Secretary's Corner
November 2008
We are constantly trying to improve the way that we communicate with our members.
As you can imagine, communicating a vast amount of information to over 5 thousand members of staff across the huge and diverse geographical area in which we work is no mean task.
However, we have come a long way from where we were 12 Months or so ago, we now have a first class newsletter, one of the best websites in the region, our E-news service that members can sign up to, special bulletins, the “your shout” forum, station visits, well publicised phone numbers and email addresses of all the committee members for those personal issues/advice and the local staff partnership forums.
The only slight problem with some of these methods is that they rely heavily on IT and they rely on a small handful of people doing all the work. To overcome this problem it would be ideal if we had a representative at every department that we could feed information to for them to post on notice boards or disseminate to staff. We currently have somewhere in the region of 120 departments with only about a quarter having a named rep for us to contact. We will soon be sending out the annual nominations for department reps and, as I seem to do every year, I must urge staff to elect a rep and send back the form for accreditation. If it really isn’t possible that someone is willing to put their name forward, then this year we will also be inviting expressions of interest from members that are prepared to be a department contact that we can send information to hot off the press.
I would also like to add that communication is a 2 way street, if, for example, a rep would like information on a latest policy position and that policy has not yet dropped on the doormat, then try contacting the County Lead and asking the question, after all, we are here to help.
This is your union and by more people getting involved and sharing the workload, we will become more efficient and everyone will benefit.
As the saying goes, “don’t be a part of the problem, be a part of the solution.
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