Please bear with us

It’s a bit of a grizzly time for us as a digital team.

In the last 2 weeks alone we’ve had over 75 new content request forms submitted, over 60 requests submitted via email (not including back and forth emails), on top of a host of big ongoing projects, and a backlog to wade through.

All this whilst juggling meetings, sickness and annual leave within our very small team. It’s A LOT but we’re chugging along to get through it.

So please spare a thought for your local digital team member… we’re doing our best!

Grumpy Bear

Leadership development days

Twice a year, Heledd is invited to a get together with Sarah Jennings, our Director and all the Leadership people and managers that report into the Customer, Communications and Commercial Directorate. The theme for this meet-up was resilience.

Between the relentless requests and workload of our team and many other teams in NRW, and with a backdrop of the choppy waters and general madness of the world - learning more about resilience feels topical. Catrin led a session to question Sarah about what’s important to the Executive Team at NRW right now, what challenges she faces, how do we go about tackling the concerns raised in the staff survey, what action is being taken to tackle the concerns raised in the staff survey. Sarah was very open and honest with us in the room, and we all had a chance to ask more questions. On the second day, Julie Andrews, a Nurse Team Leader from Morriston Hospital joined to talk about how she manages to stay resilient – in a very busy and pressured environment. She shared her experience of working as a nurse in a busy hospital ward, managing a team of 50 nursing professionals. She shared her practical tips of what she did personally, but also to help support her team to be resilient. Heledd enjoyed Julie’s honest and authentic leadership style, and there were a lot of practical tips that could help us as individuals and as a team.

The take away messages:

  • Circle of Control: Focus your time and energy on these things, as you have direct control over them.
  • Circle of Influence: Do your best to sway things in your favour, but don’t stress if things don’t go your way; you never had the power to choose.
  • Circle of Interest: Try to accept, recognise you can’t control or influence them. Instead, find the subset of things you can control or influence.

Deciding what’s within our Control, Influence or Interest will continue to be a struggle for most teams – we care about trying to fix the bigger problems. This is a useful framework to try and help us be a happier, more resilient team that can deliver the important work we’re here to do.

The Circle of Control - by Simon Cross

  • Having a safe space / person or people to share and vent when needed
  • Finding ways to escalate and influence things, that are not within our direct area of control

A day on the train – learning / reading / saving stuff for later.

With no high-speed railway connecting Bethesda with Cardiff, Heledd spent another 8 hours getting to Cardiff and back, which means her head was mostly in her phone or laptop.

Some stuff Heledd read or bookmarked for later – whilst browsing X, LinkedIn and BlueSky.

Heledd joined a late evening workshop on Thursday with Kate Tarling. She is very, very excited about talking more about it next week.

Changes to waste exemptions

Changes to waste exemptions means NRW will need to communicate with businesses that use them and anyone about to register exemptions for the first time.

An exemption basically means someone can do something with waste that is fairly low risk, without applying for a permit – but they still have to register the exemption with us.

Thousands of businesses across Wales use exemptions to handle waste, so the changes will affect lots of people.

Alex and Sam met comms and waste policy and agreed an approach to reach users in targeted ways:

  • create content about the changes within the registration/ renewal user journey
  • emails direct to exemption holders
  • blogs
  • content for staff dealt with internally, not on the website

This is a bit of a different approach to what’s been done before which is to try and put everything for everybody on a page – we’ll assess how it works.

Checking oil storage tanks

Sam worked with ops staff SMEs on new check your household storage tank for leaks content. Previously NRW had been using an annual press release to remind people to check their storage tank – some years it would link to a PDF written in legalese. We felt that content for people with oil storage tanks deserved a permanent home, that could be linked to from news, social media or blogs.

Filming on NRW land

Sam, Laura and Lucinda have been delving into three years of applications to film on land we manage. We’ve found that most applicants:

  • are using the form as a tentative approach (ie can they in principle use our land, are the dates available?)
  • aren’t ready to provide the information we’re asking them for
  • aren’t giving 12 weeks’ notice (which is what we ask for)

Users’ reality and our expectations seem to be mismatched. We’re feeding lots of learning into this project.

Content strategy and SME how-to

We published the new content strategy as well as a succinct summary of the role of the SME in content creation. We’ll be doing some organisational comms soon.

Other things happening this week:

  • James has been revising the draft ‘Apply for a felling licence’ web page. He met with the SoNaRR team to draft a landing page for SoNaRR2025. He’s also been preparing for some user research interviews about our new ‘horse riding permit at Newborough’ service and getting permission to film on NRW land.
  • Paul, Andrew, Lucinda, Sophie and Kim had a meeting to bounce around ideas for streamlining the content board.
  • Owain is currently re-creating all of our data dashboards for the website and intranet, following a major update by Google this summer. It’s an un-bear-ably big job but someone has to do it.
  • Andrew is dipping into sheep dip forms.
  • Lucinda has been prototyping online application forms for a ‘apply for a job’ service.

Fun fact Friday

Now for the real reason you’re here… this week’s fun fact. We go from bearing with us to just bears. Did you know it was ‘Fat Bear Week’? If not then you’re in for a treat, look at these chunky bois:

Meet the bears of Fat Bear Week.

What is fat bear week? Some of the largest brown bears on Earth make their home at Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Brown bears get fat to survive and Fat Bear Week is an annual tournament celebrating their success in preparation for winter hibernation.

Here is a particularly fine example:

128 Grazer

Here is the league table as it currently stands (Go Grazer!)

Fat Bear league table

If you too are as passionate as us about Grazer winning the Fat Bear crown. Vote for your favourite fat bear. The winner will be announced next Tuesday.

Weekend wisdom

“Two bears in one cave will not end well.” – Mongolian Proverb