Notes from the inaugural One Team Gov Manchester breakfast

On 24 July at the DWP Hub in St Peter’s Square we ran the first Manchester-based One Team Gov breakfast. This was the week after I attended the first One Team Gov Global event and, in the spirit of Principle 2: take practical action, committed to setting something up for public servants based in Manchester. There was (and is) a One Team Gov North that encompasses all of the Northern cities — one of their last conferences was run in Manchester and there are regular events in Sheffield and Leeds. However, I’d been struggling to get to them and knew of others in Manchester who were interested in getting involved but for whom travelling was difficult. For informal, regular, non-agenda’d meet-ups like this, I believe there is value in staying hyper-local.

As it was our first meet-up we took the time to go round the room and introduce ourselves properly — name, organisation and job family. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of people we had in the room. We spanned 6 organisations (government departments, non-departmental public bodies and private sector) and multiple job roles (user research, product management, policy, delivery, behavioural economics, cyber-security).

Once we’d gotten to know each other a little we ran a post it note session to gather ideas about how we want One Team Gov Manchester to work. In the spirit of Principle 1: work in the open and positively, here’s what we came up with…

Who do we want to be here?

We had some good diversity in the room, but we were still skewed towards digital professions and product management. We agreed we would like to have people from local government, operations, policy and analysts as well as some representation from HMRC, who we know have a Manchester office. That’s not to say if you’re not on that list you’re not welcome, it’s an open community! We just wanted to identify and positively encourage some groups we knew were missing to join us in the future.

How do we encourage others to join us?

Whilst we want to keep things informal, we recognised that if we want people from operational teams or local authorities to travel to us we may need to have some breakfasts with a formal agenda or pre-defined focus, so that they can make a clear case for why it’s valuable for them to attend.

We also agreed that there are loads of internal communications channels and platforms we could make better use of, which might help us break out of the digital bias that is definitely enhanced by promoting through Twitter. I think we all agreed it would be good to be able to share a proper invite too, rather than me try and handle everyone through direct messages!

Finally, it sounds trivial, but we want to get some One Team Gov stickers and lanyards for breakfasters to take away and use as prompts to start conversations with others.

What do we want to achieve?

We had lots of ideas in this section…

• Networking and peer support — making connections across traditional divides and sharing our energy and enthusiasm for public service
• Learning from each other — about different organisations, professions and ways of doing things
• Contributing to the Manchester community — by highlighting and supporting opportunities to speak at events, encouraging young people into civil service or volunteering
• Fostering leadership opportunities — pushing/lobbying to ensuring Manchester, and the North of England get a representative number of leadership roles
• Active collaboration — on projects where our departmental objectives overlap

What came out of our first breakfast

It was only our first breakfast, but when we finished the structured discussion one DfE user researcher came up to meet the user researchers in my team and I’ve since been in contact with another DfE colleague about leadership initiatives in the north. Hopefully these are the first small steps towards achieving some of the goals we set ourselves. We all agreed we wanted to do these more frequently and that it would be good to talk about how we talk about One Team Gov Manchester to others — so we’d like to write our own ‘elevator pitch’.

Next time we will be talking about our One Team Gov Manchester elevator pitch. If you’d like to join us, we will be in the café on the first floor of the DWP hub from 08:30 until 09:45on 14 August.