Agile Angus – changing behaviours in a council workplace

Jane Stork is the Communications Manager for Angus Council and has been with the council since 2015 after a career in marketing and communications in the private sector. She has served on the council’s Agile Board and was a key member of the Agile Implementation Team since the programme started. 

Agile Angus

Our Agile journey began in 2015 when council approved our “Agile Working and Accommodation Strategy” paper. This set out our desire to create a sustainable property estate, improve our service delivery and make our organisation more effective. The two clear drivers were to lower our carbon emissions and to save money. Early research showed that these two objectives could be achieved by successfully adopting agile working practices and adapting our workplaces.

We started the Agile process with research guided by experts Hub Co., in both from the way we used our buildings and how our customers interacted with us. In practice, this meant reviewing our aging and rambling property estate which was scattered across the whole of Angus. Angus is a mainly rural county, with seven burgh towns of varying size, meaning that we had mix of a few very rural properties, mainly old schools, and a varied array of buildings in each town.

We then decided which building we really needed to deliver our services locally that could be affordably upgraded to meet modern requirements for IT and low carbon targets, and those which we no longer needed.

We also collected data and analysed working patterns, identifying how much time was actually spent in offices and how much time was spent out and about. Using this data, we identified five work styles which ranged from roles always required in a specific place (workstyle 1) such as receptionists and teachers, to primarily back-office workers, who could be located anywhere with internet access, as they only needed to attend in person for meetings (work style 5). Other workstyles were calculated as a proportion of their time within a corporate office or elsewhere.

Mindful that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”* we knew that the biggest barriers we would face would be changing behaviours and building trust.  It’s a big shift to make people think differently about work being a task, not a place, and moving from “I have a desk”, to “we have desks”. It also takes a different management style to ensure productivity and staff well-being.

It was recognised that to successfully make this seismic shift, we would need a dedicated team, available and skilled to provide support, advice, and guidance to teams to affect this huge workplace cultural change. Therefore, the Agile Implementation Team (AIT) was born.

We also knew that in an organisation as diverse as a council, there would be many unseen issues ahead which teams would need support to overcome. We agreed that all issues we would encounter would come under three headings: People, Processes and Place, and these would be our AIT workstreams.

• People supported the culture, training and behaviours.
• Process helped teams shift to digital processes, storage and upgraded IT kits to support Agile working.
• Place redesigned the interiors to create welcoming open plan spaces with great hybrid, confidential and meeting spaces, and breakout areas in key locations.

We were working to parameters established in other Agile environments, such as desk to workstyle ratio – meaning for example that six Agile working style 3 workers would need three desks etc., and that each full time equivalent person would get one meter of storage space and a locker for personal items.

To test our theories and processes in the first instance, we worked with a medium sized team to be “pathfinders”, trying out the kit, culture, processes, and spaces.

The pathfinders surfaced five key learnings:

1. It needs to be a “turnkey” project. Moving the service into a new, brightly decorated, and (crucially) fully operational space made a huge difference and really helped to embed a different culture. It worked best if the space had a different look and feel.
2. We surfaced many unseen problems. For example, the IT kit that they thought they needed wasn’t the right kit. The shift in working was so great, they hadn’t accurately predicted what they’d need and use. They also needed far less storage than anticipated once everyone got digital storage sorted.
3. Agile behaviours and culture needed to be articulated, encouraged and embedded prior to the move, otherwise it’s a lot of change at once and some people struggle to cope with that all at once.
4. You can’t rely on information cascading via a management structure. You don’t know who in the organisation will block or reinterpret key information, so we had to commit resource from the AIT to speak directly to all members of staff. We also used Viva Engage for direct two-way communications which could be anonymised. This gave staff the opportunity to flag very individual needs and concerns,
5. Often specific issues raised as “impossible to overcome” in Agile, masked wider concerns about the shift in culture. When sorted, that individual or team would often come back with a new issue – these were usually minor and easy to fix, but it flagged the need for greater support in managing the change sympathetically and compassionately. It was a huge cultural shift and people at all levels did struggle, especially those for whom work was their primary social space.

From the pathfinder learnings, we developed an Agile protocol document,  written in an informal, chatty style because we didn’t want Agile to just result in a list of do’s and don’ts. The protocol aimed to steer the culture to one which would work in a shared space. Its warm tone reflected on the huge cultural change which the organisation was undertaking and acknowledged that many would find it tough. This was very well received and, currently in its 16th edition, is still the bible of all things Agile, but without commandments!

The interior of Bruce House, Angus Council

We took a phased approach to avoid spreading resources too thinly. Phase one focused on our main back offices, and phase two moved to our locality hubs. It wasn’t plain sailing, but key moments such as our then chief executive giving up their own office to become a meeting space sent a powerful message that Agile was here to stay and included everyone.

Phases one and some of two were successfully implemented before COVID-19 hit us, which meant that many staff could very quickly adapt to the lock down situation with many staff well equipped for home working.

After COVID-19, so many staff had adapted to home and agile workings, we expanded the original scope of Agile and moved to phase three, which meant supporting more staff moving to Agile working and more of the already Agile staff moving to higher levels of Agile – for example, in phase one, I was an Agile 3 workstyle and I successfully moved to 5, which reflected my practice during the pandemic.

It has not been easy, some staff have struggled without regular interactions within an office environment and some managers have found it difficult to adapt their management to assess outputs and outcomes, rather than “presenteeism”. We have addressed this with a renewed focus on team meetings, one to one meetings and opportunities to work in cross functional teams.

To date, the strategy has delivered over £3 million of revenue savings against a target of £3.544 million. This includes an annual income from rental properties of over £140k, and we have also generated £1.2 million of capital receipts with more to come.  We have also seen a significant reduction in sickness absence, improved recruitment appeal and, contrary to some expectations, maintained high levels of productivity.

The internal culture has shifted hugely with the majority of back office staff choosing to work agilely. Such has been the wholescale shift in working, the number of available bookable desks for staff has far outstripped staff demand, as a result, we have been able to reduce the number of available desks, further optimising our office spaces. The success of the agile programme in freeing up office capacity has been so impactful that in May 2024 our council approved the marketing of our head office building for sale, part-lease or lease. This move also helps with the development of a more sustainable property estate and could provide valuable business space for business and partner organisations in Angus.

*“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a quote from management consultant and writer Peter Drucker.

See more:

Shining a light on the dark art of local government workforce planning – LGiU

Local government workforce and capability planning – LGiU

Getting the best from your workforce: An introduction to recruitment and retention – LGiU