With a planning service as large as East Riding’s, clear roles and responsibilities are critical for delivering consistently great outcomes. The wide structure of the service necessitates effective communication within and between teams. And allocating work to the right team, at the right level, is essential to the functioning of the service. Beginning their improvement journey, lots of East Riding’s planners felt too overwhelmed by excessive workloads to think about where their work was going – making, in their words, the ‘outside perspective’ of Mondrem’s Head of Client Solutions and senior consultant, Lucy, ‘invaluable’ for holding them accountable to deliver the improvements they wanted and needed to see. 

 

At first, some of the team worried that dedicating time to reflect on their working practices might exacerbate existing workload and capacity challenges. Feeling like they were ‘drowning’ in work already, taking any time away from tackling proliferating workloads sometimes felt tough. In hindsight, though, elements of their project focussing on roles and responsibilities shone through as being ‘transformational’ – helping the team to make sure responsibilities lay with the right people with the skills to do the job well. Now, their team-led approach to workload allocation continues to benefit the service: Senior leaders can focus on project management, providing support, and managing stakeholder relationships; planners can focus on developing and determining applications in-hand; and support and specialist teams can work more collaboratively with the service to push for higher-quality applications and more targeted reports and information. Clear roles and responsibilities have helped to transform East Riding by creating space for leadership to happen – with new opportunities for continuous professional development and a handy ‘helicopter view’ from which to spot and fix arising problems before they grow. 

With the right work going to the right people and a shared understanding of best practice, East Riding’s planners and validators could begin unlocking lost capacity. Some planners had negative experiences with previous consultants which had left them feeling sceptical and misunderstood. However, despite seeing ‘lots of improvement programmes’ aiming to increase productivity, Mondrem’s ‘wellbeing focus’ really helped to ‘shift the teams’ perspective’ - alongside Lucy’s ‘positivity’ which was welcomed on ‘days when change felt hard’. During the first two weeks of their caseload reduction work, the team’s productivity increased by 50% - the equivalent of adding around twenty extra planners to their service with no additional long-term cost. 

Data played a vital role in improving productivity at East Riding – and key measures included and exceeded national indicators of applications processed. Routinely measuring the teams’ wellbeing using a weekly survey helped planners to feel listened to throughout the project – reframing wellbeing from an abstract or sanctimonious metric to one deeply embedded into East Riding’s commitment to creating a great working environment where planners and placemakers could do their best work. Alongside wellbeing, monitoring performance data using Mondrem’s WorkPlan software helped to visualise the team’s progress – emphasising a clear link between wellbeing and productivity, creating a convincing data story to feedback to stakeholders, enabling them to see and address issues at the root cause, and offering the team some welcome motivation by forecasting the impact of their hard work. And by evidencing where issues were most often occurring, the team could lead data-driven process improvements to support their new ways of working. 

Throughout their ongoing journey, communicating more effectively with one another and external stakeholders continues to help set clear expectations – giving the team the space they need to lead and sustain improvements. With their newly shared understanding of roles and responsibilities and more streamlined and efficient processes, teams within the service can communicate and collaborate more effectively. Regular operational meetings drawing together planning, specialist, and support teams help to inform clear and consistent leadership practices – making sure everyone is pulling in a shared direction. And routinely encouraging people at every level of their service to feedback their experiences to senior leaders who have more capacity to support them has helped to ensure everyone feels well-supported throughout their journey. Additionally, series of external communications have kept stakeholders like local councillors, agents and developers, and other service users ‘in the loop’ - demonstrating the value of East Riding’s improvement journey from their own perspectives. As a result, East Riding’s planning service are moving towards higher-quality planning applications, clearer and actionable reports of planning breaches which include all the information they need, and fewer complaints overall. Their journey continues to benefit from the support of their local councillor and Planning Portfolio Holder, Cllr Leo Hammond. 

Eighteen months after beginning their ‘Fit for the Future’ project with Mondrem, East Riding’s planning service continue to feel the benefits of their new approach and have made significant improvements to wellbeing, and in turn welcomed the consequences of increased productivity and reduced work-in-progress. There is a feeling that the service has shifted from a ‘reactive to proactive’ approach, putting their newly unlocked additional capacity towards fee-earning activities like PPAs and Pre-Apps - ‘building resilience’ against a sometimes tough legislative and financial landscape. As of June 2024, East Riding’s planners have reduced their work-in-progress by just under 40% and are forecast to meet and exceed the national 8-week target this autumn. Planning enforcement have similarly reduced their work-in-progress by over a third and are predicted to meet their 20-week target by early 2025. And the validation team have completely cleared their backlog. Although the service agrees they are at the beginning of what will be an ongoing journey, they have already noticed significant improvements to morale and wellbeing and are keen to keep up the good work. With the hope and belief that things can and will be better, they are well on their way to achieving their mission: ‘to make East Riding a great place to live and work’.