South Tyneside Council

South Tyneside Council are a forward-thinking and innovative council with a clear goal to develop digitally. They are also one of the 8 successful local authorities that are taking part in the Future Councils pilot with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. As part of this pilot, all councils agreed to baseline current digital and cyber maturity. 

After recently introducing their ‘Modern Workplace Programme’ to improve and modernise their ways of working, they wanted to use some of the Future Councils funding to focus on helping their staff work better with available technology. In particular, with increasing the adoption of Microsoft 365. 

They knew there was pockets of successful use and adoption of Microsoft 365 across the council, but wanted to have a clearer view to baseline and improve the maturity of use more widely. Our Digital Skills Assessment not only looked at capability across the council, but more importantly the maturity of use.  

People may have the capability to undertake an activity, but the Digital Skills Assessment understands the why.  Being clear on why people aren’t mature in their digital skills is crucial to creating a programme of change. The solution might be a learning programme, or it might be addressing the lack of awareness of tools or even cultural blockers. 

We started by customising the assessment to the council’s needs and integrating it into their Annual Employee Survey – this way overcoming the ‘Survey-Fatigue’ most public sector organisations face. After analysing the initial assessment results, we followed up with focus groups. We found a maturity of use in several key areas such as Meetings, Task Management and Communication. While these were inline with a desired baseline, there were areas for improvement in other areas such as Information Management and Accessibility. Other key findings showed that around 50% of staff were not storing files in the cloud, with version control being utilised by less than 20% of people.   

“Hable went above and beyond to deliver the project to a high standard, were flexible with changes, and provided useful support and advice throughout.”

- Georgia Fletcher, South Tyneside 

Thanks to these insights, we were able to put together a programme of dedicated learning. One which wasn’t ‘one size fits all’, but properly reflected what people really needed from their learning in order to thrive at work. Rather than just training them on any and everything.

The 'M365 Academy' learning programme not only covered essential skills to improve understanding of Microsoft 365, but also combined our Change Desk service. Meaning South Tyneside staff received additional support in their flow of work, alongside the learning sessions. Having a platform to ask those ‘How do I?’ questions is essential to reinforcing change to ultimately become a behaviour. .  

We are delighted to report an increase in confidence has already been seen across South Tyneside and look forward to continuing working with them to boost digital skills for all staff.