Yvette Greener, Client Director
Our mission in the GPA is to provide great places to work for civil servants. We achieve this through continuous innovation, which involves excelling in both operations execution and strategic management putting clients and customers at the heart of everything we do. Through our quarterly newsletter, we hope to keep you updated on a number of key improvements and priority activities we have underway - there are many.
It is now just over three months since I joined the GPA as Client Director, during which time I have sought to understand more about what is and isn't working for clients. We are pleased to see a marked improvement in client satisfaction across nearly all of our clients in Q3 - an increase of 11 percent from Q2 and 33 percent from Q1. Several things have helped us deliver this progress including, improving responsiveness to queries and improving the accuracy of the invoices we send to clients. But, from our survey and through engagement with clients we have also heard that we need to be more consistent and focus on collaboration.
Moving into the new financial year we will be launching a new GPA Client Strategy and underpinning a plan to deliver it, which includes our expectations of how this will drive our performance. As part of embedding this new approach we want to work with clients through a matrix approach by the services they take, working in partnership with our clients to achieve "trusted partner" status, gaining a better understanding of drivers and in meeting requirements.
Whether you are currently a client or not, we want people to recognise that our ambition is to be an industry leader with all our clients and customers as our advocates.
HOW INSIGHTS UNDERPIN WORKPLACE DESIGN STRATEGIES
We are committed to delivering great places to work for our clients and customers. Essential to this is the need to gain a deep understanding of our customers so that we can deliver products and services that best meet their needs.
Following on from the success of the Leesman homeworking survey and report in 2020, we have now completed another five Leesman surveys. These surveys combined will provide us with data from approximately 35,000 civil servants which is helping to shape our workplace offer.
We have also piloted our own customer satisfaction survey in three buildings (Rosebury Court in Norwich, 2 Rivergate in Bristol and Temple Quay House in Bristol). We're currently analysing the data, using dashboards to present the insights back in a visual and engaging way. The data is already providing great insights into what is and isn't working. And we are putting action plans in place where improvement is needed. Our next step is to develop our plan for future surveys which we will share shortly.
SMARTER WORKING PROGRAMME
We have continued to support departments in their smarter working implementation, with 14 departments successfully achieving 'mature' status to date. This means each mature department has provided demonstrable evidence of how their people and culture, leadership, technology and workspaces are supporting, advocating and role modelling smarter ways of working. Most importantly for mature departments, smarter working is not complete once they reach mature status - the investment in creating and maintaining great workplace experiences is still a focus for all.
Smarter Working mature departments:
* Charity Commission
* Crown Prosecution Service
* Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport
* Department for Education
* Department of Health and Social Care
* Department for International Trade
* Food Standards Agency
* Forestry Commission
* National Archives
* National Savings and Investments
* OFGEM
* OFSTED
* OFWAT
* UK Export Finance
The Smarter Working Programme has created a community of practitioners that support each other with sharing best practices and continuous improvement. This community is helping to raise the bar in workplace experience across the civil service.
