Kent County Council delivers its library service through 101 buildings, 11 vehicles and over 1,000 staff and volunteers.
Like most public library services, Kent Library Service has recognised an accelerating pace of change in the environment in which it operates in recent years. Seven years ago Kent County Council set the Library Service a target to transform itself. At about the same time a Best Value review had provided some welcome external challenge.
The Service initiated a change programme to respond to this change. That change programme began with a piece of work to identify the strategic priorities for the Service through consultation with the public, elected members and staff. This was used to develop a strategy for the Service, which was adopted by the Kent County Council Cabinet.
The change programme then moved on to focus on a range of operational concerns like providing modern and welcoming environments and ensuring that staff were skilled and well supported to achieve the recently identified strategic objectives. This involved major changes to staff roles and responsibilities but was cost neutral and involved no compulsory redundancies. From the start of the process the message to staff was that this restructure was being undertaken in order to realign staff roles with the new priorities for the Service.
This staff restructure focussed on how the service was delivered to communities. District managers were introduced to strengthen relationships with communities at a local level. The role for librarians changed as more “front of house” customer support assistants were employed to deliver the core service. This freed up the remaining librarians to focus on service development and improvement, including stock management and training of front of house staff. In order to understand how the service needed to develop, community librarians were expected to spend more time developing relationships with their communities and building local partnerships. Supporting them were specialist teams, bringing expertise in areas including: family and lifelong learning; IT; and publicity and promotion. These were underpinned by the remote information service “Ask a Kent Librarian” – an exemplar centrally-based information service used by both staff and public.
At the heart of the change programme was an understanding that continuous improvement of services to the public would not be achieved unless the organisational structure of the service was radically changed. Like the response to change that it supports, Kent recognises that a healthy organisational culture needs constant review and attention. Such a culture is an essential requirement if staff are to have the energy and confidence to rethink services and adapt to new circumstances.
Two years later the service was required to deliver £1m in savings. The savings were achieved by reviewing the effectiveness of the existing structure and making further revisions by taking out a management tier and reducing the number of community librarians. This change was only successfully implemented because staff understood the service priorities and were able to focus their reduced capacity in these areas. It was also vital that staff understood why this change was being implemented, ie. to deliver savings.
Along with other authorities across the country, Kent recognises that the years ahead will be particularly challenging as pressure increases on budgets and the external environment continues to change faster and faster. The principles of continual review and change put in place in Kent are giving staff the confidence to think big and to consider transformational change rather than “salami slicing” to deliver cuts. For this approach to work managers must focus on how best to support the local authorities' strategic objectives, and work in partnership with, and gain the support of, elected members. It is also essential that everyone understands that the role of consultation (with both the staff and public) is to inform decisions made and not a delegation of the leadership role to the consultees. The organisational culture needs to treat everybody as equals; encouraging the sharing of information wherever possible, and supporting creative thinking. Managing the balance between empowering and encouraging staff to take such pro-active roles in service development, and maintaining a realistic understanding of what can be influenced and where final decision making lies, is what Cath Anley (the Head of Service) thinks is the hardest part of effective leadership.
Today debate and challenge is encouraged in the Service. Effort has been invested in creating forums for comment and to capture lessons about what works. In addition to a weekly staff bulletin, a 360 degree network of 10 staff representatives and the Head of Libraries meets six times a year to discuss emerging issues and opportunities. The outcome of these meetings is then fed into local staff forums. All managers regularly go ‘back to the floor’, to maintain a sense of connection to the customers and an understanding of their needs.
This is not a project, where an end can be defined. The work is ongoing and needs continual commitment and focus. Kent Library and Archive Service know that any change process worth pursuing is endless, and that any Service who feel that they have achieved transformation have by definition failed to understand what transformation is about.