fact that it's proactive is we're not just using it with the people who are agile workers, we're using it to understand people's circumstances and we're also sharing it with people when they are going through the process of commencing their supervision journeys,
00:07:51:02 - 00:08:10:08
Steve Kerridge
people who are starting to think about being supervisors for the first time. So a very good product. And we have shared with some other organizations. So, we work with a wide variety of partners, many people in similar situations, many people who've come to us and said, well, we're on similar journeys, either not quite there yet or we've we've, we've whipped through and now we're having a look.
00:08:10:18 - 00:08:21:01
Steve Kerridge
And we really shared that it's been a useful tool and it's been something that people, as I say, have incorporated into their way of understanding something that otherwise would be quite nebulous. So yeah, very good.
00:08:21:07 - 00:08:47:15
Sara Connolly
That's great. And that Creative Commons element of it allows other organizations to use it for that, you know, in a way that's valuable and helpful to them to themselves. I remember when we conducted some of the interviews, people talked about the, you know, what it was to be involved in policing and how the ‘in-person’ was a really important part of that.
00:08:47:15 - 00:09:07:16
Sara Connolly
And so it really sounds as though it wasn't just a question of change in working practice, but actually a really significant shift in in workplace culture? And I wondered how easy that transition has been for you and what kind of learnings you take forward from that?
00:09:08:02 - 00:09:28:03
Steve Kerridge
Absolutely. So I think I mentioned before around the diversity of what we do within policing. So we have to understand that when we're caring for the most sensitive in society, when we're dealing with some of the most dangerous, high risk challenges that we face as a society, there will always have to be a core 24 / 7 on the ground service that's delivering for that.
00:09:28:20 - 00:09:46:02
Steve Kerridge
So that was always maintained. And there is what we found sort of partway through is we've also got some warranted officers where the nature of their work means that they can work slightly more flexibly. They do need to be with the customer at times, but a lot of the preventative work or planning work, etc. can be done in flexible ways.
00:09:46:02 - 00:10:17:24
Steve Kerridge
And then inevitably at the other end, we've got a number of people who could work in a far more dispersed and an agile way. So there are differences in the organization. So the culture, well, the starting point with the culture was of course moving from a position of everyone working in one way to not only being able to deliver and show that we can operate in that way, but it's reconciling some of those challenges and some of those concerns that people could have about fairness.
00:10:18:18 - 00:10:48:24
Steve Kerridge
So I think that was really, really important. So: open conversation involving people explaining the situation around why we were doing what we were doing and having a clear rationale was really important. Clearly, going back and looking at terms and conditions, contracts or arrangements to make sure that those people who were not able to operate in that way fully understood why and what could be done, where appropriate and where possible, almost in recompense almost to, you know, to balance out across the organization.
00:10:49:09 - 00:11:17:03
Steve Kerridge
And then I think it's absolutely understood that at the top level of the organization, there is often a degree of confidence and comfort in having people around you. So there was that necessity to make sure that we could show this can make a difference. So again, it goes back to this importance of when you're identifying a change, making sure that you're really clear on the business benefits and that those encompass everything.
00:11:18:00 - 00:11:31:23
Steve Kerridge
So the key thing certainly for senior managers was to build that confidence by saying, look, this is this is the bottom line of what we're trying to deliver. But also this is the softer side. This is what's coming from the ground up in terms of our discussions with staff. And this is how we're managing some of those issues.
00:11:32:21 - 00:11:57:08
Steve Kerridge
And then, of course, where it's appropriate, here are the bottom line cost savings. Here are the efficiencies which we must always be focused on in terms of spending public money. So that was really important. So that did require a cultural change. Did it happen instantaneously? Now, are there still naysayers? There always will be. There always will be. But I think we have seen a shift within our organization.
00:11:57:08 - 00:12:29:00
Steve Kerridge
You know, we're now three and a bit years in where this has become commonplace, and we are settled now on a percentage of our staff who operate in an agile way and a percentage that don't. And we're now satisfied. And one of the gaps we wanted to close was making sure that we addressed all those issues of fairness and we made sure that people have got the right protections and contractual basis for how they're operating, as opposed to assuming that old contracts, old ways underpin new ways of operating, which they don't.
00:12:29:14 - 00:12:39:19
Steve Kerridge
So key challenges there. I think that about culture that we're never going to be there 100%, but I think we're moving towards that and that's facilitated some good work going on.
00:12:39:19 - 00:13:08:23
Sara Connolly
I'd really like to come back to that point about the performance and the benefits, because I recall in some of the early scoping interviews, people were talking about how much time was spent traveling between meetings. So that face to face, you know, way of operating really did have some time consequences, opportunity cost consequences. And I wondered how you're experiencing those benefits now?
00:13:09:13 - 00:13:32:16
Steve Kerridge
I think that's probably one of the things that has lodged itself most in how we operate now, because even for those people who were not comfortable in working this way or it wasn't suitable for them or their arrangements were not the not such that people working. So I thought that has been a key win. There is always the necessity with some meetings, obviously depending on content, depending on sensitivity, that those things need to be conducted with all present.
00:13:32:17 - 00:13:57:19
Steve Kerridge
But that is something that we very much focus on now. So it is the norm rather than the exception that we would look to run things in an online way where we can see the rapid onset of how things changed around software that we all experienced moving particularly you know, certain certain brands, etc., certain providers have made things really, really flexible and that includes on mobile devices.
00:13:58:07 - 00:14:15:13
Steve Kerridge
So, you know, we will often have people calling in who are parked safely on the side of the road between other bits and pieces. So there's a monetary basis for that. And one of the things that we did right at the beginning was that very closely, you know, when you start to think about not just, you know, the mileage and the expenses claims, you start to think about wear and tear.
00:14:16:05 - 00:14:34:17
Steve Kerridge
You start to try and put a pounds and pence value on hours saved. It's significant. But what we must do is make sure that a day that used to be broken up with traveling, that also could have some benefits to unwind or to debrief or to think or prepare for the next thing, that we don't lose some of that time.
00:14:35:06 - 00:14:55:08
Steve Kerridge
So we've been really careful about making sure that that doesn't become eight hour back to back meetings where people get a few seconds between pressing a button. So as with all it's a blend, it's a blend, but I think it's more the norm than the exception across an organization, which is spread across numerous bases across the county area.
00:14:56:10 - 00:15:16:15
Sara Connolly
And I'd like to come back to the point that you made about managerial competencies, because, of course, this was a big shift for people managing teams. So how did you use the insights that we provided? Was that in training? Was it in other ways of sharing across the organization?
00:15:16:15 - 00:15:36:00
Steve Kerridge
Yes. So we've used that through training, we've used that through included elements in some of our leadership training. And what we've tried to do throughout with the Agile Working programme is show that because it affects everyone, we try to draw out key details and package things in a way that's accessible to everyone. So formal training has been very, very good.
00:15:36:00 - 00:16:02:23
Steve Kerridge
So the product that we referred to before - the checklist ultimately - is a really, really important part of management training. But we will have welfare check points with all of our staff where we've actually added that to that list. So whereas in the past we'd be thinking about, you know, what we'll start to discuss around sort of home circumstances, we'll talk about family and, you know, all of the challenges that we have in in work life balance.
00:16:03:24 - 00:16:19:19
Steve Kerridge
But we've actually used that as a guide now to actually go through with people and say ‘and as an agile worker, these are the things that we know from previous research with this very population. So where are we with those things?’ So both as a training tool and as a day to day tool in how we manage our people, focused on welfare.
00:16:19:19 - 00:16:20:07
Steve Kerridge
It's been very good.
00:16:20:20 - 00:16:41:16
Sara Connolly
So when the team, when we spoke to you, I mean, right at the beginning we were keen to undertake research, we were keen to inform practice and I wondered what you felt about that sort of university research constabulary collaboration, what you learned from that?
00:16:41:20 - 00:17:11:07
Steve Kerridge
Yeah, I think, I think it comes back to one of the points I made a moment ago. So I've said throughout that we should never assume we have all the answers, that we have access to all of the materials that we need. And whilst we're very well supported with strategic analysis and people who are very highly educated or people who've got research backgrounds, it is very limited from their and we are in an environment that is very numbers driven.
00:17:12:09 - 00:17:48:06
Steve Kerridge
So the key thing, the key thing really for me that prompted all of this discussion was this element around understanding far more beyond the numbers and being able to understand how to properly design and deliver question sets that get to the heart of an issue when you're dealing with a group of of diverse human beings. Because I think sometimes with the best of intentions, without that insight, without that skill, without that knowledge, you don't list the information you want or there are some pitfalls which you could find yourself falling down.
00:17:48:06 - 00:18:15:15
Steve Kerridge
And as I mentioned before, that can be hugely damaging for actually understanding the richness of the picture as to where things are. So it is always good to have a critical friend that comes with no misconceptions. Who is coming extending a hand to help, and that gives a really sort of vivid take on some of the things that we deal with every day.
00:18:15:15 - 00:18:35:20
Steve Kerridge
So it's hugely beneficial, hugely important. The challenge obviously for particularly for policing, the challenge for public sector is always to make sure that we can achieve that in a way that minimizes cost and we can look at exploring every avenue we can to look at funding to get best value, both for academic partners and obviously for the policing partners.
00:18:37:04 - 00:18:44:12
Steve Kerridge
But yeah, hugely important and something that I've always championed and something that hopefully throughout the rest of my career I want to continue to focus on.
00:18:45:12 - 00:19:19:11
Sara Connolly
From our point of view, I think that it was really interesting to see the diversity of the policing activity and how important the context was under which a new workplace practices in introduced. So it wasn't just about COVID, it was actually about the context of policing too. So we've been discussing Agile working, we've been discussing the cultural change from a research and practice perspective.
00:19:19:19 - 00:19:23:18
Sara Connolly
Are there any particular insights or tips that you'd like to share?
00:19:24:03 - 00:19:54:15
Steve Kerridge
So the first is if I was talking to other organizations about our experience and say in the context of Agile working, what have we learned? I would say it's really important to understand just how significant a degree of flexibility and control over working arrangements can be for staff, but also that some of the traditional notions of what it's an opportunity for laziness or people won't be disciplined or what is that?
00:19:54:18 - 00:20:14:05
Steve Kerridge
Those things, I believe, are myths. It doesn't mean you don't need to have structure, it doesn't mean you don't need to have the right system to support people. But there are real opportunities to explore this. And in a really busy world of juggling so many different things with constant noise, with the constant assault of information, can be a really good way for people to operate effectively.
00:20:14:05 - 00:20:47:13
Steve Kerridge
To have that flexibility and for organizations to achieve their objectives in an efficient way. So I think it's a hugely important and I think, as I say in our organization, quite a traditional organization, we've seen people who have seen that have embraced that. And as a result, we've seen those change. And the second element is again, the importance of bringing perspectives and expertise outside of your organization where you can to challenge your ideas and to continue to close gaps in creative ways.
00:20:48:08 - 00:21:09:10
Steve Kerridge
Because at the end of the day, certainly from a public sector perspective, what we want to do is create a safer, happier, healthier, more productive society, bringing together academic partners with the public sector to do that, I think is a hugely important way to achieve that.
00:21:09:10 - 00:21:14:15
Sara Connolly
Thank you very much. And are there any other final messages you'd like to give our listeners?
00:21:15:00 - 00:21:45:14
Steve Kerridge
I'd just like to say thank you very much. I thank you for the opportunity to participate today, and I'd like to say thank you very much over a period of years for the opportunity to work with the university, with the business school. It's given me personally a number of really good insights as to how we can make things better and the practical achievements that can be put in place in the workplace or within communities or within society by bringing together collective minds.
00:21:46:03 - 00:21:53:10
Sara Connolly
Thank you very much, Steve. Thank you.
00:21:53:10 - 00:22:21:20
Helen Fitzhugh
So that's a big thank you again to Professor Sara Connolly and Chief Inspector Steve Kerridge from Cambridgeshire Constabulary. Just a quick reminder, if you'd like to find out more about the checklist for the pro-active management of remote workers and download that checklist, please visit www.evolveworkplacewellbeing.org and search ‘Checklist’. Please join us in our ongoing exploration of workplace wellbeing, research and lived experience in our regular podcast going forwards.
00:22:22:11 - 00:22:52:16
Helen Fitzhugh
This podcast was produced by the University of East Anglia with the support of UEA Broadcast House, Norwich Business School, RAND Europe and all the members of the Workplace Wellbeing Research Team. You can find out more about our team as a whole, our research and use our practical, business-focused resources to improving organizational wellbeing at www.evolveworkplacewellbeing.org
