Beyond ‘presenting need’: how we’re designing a new service for residents’ interwoven challenges

This is our second blogpost in a series about how we’re tackling poverty at the Royal Borough of Greenwich. Previous articles in this series:

• About the Greenwich Supports strategy
• The Greenwich Supports pilot onboarding journey

Three months into the Greenwich Supports pilot

We are now about three months into our Greenwich Supports pilot, having completed one month of onboarding and two months of working with residents.

In this pilot, we bring together advisors from various disciplines across the council to provide more wraparound support to residents. The aim is to prevent and reduce poverty in the borough. So far we’ve supported over 120 residents and helped them increase their income by over £76,000 total.

Our Greenwich Supports team is made up of eight people from vastly different disciplines across the council:

• One benefits/welfare rights manager
• One benefits/welfare rights advisor
• Two debt advisors
• Two customer services advisors
• One employment advisor
• One housing advisor

With residents experiencing challenges across more than one of these areas, it’s not always straightforward to know where to begin. In this blogpost we share our learnings so far on how we’ve gone about doing so.

Life is complex and dynamic — the support we provide should reflect this

When people are caught off guard by an unexpected life event or are grappling with the cost of living, they experience multiple challenges across money, employment, housing, health and wellbeing, and more.

Someone who lost a job likely doesn’t just need employment support — they’re probably grappling with the emotional impact of job loss, may have fallen into debt as a result, and may be eligible for more benefits than they’re aware of. What comes across as ‘employment support needed’ carries much more nuance — support needed likely extends much broader than that.

So how do you determine what to address first — what the resident’s ‘priority’ or most urgent need is? On the pilot, this has turned out to be more of an art than a science.

Start by getting to know the resident

For residents who aren’t known to a council team (who we reach out to proactively because we think they might benefit from preventative support) we start by having a Customer Services advisor talk to them. They get to know them as a full person — what’s their housing situation like? Are they working or interested in looking for work? Most importantly, what do they see as their priority?

Know what context you need… but expect some trial-and-error

We’re learning how important it is to gather the right context in these first conversations. Sometimes our Customer Services advisors need to go back and ask a resident questions they didn’t initially ask after consulting with other specialist advisors.

For example, we learned that having someone from the council call you out of the blue may make you feel pressure to say you’re actively looking for work, even if you’ve been consumed with other things. In one instance, when our Customer Services advisors connected one such resident to our employment advisor, she quickly learned the resident wasn’t ready for work and was better suited for a different advisor.

So, it’s not just a matter of asking the question but asking it in the right way. We’re continuously iterating our ‘first conversation’ script as we learn more about what context we need and how we go about getting it.

Balance the resident’s view with the advisors’ expertise

Residents are experts on their own experiences, and our advisors are experts on navigating complex systems like benefits or housing. A resident might think they need a quick benefits fix to increase the amount they’re receiving each month. In reality, they’re receiving the correct amount in benefits because they’re getting deductions for living in a place with more rooms than people. The only way to receive more money would be to downsize their flat. What appears to be a money issue is actually a housing issue.

‘Translating’ the need the residents’ stated to the correct (and often technical) remedy while honouring their lived experience and keeping their priorities at the forefront is a delicate and important act.

Acknowledge that you might still get it wrong (and that’s okay)

Sometimes, we get it wrong. In one instance, all signs pointed to debt and employment being the individual’s priorities. But when our employment advisor built trust with and got to know them, they learned they lost a loved one three weeks prior. Focussing on anything else was nearly impossible.

The pilot is about wraparound support, so while we don’t have a bereavement expert, we did what we could. The advisor coordinated three-way calls between themselves, the resident, and bereavement support providers, and left the door open for debt and employment support whenever they felt ready.

There’s never just one challenge people are facing, and these challenges are all likely intertwined. It’s just a matter of where to begin. For many residents we’ve worked with, multiple forms of support end up being provided simultaneously by more than one specialist advisor, so long as they feel that’s the right fit.

The collaboration and coordination behind the scenes

Determining how to best support residents in the way we’ve just described requires some coordination within the team. We need to understand what support we collectively offer and work together to tailor this support to residents. When we started the pilot, we wondered how much we would need to ‘design’ for this kind of collaboration to happen, and how much would happen organically. We learned it’s a bit of both.

Some degree of structure is needed (at first)

A good degree of intentional collaboration was initially needed — we were bringing together people from five different specialisms, each with their own ways of working with residents and colleagues. Like we mentioned in our onboarding blogpost, we spent a significant amount of time in the first month familiarising ourselves with what exactly everybody on the team ‘did’.

Our ‘case allocation’ meetings became lively two-hour discussion spaces to do just this (and more). In these sessions we:

• Collaborated on how to best support residents Each resident has a unique set of circumstances and needs, and each team member’s expertise leans itself to a different problem-solving lens. Team members bounced around ideas on what support might help, or questions they had about the resident which, if clarified, might help them better support them.
• Learned from each other and became more familiarised with others’ expertise If someone brought up ‘breathing space’ (temporary protection from debt collectors) for instance, as an idea to help a resident, those unfamiliar with the term were bound to ask what exactly this meant. These were spaces for our manager to learn too — to familiarise herself with the expertise of team members and validate her assumptions on what each person could help with.

The designed ‘purpose’ of the meeting (to see which advisor was best suited to support a resident) wasn’t necessarily important. But ensuring there was dedicated space and time to work together was.

Collaboration can indeed be over-engineered

We set aside more than one recurring meeting (including and beyond the case allocation meeting) with the intent to ‘collaborate’. What were meant to be one-hour meetings sometimes became ten minutes ridden with awkward silence upon asking the question, “Does anyone have any questions for anyone?”.

We quickly realised the most valuable form of collaboration happened outside the meeting room. The team consulted each other most frequently in the moment they realised they needed input from someone with different expertise. The nature of the work they were doing as well as the comfort and familiarity they had with each other lent themselves well to a more organic form of collaboration than we’d expected. The learning here is if you put in the work to build team culture from the start, collaboration will probably organically happen.

There’s still more to learn

We’ve begun chipping away at our search for the ‘recipe’ for holistic support provision and multidisciplinary ways of working at Greenwich, but there are still many more questions we want to answer:

• What are the pros and cons of having one advisor working with a resident at a time vs. multiple?
• Is this model truly an effective way to prevent crisis/poverty? In what ways?
• In what ways does becoming more upskilled enable advisors to better support residents?

In the meantime, do reach out to us if you’re embarking on similar discoveries and have insights to share, or if you simply want to learn more. You can contact us on Medium or by emailing celia.beketa@royalgreenwich.gov.uk or corin.hammersley@royalgreenwich.gov.uk.