Chief Executive Blog - December 2015
Dear Colleagues,
Engaging with our community is one of the key stages of planning for the changes that the council, along with other public services organisations, face in the years to come.
Therefore I, along with corporate management team colleagues and representatives of our community planning partners, was very pleased to be part of the series of consultation events held across Moray over the past few weeks.
We recognise that this is just a start and the response from the general public was not as great in terms of numbers as we might have hoped. However, those who did come along found it a worthwhile exercise and the meetings and the feedback have provided a useful platform on which to build as we carry forward the community engagement exercise into 2016.
What this will also do is help build resilience within the community as people begin to see what the shape of public services might look like in the future. Led by elected members and supported by the community planning partners, these sessions provide a forum for people within the community to help shape public services in the future.
On the subject of resilience, the final employee conference took place at the Fishermen’s Hall in Buckie, sharing the theme of ‘Pathways to Resilience’ with the two conferences which had gone before. Once again, the event was well attended with delegates and managers discussing various aspects of resilience as well as this year’s survey results, which are very useful in providing an indication of where things are going well and where they are not going so well. I was particularly pleased to see that more people responded to the survey than last time, which is encouraging.
Continuing to look to the future, the education attainment and achievement debate hosted by the Scottish Government and Education Scotland provided a useful chance to learn first-hand the government’s aspirations for our young people. The past month has also seen me in Edinburgh for the regular CoSLA leaders’ meeting.
The civic military forum was held at RAF Lossiemouth which gave me a chance to say farewell to the outgoing station commander and I am looking forward to meeting his successor once he has settled into his new role.
Locally, I have also had my regular meeting with the chairman of the joint community councils and a catch-up with the chief executive of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, plus the chance to meet the new local commander for Police Scotland, Superintendent Stewart Mackie.
On another local note, I was very pleased to attend the Moray Business Women’s ball in Forres as well as the Scottish Council Development of Industry event in Elgin where we heard from the chief executive of Oil and Gas UK.
The corporate directors and I also took part in the latest meeting of the leadership forum as we came together with senior and service managers from across the council to focus on key issues and priorities for the council. This time we were looking at customer focus and our task now is to take forward the improvement actions in areas that could do better and share best practice.
One of the most rewarding events of the past month was presenting the long service and STAR awards to very deserving individuals and groups of staff, and my particular congratulations go to Kirsty Dunlop and Rhona Wood who were overall winners with the Chief Executive’s Award for Excellence.
Looking forward, one of the main challenges now is to work out how to build on the community engagement events for next year and also to look at what can be done to respond to the employee survey results.
As always December is a busy month with managers’ briefings, listening meetings and service learning visits and in addition I will be at the food and drink summit with senior managers from the food and drink industries in Moray, along with MPs and MSPs, to try to find ways of further promoting Moray.
And finally as we move into the run-up to Christmas, let us not forget those working over the festive period to ensure our community is looked after, particularly the more vulnerable members of society who rely on us.
I hope that you have a happy Christmas and New Year and I look forward to seeing you all again in 2016.