Looking back and looking forward

As we approach the festive season, I have been preoccupied by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Now we are coming to the end of 2023, it is a good time to reflect on the last twelve months and how we can connect the past, present and future so that we can use the learning to make the best decisions in the years ahead.

The past year has been difficult and challenging for the whole country. For us at Sense, it has taken longer, been tougher and has required more effort and hard work to bring about change and respond effectively to the difficult external environment.

But we have certainly learned from the past. We finalised our annual budget at the start of this year. Given the ongoing pressures, we saw that the budget would be challenging to meet as soon as it was published so we had to move quickly, review our budget and re-prioritise our work. The main challenge was to really focus on the must-dos for Sense, to scrutinise all our income and outgoings, look at service improvements, hold back some expenditure and recruitment, and to develop more efficient systems.

Reflecting on 2023, it seems that we solved one month’s problems only for the following month’s problems to be different. Fundraising has been more challenging with more competition for funds. In our charity shops, costs have increased, and it is a competitive market for quality donations. The months of October and November have been much more challenging months due to the storms and adverse weather which have reduced footfalls for all retailers. We also faced a hard period in social care where we had the challenges of recruitment and retention issues, increased use and costs of agency, increased number of voids, and the need to secure fees to meet the increased cost of living. 

We know that times are tough for everyone, but they have disproportionally impacted on disabled people. Thousands of disabled people are still missing out on the vital support they need. The pandemic and now the cost-of-living crisis has made things harder. It’s made existing barriers worse and exposed new issues. That is why we responded in a new way and introduced emergency payments to disabled families – and that’s why we will never stop campaigning for change. From more financial support for households during the cost-of-living crisis, to securing further investment in respite services, and responding to the recent Autumn Statement. 

We have certainly learned from the past twelve months.  What I have learned this year as a leader is how we deal with the more difficult stuff and explore ways to effectively support people through change.

I have learned that organisations don’t fear incremental change.  But we do fear sudden change. We fear change that threatens us. Sometimes it is important to give a label to the level of change needed and the prospect of not changing. So, we said, “these challenges are serious. We need to change today. If we do nothing, we would be sleepwalking ourselves into something really serious.” We knew we had an issue with recruitment and rising social care costs. We didn’t know immediately what we needed to do to resolve this.    So, we defined the situation that we were in, the context, what we needed to achieve, and from there we were able to define the solutions.  In this way, we could energise people and lower the level of fear as we started to identify solutions and bring about change.

We adopted a much more collaborative approach than ever before, bringing together finance, operations, people teams, and have finessed our approach over the last twelve months.  Working through each of our social care services has enabled our support functions to ask the right questions of other services and improved our colleagues’ understanding of other services. It also enabled us to identify areas and processes that need to be reviewed and updated.

We didn’t just pivot our services.  We needed to pivot our jobs. This came with an acknowledgment that we put ourselves through stress and strain and the need to support each other.

The real game changers came with using data to inform decision making.  We looked at all our data sets, got into the detail and used it to build a clearer picture of our services, and understand our gaps. The data has enabled us to work much more collaboratively across departments, to share knowledge and support each other with areas such as recruitment challenges.  It also brought confidence, that individuals had support and could contribute to the change and more solutions.

We have put in place the right financial controls, more formal forecasting, and a three-year financial plan to give us greater assurances for the future.  More than ever, we have worked together as one team. We have already come a long way.  Learning from our mistakes will make a valuable contribution to the future.

We are now focused on the present and the future. The here and now is about continuing to monitor our budget, to understand what the financial information is telling us now, and what that means for the rest of the financial year. 

Looking to the next financial year, we know that we will need to absorb additional costs given the increases in minimum wage rates. In social care, the government will need to increase real terms social care funding to enable us to recover these costs and secure fee increases from our commissioners. In our retail sector, it is a stark reminder that whilst government announces the increases in minimum wage, it is charity shops like ours that must deliver it and absorb higher wage bills. 

We have started to look at the future. This will include developing and implementing our new data and insight strategy; driving sales in Trading and opening new shops ahead of time; implementing our Engagement strategy to secure fresh fundraising opportunities; reviewing our brand narrative so we are able to explain what we do in a dynamic and succinct way and continuing to invest in new resources, systems and skills. We have the opportunity and skills to seek out new practices and solutions that will give us the edge in the future.

We will also be implementing the outcomes from our Employee Engagement Survey based on the valuable feedback that you gave us. In January we will sharing our Organisational Action Plan, focused around our key areas of ‘communication’, ‘valuing employees’, ‘leadership’ and ‘taking action’. This is something that myself and my Executive Team colleagues are extremely passionate about and we are excited to take you on the journey with us.

The power of the employee voice cannot be understated and a strong organisational culture of listening to employees is healthy and strengthens our ambition of being an employer of choice, where all colleagues feel they can be open and contribute.

Our Employee Forum and Diversity Networks are having an increased influence on our future work and we have committed to further develop supporting the health and wellbeing of our colleagues by introducing resources such as Headspace and new toolbox talks. We can also look forward to a refreshed Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy in 2024.

Looking ahead, we have a strong Executive Team and a talented Leadership Team behind us.  We have a positive future in front of us and our challenges ahead seem less daunting.  By learning from the past twelve months, we can be more confident about the future.  

There is a quote that says: ‘great leaders absorb fear and exude hope to others.’ I think that's an excellent quote to keep in mind as we lead our teams through challenging times. I am confident that we will continue to exude the right level of hope to our teams over the next year.

Thank you and all the very best for the New Year.

Richard