Lesson 4: Communicate (and listen) relentlessly
Collaboration requires effective multi-directional communication. Paul communicated relentlessly throughout his leadership of the programme and made clear that he was always available for a phone call with contributing organisations.
When leading a complex programme, misunderstanding is common and it is important to use every communication opportunity to offer more clarity to contributors. Paul has learned that tensions and arguments can easily be diffused by having the right communication structures in place to ensure people are able to raise issues in the appropriate forums.
Early on in the programme, a communications and community engagement team was rapidly convened. They set up numerous meetings in town halls across the country talking and listening to refugees and their hosts and feeding this back to the programme leadership.
Ministers and other political leaders held forums to explain the policy to the public and other stakeholders and inspire them to act. A data feed was set up to inform programme decision making. This depicted insights and data from a range of sources including user research and other focus group data. It gave almost real time feedback on the programme’s key metrics including number of matches, number of rematches needed, help desk usage, and information from local government and the police.
Daily ‘stand-up’ meetings were held, creating an agile approach to the programme and helping communication to flow efficiently and effectively amongst the key players enabling rapid decision-making and facilitating dissemination.
Lesson for NHS
For the increasingly large and complex health and care sector, clear communication structures and channels are needed to make sure that people and organisations have the clarity they need to be effective. Technology exists to gather feedback and insights from service users in near real time and more effort should be made to ‘listen’ to these data and use them to inform decision making.
We used the collective moments as a touch point to bring participants back to our common purpose and then go again.