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The Scottish Government has announced that from 19 November, restrictions around outdoor socialising changed to allow eight people from three households to meet outdoors. Since last week, you have been able to meet another household indoors, in a private home or in a public place. The maximum number of people who can meet indoors is six from two separate households.

New legislation comes into force on 20 November to restrict people who live in a Level 3 or Level 4 local authority area from travelling outside their local authority except for an essential purpose. The regulations also prevent non-essential travel into a Level 3 or 4 local authority area.

There are a limited list of exceptions to the travel restrictions including:  travel for work, or provide voluntary or charitable services, but only where that cannot be done from your home  travel to school, college, or university where teaching is not provided remotely  (To and from Level 3 areas but not Level 4) travel for under 18s sport  travel for healthcare, social care, childcare and other essential services,  travel to provide care or assistance to a vulnerable person  travel to visit a person receiving treatment in a hospital, staying in a hospice or care home, or to accompany a pregnant woman, vulnerable person or child to a medical appointment  travel for shared parenting or travel between the two parts of an extended household  travel to meet a legal obligation, including attending court or satisfying bail conditions, or to participate in legal proceedings  travel for weddings, civil partnership registrations, funerals and other “life events” (such as bar mitzvahs and christenings)  travel to transit through Level 3 and 4 areas by road or public transport if your journey begins and ends outside such an area  travel to move house  travel to avoid injury, illness or to escape a risk of harm

Angus, , City, , , , , , and are Level 3.

East Ayrshire, , East , , , Renfrewshire, , , , and West are level 4.

I am writing this is in our first cold snap of the winter, which follows the heavy rain and strong winds on Wednesday. Wednesday was another great example of when the might of Islands Council sprang into action to keep our community safe. I would like to say a particular thank you to our Roads Team who worked so hard to clear blocked drains and ditches, deal with landslips, put out warnings to drivers and worked to keep our roads network safe. In difficult winter conditions, our dedicated staff go above and beyond their duty to help and keep people safe. I would also like to thank staff from across Childrens, Development and Infrastructure Services who worked so well together to ensure all our children and young people could get home safely from school - planning for the worst and hoping for the best as ever! In responding to emergencies like these weather events or the pandemic, collaboration and cooperation is essential. However, people can naturally tend towards self-interest at the expense of the greater good, particularly when they believe they personally have all the resources they need. This week, seeing our response to the floods got me thinking more about our Council Value: Working Well Together. My interest was sparked even more by some research about how people cooperate more effectively when they cannot solve something on their own.

Imagine you’re living in a small community on an island surrounded by sea (!) Everything has been great so far; however there has been recent heavy rain, and now floodwaters are predicted to arrive in the next few hours. Without action, everyone in the community will lose their home to the rising floodwaters. People in this small community have sand bags to help either shore up their own house, or contribute to saving the entire community by building a larger wall of sandbags to protect everyone. The catch being that everyone needs to cooperate to have enough sand bags to save the community. How do people respond to this threat to their community and household?

Recent research demonstrates that the response largely depends on the resources the individuals have at their disposal. Jorg Gross and his colleagues setup a range of conditions for participants to respond to, all reflecting a similar scenario to the community at risk from a flood. Each person had some resources, equivalent to the sand bags, that they could either contribute to the community in an attempt to protect everyone, or keep in an effort to protect themselves.

The research found that when people didn’t have enough resources to save themselves individually, they were most willing to contribute to the collective effort. There was still some risk here as people could act in a self-interested way, and therefore the overall community may fail. However, in most cases, where everyone had the same level of resource and not enough to save themselves, they successfully cooperated to help the broader community.

As the researchers varied the resources available to individuals, behaviour changed dramatically. Those who had enough resources to save themselves started to withhold resources from the community effort, even when that led to others failing. Similarly, those who did not have enough resources and could only rely on community cooperation tended to lose out as the inequalities in the community increased over time. Inequality increased as the rounds continued. People began to stock pile resources at the expense of others’ immediate needs.

What’s the lesson here? If people feel they can do something on their own and don’t need others in order to succeed, they are likely to act from a position of self-interest, and are also unlikely to help others. This continues even when others are at risk of failing or missing out. This finding has obvious implications for society, but also lessons for within our Council.

Organisations, like small communities survive through cooperation. Despite the silos that so often emerge, every organisation needs good will and cooperation to succeed. In most instances if my team “wins” and your team “loses”, then the overall Council loses. Cooperation acts like conduits between the silos, helping to share around resources and knowledge.

Working well together was on show in the World Championships women’s 4 x 100m relay race in 2003. There were eight teams in the final and the US team was the favourite. They had the fastest women on earth that year in their team. Based on their personal best times for the 100m sprint, they should finish 3.2 meters ahead of the others. But the French team won. Instead of the favourites taking the gold, the average team put their strengths together and prevailed. Each individual French runner who carried the baton was slower than her American counterpart was, but the baton moved faster with the help of cooperation: the positive impact each runner’s successful baton pass has on the performance of the team as a whole. Each brilliant handoff required the passing runner to sacrifice her own individual performance in order to generate a positive effect for the performance of the team. If people are only assessed and rewarded based on their personal performance, they will focus only on those aspects – their individual speed, not the larger effect of a masterful baton pass. With cooperation, the whole can be worth more than the sum of the parts. The individual runners who carried the baton were slower, but their baton was faster.

When we are responding to emergencies, we show how well we can work together. In fact, we are masterful at it, as the last nine months demonstrates. Let’s not lose sight of working well together when the heat of the emergencies fade and our resources feel tighter - we are One Council and every single one of you contributes to our success and our whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.

The biggest risk to our success is if you identify with your immediate activity more strongly than you identify with the Council as a whole. This creates conditions where we are less likely to collaborate and cooperate across teams. When we focus on our own team, other teams become either a threat or a distraction.

Competition between teams generally does not promote excellence because trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. We can only pay attention either to the task at hand or to the enterprise of climbing over someone else to win. Additionally, in a competitive environment, promoting creative ideas and processes that could dramatically increase effectiveness is not worth the risk of individual loss - because you know no one is there to help you out if you fail.

Co-operative values are shown to increase long-term productivity, improve morale, and lead to a positive, happy workplace. So working well together really does matter – it’s one of the ways we can make the Council a fabulous place for us all to work. Even more importantly working well together makes our organisation succeed at what we are here to do, which is do our best for Shetland.

Making the Council a fabulous place to work for you so you can do your best for Shetland is my priority so I am delighted to announce that the launch of our third employee opinion survey Viewpoint 2020 will take place in December. The survey team are finalising the details, so I will let you know within the next couple of weeks the exact date when you will get the questionnaire. We are working once again with The Employee Engagement People Ltd and SurveyLab who will manage the survey independently from the Council to ensure that your responses remain anonymous. As happened in 2015 and 2017, you will be invited to complete the questionnaire on- line, but if you don’t have IT access at work you will be sent a paper copy of the questionnaire along with a Freepost envelope to return it to SurveyLab.

You might wonder why we are carrying out a staff opinion survey during a pandemic. I believe that it is vitally important that we find out as much as we can about your experience of working during these challenging times. So, whilst the core questions in the survey will be the same as 2015 and 2017, we have added some additional questions so that you can tell us about your experiences of working under the COVID-19 restrictions. Participation in the survey is voluntary, but I really hope that you will get involved. Your thoughts and feedback are taken very seriously and will be acted on. On that note, it is worth reflecting upon some of the changes your 2015 and 2017 feedback has inspired: 1. The introduction of the Council’s Values, which has had a huge, positive influence on our culture and have become firmly embedded in everything we do.

2. The creation of the Future Leader’s programme and subsequent involvement of Future Leaders in delivering Viewpoint related projects across the Council.

3. The prioritisation of staff wellbeing initiatives both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

4. The introduction of new work-life balance initiatives for example “Happy to Talk Flexible” on all job adverts, along with the wider adoption of home- working support options.

5. E-learning opportunities available 24/7 on any device.

6. Leadership structures with photographs of key leaders visible in Council buildings and on the intranet.

7. The publication of the “In Touch” staff magazine twice yearly, which includes regular contributions from colleagues across the Council.

8. The creation of a Viewpoint focus group to drive the review of the Personal Development Plan Policy.

9. The inclusion of Viewpoint survey feedback in helping to shape HR policies and two Workforce Strategies.

10. The Viewpoint COVID-19 Pulse Survey in May 2020 using a selection of the Viewpoint Survey questions to enable us to understand how the COVID-19 restrictions were impacting upon you and the way you carry out your job, day to day.

When we launched our first survey in 2015 there was doubt about the Council’s commitment to acting upon the survey results. I hope that you can see from the list above that we have and will continue to listen and act upon your feedback. 2020 has been the most challenging year I can recall in my career. The way you have tackled the challenges COVID-19 has thrown at us has been inspirational. The challenges we have faced together will be with us for some time to come, so please take the time to act upon your Survey invitation when it arrives in December. Your feedback is crucial in shaping the Council’s future, during the pandemic and beyond. As you will be aware, the UK leaves the EU on 31st December 2020 and if you are an EU Citizen, you will need to apply for Settled Status if you haven’t applied yet. As I have said, every single one of you contributes to our success as an organisation and I want to make sure you take the necessary action to be part of our success in the future too. If you aren’t sure what to do, speak to your line manager and they can get assistance from our HR team. The CAB are a great source of advice and information too.

As you will recall last Friday was National Kindness Day - I asked you to do an act of kindness. A special thank you to Kay whose act of kindness was to bring me another plant - the beautiful begonia now gracing my office at 8 North Ness! I have also been asked by Janice Pottinger to promote their “Act of Kindness – Pay it Forward” Advent calendar. Every day from 1-24 December, a gift donated by local businesses and community will be posted up on their Facebook page (Church of - Burra Isle Parish Shetland). If you like the page, share the post and comment you will get a number. There will be a random number generated on live feed, and the winner for that day will then choose someone to give the prize to (paying it forward). I thought that was a lovely idea so please get involved and make someone smile by a random act of kindness like the one Kay did for me on Friday! Finally talking of calendars - some of you have been asking about getting your hands on a Tommy Calendar - they are available from “Tommy’s porch” at 25 Hillhead for £10 or if you message his page, they can be posted for £12. The calendar is raising money for the Shetland Foodbank who have been a critical partner working alongside our Council services in our pandemic response supporting the most vulnerable people in our community. The Foodbank reminds me of those sandbags where, for success, we must work together to make the most of our collective resources to stop the flood rather than stockpiling my sandbags at the expense of your needs.

Kind regards

Maggie