At East Sussex they feel it’s important to trust and empower their staff to use their judgement and they try not to put bureaucracy in their way. They also strive for equality of opportunity in all aspects of work.

A forward-thinking approach to new technologies

They embrace new technology and try to harness its capabilities to improve how they deliver services:

• They use Yammer across all their corporate departments to enable staff to communicate and share information
• They use Microsoft Teams for business so they can keep in touch by instant messaging, video conference and desktop sharing
• Their senior managers host web chats where staff can ask them whatever they want

Join an agile organisation

Where possible they encourage their staff to work in an agile way. This can mean working at one of their sites with your team, or at home when needed, but always retaining a strong team identity.
They will provide you with the technology and equipment, to do your job efficiently from wherever you are. For instance, you can take part in meetings with colleagues at the other end of the county via Microsoft Teams, and share your screen and work on documents together.

A culture of learning and development

East Sussex support a diverse range of learning and development opportunities for their workforce. They also promote a coaching culture to encourage and embed learning at work because they recognise that some of the most impactful learning happens on the job and by reflecting on it with others.

Planning for the future

Their People Strategy has been developed to help achieve the people changes needed over the next 3 to 5 years.