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Case Study – Borough Council of Lynn & West Norfolk

Borough Council of King’s Lynn & West Norfolk achieves £1m efficiency savings – ahead of Gershon

Leisure and Public Space

The areas involved within this department were the Leisure Centres, Car Parking, Grounds Maintenance and Street Cleaning. The latter three areas were field based operations which on commencement of the review offered opportunities to improve planning, target setting, standards, activity reporting, lost time analysis and performance reviews.

Control documents were the first thing to be installed. These focused on Lost Time Reporting, allowing workers in the field to systematically report back the problems they faced when trying to complete tasks. Daily Action Review Meetings were set up to ensure that supervisors were aware of all the issues raised and could take the appropriate action to resolve them.

A framework to assist supervisors to plan the workload of their staff was developed, which listed all the tasks that might need to be carried out, together with the time that it should take to carry out these tasks. This enabled supervisors to allocate work effectively and to monitor performance against the planned work schedule. Variances between performance and the plan could then be used to find out what barriers were preventing certain jobs being achieved to time, or if they were being achieved more quickly, what good practice could be shared with other workers in similar areas to improve performance across the section. The standard timings will continue to be monitored and adjusted to incorporate the reduction in lost time.

Once supervisors were happy with the quality of information being reported in the field a ‘Weekly Operating Report’ was introduced. This summarised the field Performance Indicators and issues for review by the Supervisors’ Managers. This ensured that all issues raised by the team were reported to the appropriate level of management for action.

Workers in the field now have a clearer programme of work and expected level of performance, which means that their achievements are also recognised. Performance will continue to improve as the system becomes fully embedded and more obvious and hidden lost time is eliminated through actions assigned by supervisors and managers.

Nathan Johnson, Public and Open Space Manager said: “the best thing to come out of this is that I now ensure I sit down with all my supervisors once a week. Because of the nature of our work we tend to be out and about most of the time and it can be quite difficult to catch up with all my supervisors at the same time. This weekly operational review meeting we now have has formalised that process and means that my supervisors can let me know about any problems or successes on a regular basis".

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