No barriers — how person-centric ways of working are at the heart of success
In our work making sure British people abroad can get emergency passports quicker and easier, Caution Your Blast (CYB) are helping in two ways. Firstly, we are giving people peace of mind that they won’t be stuck overseas indefinitely; but more importantly, we are making the lives of both users and those who work on the service simpler, saving time and effort for everyone. And given that thousands of Brits apply for new passports via the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s Emergency Travel Document service every single year, this was exactly the motivation for us to get involved and help improve the service.
It has been a great success, in no small part because of how together CYB and the teams at the Emergency Travel Document (ETD) centres in Madrid and Singapore have built up a friendly, open and honest working environment that allowed us to work collaboratively. Their problems became our problems, and together we created solutions that are already making life easier not just for ETD centres, but for people using the service too.
“The relationship is really good, very open and transparent,” says Steph Buck, CYB’s Service Designer. “They trust that we’re doing the best we can for them. They’re optimistic and pragmatic about what we can achieve with them and they’re really grateful for it”.
But a working relationship like that doesn’t happen by accident or overnight. CYB’s approach to collaboration goes to great lengths to ensure the best possible rapport with anyone we work with, and an in-depth understanding of their needs.
Here are four things we did that laid the foundation for our work with the ETD service:
1) Show that you care about the project
We only take on work that we are passionate about and think will ultimately make a difference to people. It is important to show this to the people you work with from the outset — and there’s no better way than by taking the time to listen to them and learn about all the aspects of their job.
Nobody knows better how a service works, or what needs to improve, more than those who use it every single day. Listening to those stationed at the ETD centres gave us a firm grasp of the issues right from the start, and a clear idea of where we could help — crucial given that ETD teams deal with customers every day, and our ultimate goal was to make life easier for both staff and users.
“The first thing we did was a tonne of just talking to them and listening” says Rick Stock, CYB’s Delivery Manager. “We knew that this project was about listening and understanding what was really happening at the ETD centres and the actual experience of the people working on the ground”.
2) Work inclusively
We love to work inclusively — it brings the best out of everyone. Productive working environments are a place where friendly and constructive conversations can lay the foundations for creative solutions.
By taking the time to learn about the people we work with — not just their working practices, but their hopes and needs too — we are able to nurture a culture where everyone feels valued, and that their input and ideas are welcome.
The ETD centres were incredibly responsive to this approach. Not only did we learn how their centres operate and identified areas of improvement, but we were able to talk through our thinking and decision making in an open and collaborative way.
“We ran productive sessions with people from the embassies, people from the ETD centres, people from policy team, and people stationed all around the world,” Steph says. “We could learn from them, but also show how we would map out the process of issuing the documents. And that worked really well, because we managed to get feedback from so many different types of users in the same forum. I don’t think they would have normally had that range of people sat down together trying to identify their pain points, or come up with ideas and solutions”.
3) Take the time to understand nuance
It is easy to believe that two separate strands of the same service perform the exact same functions: after all, how different could processing the same user be?
However, because we took the time to delve into the detail and conduct in-depth analysis, we were able to realise the subtle nuances between working practices in Madrid and Singapore. This not only allowed us to develop a deep knowledge of how people work, but also to design more tailored solutions.
“I think one of one of the early assumptions from policy and consular staff was that the two ETD centres are run in a completely identical way,” Steph says. “That’s because they were issued the same policies and same processes. But actually, there are nuances, and we’ve spent a lot of time with both of them, talking mainly to team leads and individual members of staff to really hone in on those differences and why they’re different and how the different processes work”.
4) Be open and honest
It’s impossible to do a good job if you don’t have the trust of the people you’re working with. If your partners are suspicious of your motives or decisions, you’ll find your working relationship strained (to say the least). The best way to create an environment of mutual trust and respect is be as open and honest as possible at every stage. Only when people feel comfortable enough to talk frankly — about everything from their work ideas to their personal circumstances — can a team have the sort of productive conversations that ultimately lead to brilliant services.
“I think the fact that they trust us has meant that we’ve been able to explain a load of stuff to them that might have been a problem,” Steph says. “There were some issues where the more we investigated them, the less they looked like a problem, or the less it seemed like there were technical or design fixes for them. And the fact that we built up a good rapport with them meant that when we went to them and said ‘we don’t think there’s anything here’, they trusted that. This has had a positive impact on both applicants and staff, as we’ve been making evidence-based decisions the whole way”.
