Weeknotes 1–15/11
At the end of the week my head feels like a ball of spaghetti and I can’t remember anything I’ve done. So it’s been really helpful to look through my calendar, focus my mind, and write down what’s happened (with some reflections).
Internal battles
I’ve struggled with my mental health this week — this usually affects my confidence, which affects my ability to work effectively, take risks, talk to people. However, I’ve ended the week feeling more on track (woo). That’s in part down to:
- support from my amazing line manager, Natalie, who listens to me and keeps putting her trust in me
- the kind, kind hearts of my fellow team-mates in the digital workplace and customer journey teams
- choosing to walk to work from Kings Cross when my train was delayed instead of taking the tube — the wind, beautiful trees, micro parks and lovely architecture I passed on my way really gave me a physical and mental boost
- going to the pub with my team after work
- people telling me I’ve done a good job with various things :-)
It’s so important to keep encouraging each other. Because I’ve benefited from others’ encouragement, I’m trying hard not to withhold words of appreciation and encouragement from others when I feel them.
Line management joys
Being able to support two talented, lovely people in their everyday work and future development is one of my favourite parts of my job! Tuesday had some lovely catch ups with my line reports, Ben and Sarah, on the amazing content work they’re doing. Ben’s working with the performance and quality team redesigning vital confidentiality and safeguarding guidance for local Citizens Advice. Sarah’s leading a complicated piece of work around content governance — what support and processes do we need to put in place to make sure we have intranet content that’s of high quality and easy to find?
Feeling torn
On Wednesday I had to take my daughter to the hospital in the afternoon (nothing serious), so I worked from home in the morning and took the afternoon off. I struggled in the morning, feeling torn between wanting to be in the office to get my work done and the desire to be there for Skye. I find this pull between work and family doesn’t really get easier as time goes on. But it was a productive morning…. I had a few team meetings to plan some work coming up and prepared content to share with local Citizens Advice at conference next week.
The afternoon ended up being such a blessing! Our car is broken so we had to take a bus and a train to get to the hospital — it was quite an adventure! I ended up having some really quality time with Skye — we chatted over a snack in the cafe, made patterns and stories on post-its (what else?), and did some great artwork! Walking home we played ‘follow my leader’ — we danced, marched, funny-walked, and hugged trees all the way home.
Mapping and more mapping
I was really happy to get back into the office on Thursday and see the team. Had a great chat with the newest member of our team, Daniel. He’s going to be helping Pandora continue to rollout Workplace to local Citizens Advice — as well as encouraging and supporting our people to collaborate, communicate, share and learn on the platform.
I joined Steph, Mika and Alex to do some stakeholder mapping for our new intranet work — not an easy task when everyone (30,000 people) are potentially stakeholders! It was really useful to have Mika’s experience and insight from working in a local Citizens Advice.
We also spent time as a team roadmapping — what do we want to be working on between April 2020 and March 2021? Another tricky piece of work, but important. Good to remember that roadmaps can and will change as the project develops. It’s helpful to have something to aim for, but be prepared for change and flux.
My favourite team session of the day was discussing how we’ll:
- share our successes and learnings
- celebrate and spend time together as a team
For the time as a team stuff, my favourite suggestions were appreciation sessions (where we give each other post-its saying what we appreciate about each other), rotating lunches (a different person organises something different each time — maybe a walk, playing a game, etc), FIKA (which we do already), and DJ nights with our team-mate DJ Alex (whoop!) :-)
Glorious Fridays
I really love Fridays in the office. They feel quieter, more relaxed. Plus we have a (short) quiz at 4pm — they are really hard! It’s a good week for me if I get 1 point out of 5 — today I got zero :-)
It was a productive day, although of course I didn’t get through everything I wanted to (who does?). I:
- uploaded some new draft guidance (written by Ben) for local offices on ‘protecting client confidentiality in your office’ ready to test with users at conference next week
- caught up on the work the team (led by Sarah) has been doing on content governance — in particular, exploring the roles and responsibilities of ‘content owner’ and ‘content creator’
- completed a draft data protection impact assessment with Steph and Mika on our new intranet product to make sure we’re being responsible with users’ data
- dropped in on a show and tell by our new platform team about the work they’re doing to secure a new content management system (to allow us to ‘innovate with ease’) — very exciting
- enjoyed random bits of chit chat and banter
Being brave
Last week I decided it would be a great idea to submit a proposal to talk about our wonderful digital workplace work at Utterly Content Conference. I’m not a natural public speaker, have never spoken at a conference before, and the thought terrifies me somewhat! But for some reason I believe I can do it. So today I wrote the proposal and clicked the submit button! Let’s hope we’re successful!
