How we are learning during our response to the Coronavirus outbreak

During the Coronavirus outbreak, The Children’s Society’s key workers are continuing to support some of the country’s most vulnerable young people — providing a vital point of stability in their lives when everything else has been thrown in the air. Even so, the disease has significantly affected the way our organisation and our services run. Prior to the virus’ spread in the UK, the default was for our colleagues to offer face-to-face support to young people, in order to establish trusting relationships as quickly and effectively as possible. A few weeks later, this default is no longer feasible. Wherever appropriate, services are providing remote support to young people — via phone, text, and online — in order to limit the spread of the disease. This has required an unprecedented transformation in the way we work. Cross-organisational collaboration and decision-making that might previously have taken weeks, months or even years, has had to proceed in days in order to ensure services can adapt their models to safely and effectively meet the needs of young people.

An unprecedented transformation represents an unprecedented learning opportunity. As an organisation we recognise that we — and the systems we operate in — will not have the option of reverting to ‘business as usual’ after this outbreak.

There will be a new normal, and the lessons we learn now will inform how the organisation adapts. For this reason, a few of us within The Children’s Society have been asked to illuminate the new ways of working that are emerging in the organisation. The goal is to enable colleagues to consciously nurture and grow those values, mindsets and practices which may help us do a better job of supporting young people in future.

What are we doing?

We are exploring new ways of working within The Children’s Society through four lenses:

• What are services doing differently to support young people?
• Who influences whether new ways of working are introduced within services, and how?
• How are organisational behaviours and practices changing?
• What do we value? How have our priorities shifted and what are we letting go of?

We understand the need to try and capture what’s happening in real-time. As Chris Bolton observes, “Ask someone what happened during a high intensity, rapidly moving situation from a month ago. I’d bet they will put together a ‘story’ that represents a logical, ordered sequence of events that match the actions and outcomes they think happened.” We also appreciate that a complex system may look very different depending on perspective.

For these reasons we are generating insight through a number of approaches, and across a number of levels of the organisational hierarchy:

• At the end of each week, we email a purposefully selected group of colleagues with a form that asks 3 or 4 questions — effectively soliciting ‘weeknotes’ reflecting on their experience. We also share an open invite to respond to the questions on our internal social network, allowing anyone to opt-in.

Examples of questions we have asked in a weekly form sent to colleagues, inviting them to reflect on their experience responding to Coronavirus.

• Where feasible, we are observing key working groups and decision making meetings.
• We are working alongside our youth engagement team to understand young people’s influence over, and experience of, our changing support services.
• We are working to support our Executive Leadership Team to reflect on their strategic learning, and on how systems are being reshaped.
• We will also review internal data, such as anonymised meta-data from our case management system (e.g. on usage of digital tools with young people).

What have we heard and seen so far?

We wanted to share what we’re doing at this stage to enable feedback on our approach. Over the coming weeks (and months) we will share the insights that are emerging. In the meantime, here are a few initial observations, which we felt might resonate beyond our organisation.

• In personal reflections and within meetings we’ve observed, there are unprecedented levels of collaboration across the organisation: “Service managers are sharing resources and ideas with each other…. I’m not saying that we didn’t do this before, but we are doing so now more than ever”. In a similar vein: “Work across the country for our team feels like it’s getting a lot more connected and streamlined as a result [of new digital working groups].” These two quotes are emblematic of countless similar comments from colleagues working on the frontline of our services. One practitioner reflected that they feel “more part of TCS than ever” because of this connectivity. No-one has talked about silos or politics or bureaucracy — whilst these are not unusually significant features of our normal operations, they are strikingly absent from staff reflections during the last few weeks. Collaboration has been “pragmatic, lacked ego or defensiveness and it has worked”. Various factors appear to be driving this, including geography becoming irrelevant, a unifying and urgent sense of mission, and more obvious interdependencies between teams in a context where rapid decision-making is vital and expected. Colleagues reflect that “we are stronger together”.
• External collaboration has also significantly intensified. Faced with challenges that are well recognised, sector-wide, and often fundamental to the continuation of existing support for vulnerable groups, teams are sharing resources and lessons with counterparts (including organisations that are typically rendered ‘competitors’ by commissioning processes). Services cite “daily meetings” with key partners to coordinate their response to the crisis — “we have supported one another across different organisations to set up alternative ways of [working]”. Funders have been almost universally helpful. Rapid collaboration is also evident in the coordination of our policy, public affairs and media response with other children’s charities and relevant central bodies.
• As well as increasing collaboration, colleagues are moving across internal organisational boundaries to respond to priorities. One colleague reflected that they feel more able “to move staff around (where they are happy to do so) to support [priority] pieces of work”. Another highlighted that people have been signing up to a new virtual training “to ensure we have staff available in case our workers become ill”.
• Within services, practitioners are testing new tools and approaches to engage young people. For example, “a member of staff completed a virtual walk with a young person to get him out the house” (i.e. they took their exercise simultaneously using Facetime). Where new approaches haven’t worked first time services are rapidly iterating: “I have no idea what tools we were using on Monday but we have migrated through to find ones that work”.
• The Children’s Society’s digital transformation was nascent prior to the Coronavirus outbreak — we are receiving support from the National Lottery Community Fund to catalyse it. In this context, there were limited established resources for colleagues to draw upon when integrating digital tools into the diverse array of services the organisation delivers. To respond to the crisis, multidisciplinary working groups were formed to develop guidance on the use of digital to engage young people. These pull together expertise from our Quality Practice and Safeguarding, Digital, Data Protection, Youth Engagement and Information Services teams, who in turn are engaging external partners (e.g. legal, clinical governance bodies, tech firms…etc). Colleagues have praised the responsiveness of these groups in reacting to the needs of different services. Even so, group members reflect “it’s not easy addressing all the concerns and confidence issues that practitioners are experiencing (I sometimes worry practitioners may forget that these teams are experiencing the same challenges as they are).” Working groups are also wrestling with the appropriate levels of guidance to provide in a fast-moving environment. Core standards, compliance and safeguards must be upheld, whilst at the same avoiding “turning this into a nanny state”.
• Colleagues appear to have worked most effectively where organisational design enables empathy. For teams which are less connected to our work with children and young people (CYP), it’s a significant ask to rapidly empathise with frontline practitioners’ context, needs, and challenges — and to align support behind these quickly. Absent from being systemically connected to the day-to-day reality of CYP work (e.g. through embedded working or ‘user research’ capacity), effective collaboration can be slower or depend on personalities clicking.
• Over and over again, colleagues reflect on the capability and kindness of their peers. Amidst this transformation people are stepping up, and looking out for each other: “I work with awesome and incredibly kind people — situations like this can really bring out the best in people!” … “I knew it, but it has reinforced that TCS colleagues are brilliant” … “My team are even more awesome than I thought” … “Laughing [with my team] really helped me this week” … “We have been more supportive and caring of each other and are collectively looking after each other” … “I’d like to celebrate the team’s willingness to be flexible” … “I just want to recognise how hard we’ve worked and how much we’ve done” — are among the many examples of this sentiment.

These are just a few observations drawn from the data to illustrate what we’re hearing and seeing — it goes without saying they do not fully capture the messy reality, and of course they may not hold true over time. As we emerge from the immediate crisis, through this work we hope to forge insights that enable colleagues across the organisation to reflect deeply and systemically on what is happening and what we are learning. If we can achieve that, then we can use this opportunity to consciously shape the future of the organisation and wider systems we operate within for the good of children and young people.

—

If you have feedback or reflections, please get in touch with us via @adgro @gemmadrake or @nerysanthony.