The power of joint working when piloting a new service

Written by Celia Beketa (Senior Service Designer) and Maria Rotaru (National Management Trainee).

The Greenwich Supports strategy is the council’s first anti-poverty strategy which promotes a preventative, holistic and resident-first approach to preventing and reducing poverty across the borough.

To deliver this support, we’ve launched a 9-month pilot for a new service and team, also called Greenwich Supports.

We hope to bring the public along the journey of this pilot with us and share the successes and lessons learned.

About the 9-month Greenwich Supports pilot

The pilot aims to offer a new service that gives residents holistic support with housing, debt, benefits and advice.

Over the next 9 months, the new team will work together to support residents in a new, less siloed way with an aim to prevent rather than react. To do this we aim to:

· reach residents before they reach crisis point

· give residents wraparound support from one place so they don’t feel ‘passed’ from team to team for the various needs they have

About the new Greenwich Supports team

The pilot team is made up of eight passionate and knowledgeable frontline workers from various service areas across the council. This includes specialists in:

· Employment

· Debt

· Benefits and welfare rights

· Housing

· Customer services

The onboarding journey

We’ve just wrapped up four weeks of onboarding the team, and have been impressed by the wealth of knowledge, expertise, care, and drive in the room at each of our onboarding sessions.

We had 9 sessions (a mix of hybrid and in-person) during the onboarding process. The sessions were each between 2 to 3 hours and focused on topics including:

· getting to know each other

· understanding the Greenwich Supports strategy

· embedding our values and principles

Throughout the onboarding, the Greenwich Supports team members exchanged their own personal experiences and insights into the service-driven and structural barriers residents face to accessing good employment, housing, and financial resilience.

They bonded over shared principles of holistic, relational ways of working with residents, offered guidance on how to better show up in their interactions and emphasised the need for new ways of working.

It was a privilege to bear witness to how collaborative, open, and learning-oriented our sessions were early on.

The reoccurring theme we’ve heard since working together to support residents is:

“This is the way it should be”

We hope the design principles and stories behind this pilot will inspire others and promote dialogue around this way of working within local authorities across the country.

One of our first onboarding sessions with the team, pictured here filling out ‘postcards’ to their future selves, articulating their hopes and fears for the pilot.

Our insights and impressions so far

The importance of building team cohesion and trust early on can’t be understated

One thing that became clear during onboarding was the importance of dedicating lots of time to get to know each for this sort of work (more time than you probably think).

We made sure the first week was all in-person, with the first day being a full day where we all got lunch together as a team. Talking about the work we’re going to do is important, talking about who we are both professionally and personally even more so.

In dedicating the appropriate time and space, we could see the team getting more comfortable with each other every session and every day. At the end of the first week, we, as pilot leads, felt like we’d been a team for four months rather than four days.

We also saw team members already beginning to build skills and knowledge across disciplines other than their own — one of the key outcomes we hoped for with this pilot. During breaks, we often overheard colleagues asking each other about their areas of expertise (for instance, “What did you say you do when a resident has this kind of debt?”).

We facilitated various activities throughout the sessions — from writing time capsules to articulate our hopes and fears, to sharing personal tactics and challenges in activating the Greenwich Supports principles in practice. In each, we saw team members asking each other questions and taking notes on approaches they could implement to build trusting relationships with residents, ensure people feel seen and heard, and get them to see their own strengths and capabilities.

Following our first day of onboarding, our housing advisor shared how keen they are to incorporate advice from our employment advisor on how to highlight people’s skills and strengths. This employment advisor described how one resident they were working with struggled to see any skills within themselves worthy of being put on a CV. After getting to know this resident and how much work they put into caring for their family, the advisor listed out the ways in which caring for their children has required immense organisation and time management on their part. These skills, she said, are essential for any job. The resident began to see it and believe it themselves.

Radical shifts require genuine codesign among multiple areas of expertise

We’ve also learnt how critical it is to bring people along the process with us. Those of us leading the operational design of the pilot are experts on service design, but the frontline staff who make up the team are experts on supporting residents and the inner workings of the council.

To design good frontline services for residents, frontline advisors must have and feel ownership over the programme they’ll be delivering. Throughout the four weeks, we worked in tandem to co-develop the details of the pilot — from how residents will be nominated to the service to what the first conversation with them will look like.

As designers, we had to be comfortable with throwing our preconceived ideas out the window. For example, we envisioned the first conversation with the resident lasting 1 to 1 hour 30 minutes and soon realised this would not work. Our advisors felt the first interaction should focus on immediate needs and priorities — trust needed to be built before having in-depth conversation on broader life aspirations.

As expected, we saw the wealth of knowledge our advisers intuitively held which didn’t need to be designed.

Genuine co-design meant being flexible, adaptable, and aware of our own positionality. While external design expertise is key, we have no experience in having daily relational, difficult conversations with people at crisis points.

We have some reason to believe we’ve succeeded so far in bringing the team along the co-design journey with us. In our onboarding reflection session, one of our advisors shared they felt they have ownership over the pilot:

“Being able to see what we decided on together presented back to us today is really cool.”

There’s appetite for and expertise in strength-based, relational ways of working

The way of working Greenwich Supports proposes is the preferred way of working for staff but institutional barriers often make it difficult for them to do so.

When talking to the team about what strength-based support looks like in practice, we saw that some disciplines lend themselves well to this currently. For instance, Greenwich employment support advisors have lots of time available to build relationships with residents and understand how they can tailor their employment journey to existing strengths and broader life goals. Others like housing officers face challenges because people often present in crisis at risk of eviction, and responding with ‘tell me about your life goals’ or ‘what do you think might be steps forward?’ isn’t appropriate.

With certain pressures and constraints removed — for instance, around high and urgent demand and low capacity — the team expressed optimism and excitement for what this pilot will enable them to provide to residents.

“Rather than ‘dealing with’ the client and moving on, I’d like to have time to build those connections. I’m looking forward to that in the pilot.”

What’s next

If the onboarding journey sets the tone for what is to come with Greenwich Supports, we couldn’t be more excited.

We’re kicking off with a team that’s eager to work in this way with each other and with residents, and is convinced that more relational, holistic forms of support are the way forward.

Next, the team will begin working with residents.

We know there will be many lessons learned and insights along the way, so we look forward to sharing some with you in a few weeks’ time. Until then, if you have more questions about Greenwich Supports or are working on a similar initiative, please reach out to one of our pilot leads:

• Head of Advice and Benefits: Corin.Hammersley@royalgreenwich.gov.uk
• Senior Service Designer: Celia.Beketa@royalgreenwich.gov.uk