Whether you believe in setting new years resolutions or you just like to set goals, a new year provides a mental 'line in the sand' for us to look forward and think, "what would I like to achieve?"
I am sure 2020 opened your eyes to many opportunities to do things better, to challenge the status quo and to improve your service offerings to better help the people you care for. For this sort of thinking, the start of a new year is a great place to start!
So, below are a couple of examples of challenges you might be facing and some simple ideas of what you could do. I hope you find them helpful.
Let's get into it!
1. Do you have a service that isn't having the desired impact on the people you care for?
You might be getting complaints, clients leaving your organisation, not enough clients joining or you may feel the service is not having the impact it was designed to have?
What could you do?
Get your team together and set some goals to improve the service, gaining their buy-in and commitment to better understand the problems and to implement changes to improve the service
Speak to some of your clients to understand the problem from their perspective. Gaining a better insight into what is and isn't working, so that then your team has the insights to create new solutions that suit their needs
Kick off a Co-design project to involve your clients and stakeholders in exploring the challenges together, and then co-creating better solutions. This way you will ensure that all perspectives are included and your solution will address the root cause, as it was co-designed from start to finish!
2. Are you a bit stuck and not sure what to do next?
You may have a complex problem that you aren't sure how to solve, a heap of great ideas and limited resources to do them all, or do you need to align your teams and stakeholders on what is truly important so you can move forward in the same direction?
What could you do?
You could map the client journey. This will help you understand the entire end to end experience for your clients when they interact with your organisation and understand what are their key pain points. This approach will give you the whole picture, rather than isolated incidences, but also help to prioritise what to work on first
Everything is part of a system, rarely does something function in complete isolation. You could start by mapping the system in which your organisation is a part of, to understand all of the different pieces and who plays what role for the people you care for? For example, if you are an in-home aged care service provider, you could map all of the other service providers and support resources in your area, to understand who plays what role for the client. This could show overlap or even gaps, when you think about this system versus the needs of your clients. Giving you a different perspective on what you need to do next
You could run a workshop to prioritise your most critical projects for the year, by getting your team to understand all of the potential projects and their benefits, and then using a filtering process to find you the projects that will deliver maximum impact with minimal effort. This could help you understand which pieces of work you prioritise for the year
Check-in on your organisational strategy. Does it need a refresh? Do you need to build a new strategy? A good organisational strategy that is well understood by your people will ensure you move together in the same direction. Maybe you have a great strategy but you need to execute it better?
3. Do you see an opportunity to provide a better or new service that will enhance the lives of those you care for? Have you found an opportunity such as a gap in your service offering, or do you feel like your organisation has the ability to do more for your clients?
What could you do?
Create a small project team to explore the problem you want to solve. Build ideas of what could solve the problem and apply for grants that could give you funding to do it
Set up a 'test and learn' environment, where you create an example of your new idea, and test it with a group of clients to see if it works. Usually what we do here is create something that is a cheap and easy way to demonstrate what the service would look like, but not be the entire service. The balance is, easy to set up but also good enough for clients to give you meaningful feedback on the experience
Identify who you think the potential clients might be for your new service and invite them in for a Co-design workshop to help you co-create the new solution
4. Are your team coming to you with problems and instead, you'd like them to innovate and change things? You may be stretched with all of your own responsibilities and wish your team felt empowered and capable to solve challenges? What could you do?
Provide your team with some time to build their innovation capability. Do you have someone in your organisation that posses these capabilities, that could run a training session to upskill others?
Could you create a list of all of the top client complaints and assign the most critical of those complaints to different groups in your organisation, giving them the tools and resources to solve them?
You could bring in some kick-ass innovation consultants to help you train your staff, like I dunno who... 🤔
I hope these tips have been helpful and have given you a few ideas on how you can make 2021 your year, achieve what you want to achieve and increase your organisation's impact.
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