The TW3 Awards have showcased some of the work being done to implement smarter working across the civil service. What has your involvement been with the programme?
My involvement is really finding out and celebrating the great work that is going on.
So I chair, but really facilitate – and have done for several years – the group that brings together all the departments [and] we talk about what we are doing and what we are learning from each other.
As we have gone on, it's really been about the culture and leadership issues, and we have been able to use this group to share best practice to go together and look at how other organisations are doing it.
Why is the TW3 programme important?
Often, there is a huge amount of good practice going on that people just don't know they are doing.
TW3 offers us a way to communicate that. Nobody is forced to do it – it’s not “fill out the following template” – because that would be counter-cultural, and the culture is so very important.
Who would have known that some of the high security people [in the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory] in the West Country had been so brilliant at changing their ways of working? I would never have found out about it [without the programme]!
One [system] that we are celebrating is people making online connections when they are consulting.
We have discovered in some of our areas that if you do it online [or] you tweet, you get a completely different range of people responding to you than if you do a classical document, even if it is on your website. So you suddenly discover you are connecting with people in different ways.
How are you are planning to expand this best practice across Whitehall?
Our role as leaders is to make it easier for people to do their jobs, so sometimes it's about how to make it easier for people who are on maternity leave, or just on career breaks, to stay in touch with the organisation and come back in.
We’ve got several hundred people in Sheffield – what's the next stage of making it even easier for them to work seamlessly with people in London or in Cardiff? You can never think you've cracked anything, but this process allows us to go on to say: “Look, they have done it even better.”
So it's this constant learning across, informally a lot of the time. We are not trying to capture it, bottle it and say: “Drink this.” We are saying: “Great, that's super… let’s make sure people are talking to each other!”