Stop, collaborate and listen.
Collaboration is vital to the Government Communication Service (GCS) – it’s one of the 3 pillars of the GCS strategy. Over the last couple of years, we’ve found that there are huge benefits to collaborating, not just within our own department, but across government.
We’re Direct Customer Communications, a small team within HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) Comms. Our job is to transform how we communicate with customers through our letters, emails and other channels. Because what we do is quite specialist and comes with unique challenges, we knew we could collaborate with teams outside of HMRC and learn from them too.
The start of our collaboration journey
At HMRC there are at least 24,000 colleagues whose role involves writing to customers. We’ve been busy the last 3 years creating a new set of writing guidelines and finding ways to improve writing skills.
To make sure these new guidelines landed well with HMRC colleagues, we spent a lot of time getting buy-in from operational and comms teams. This meant involving them regularly in our discussions, proposals and products so they knew what to expect at each stage. But we kept wondering whether other teams were doing similar things and if we could learn from how they approached any challenges they faced.
“Having a close relationship with HMRC colleagues gives us a great opportunity to look beyond our day-to-day roles and see how other communications colleagues approach their work.
Helen Race, Customer Communications Capability, Standards and Insight team leader at DWP
I find our catch-ups immensely useful and it gives us a link into a shared way of wider government thinking.”
Linking up with the Department for Work and Pensions
Our first collaboration was with the Customer Experience and Insight team at Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Our team was only a few months old at that point, so learning from DWP in those early days was incredibly valuable. There were many moments when we found we were all dealing with the same challenges, even if there was no obvious way to fix them.
The team at DWP is structured differently to ours and they’ve approached writing standards in a slightly different way too. But HMRC and DWP share certain characteristics – such as size and complexity of organisation, writing about sensitive subjects and often a similar customer base. This really helped us visualise how we might take on the tasks ahead of us.
Supporting the new team at the Valuation Office Agency
Next, it was our turn to support. When we were a bit more established, the External Affairs team at the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) got in touch. Their team was still fairly new and smaller than ours, and they’d set up a project to review and reduce over 1000 customer letters or templates and similarly improve the writing skills of VOA colleagues.
We met on MS Teams to exchange updates on our plans and showcase our products and insights, and quickly discovered lots of common ground. We were really pleased to be able to share our newly launched writing guidelines to help them shape their own communications and standards. In turn they shared some of the research they’d conducted with their customers.
We also helped the team arrange a contract with our training supplier and gave them access to some of our content to help them build their own e-learning module. This gave them a great starting point to work with frontline colleagues to tailor and develop in-person training.
“Having the Direct Customer Comms team to act as trusted advisors on the ways we could do this was invaluable. We’ve had fantastic feedback on the e-learning module and the in-person training, with colleagues commenting on how relevant it is. It really demonstrates the benefits of sharing knowledge and tools.”
It hasn’t ended there either…
More recently we’ve linked up with Companies House, the DVLA and Land Registry to share ideas on training and evaluation. We’ve also started talking to the Adjudicator’s Office about our plans to update the training we give to complaint handlers on writing.
What we’ve learned along the way
Collaborating with these teams has been a rewarding and interesting experience. It really helps to know others are going through similar challenges, especially as we’re a small team with a pretty unique role.
We’ve learned that both sides need to invest time and effort to keep the relationship going, but also that you get different benefits from different relationships. We’ve been able to learn from more established teams, apply this knowledge to our work and then pass it on to other new teams in turn.
We’d really encourage you to think about what you could learn from other teams within or outside your organisations, to help you approach projects or challenges from a different perspective. If you put effort into building and maintaining those networks, it could really make a difference!
We’re always on the look-out for other teams to work with and share experiences. If anything we’ve shared strikes a chord with you and you’d like to collaborate, send us an email.