We’re back in the office this week, stuffed full of biscuits, meringue nests, cheese and even the mother in law’s Christmas cake, but we’re online and working the feast off. We hope you had a lovely break with your family and friends and found plenty of time to eat, drink and be merry.

post-christmas lunch

Steady start into the new year

Heledd’s not a fan of big “new year, new start” approaches. January is hard enough - what with the long dark days, rain and general state of the world. It’s a time to take extra care of ourselves, not set unachievable new year’s resolutions or strict regimes.

Despite that, it’s a natural time to reflect, make plans and make changes where we need to.

Prioritising prioritisation

Although our team’s grown a little over recent years, so has the demand. There is a lot more work we are asked to do than we’ve got capacity to do. We also have a long list (and several heads’ full) of work that we’d love to focus on as a team - that will make things better for users and colleagues (if only we had the time!).

Team wellbeing is the most important thing. We each have a responsibility to use our wellbeing hour, take breaks, say no and escalate where needed - but the nub of the issue is too much work.

It’s natural to have periods of stress and urgency, and there will always be some big-critical deadlines. But the level of stress in recent months and years is unsustainable.

Some of the changes for our 2024:

1 Clearer priorities - of what we do / don’t do within the team.

  • We’ll be talking and sharing more within our team and with colleagues in other departments.
  • As a team, this will mean accepting a longer list of stuff that will sit in a backlog, and not done (not always a comfortable thing).

2 We’ll prioritise publishing and designing web content and web forms. The team’s done brilliant work over the past couple of years to support colleagues with creating more accessible PDFs, before they are published to the website. Some teams have become great at considering and creating accessible documents, but there are a lot of teams that aren’t following the guidance and using the templates, meaning a lot more work within our team to test, check, advise and fix.

We agreed as a team that we can’t continue to resource this. This will mean:

  • Publishing some PDFs by exception as we receive them (board papers, evidence reports) – pushing the responsibility for making the responsible to the authors.
  • We’ll be doing a retrospective audit and escalating any non-compliance within the org, to get more people taking ownership and responsibility for accessibility.
  • Additional tutorials / videos of common accessibility issues, to add to our existing guidance for accessibility.

3 Reduce all but essential intranet publishing. Alex is writing up more detail about this, but it’s likely to mean that we’ll encourage people to use other channels (Yammer / Email / DMS) if it’s not essential, all-company updates.

New year digital decluttering tips…

From our very own Digital Bureaucat, Bear - who was not ready for our first team call of 2024, and decided to nap right through it. Someone’s embracing #SelfCare this year.

Bear, our Digital Bureaucat

• Clean up your email inbox: Start your new year right by clearing away any old or spam emails. When you sent that cute cat video to your colleague because it was really funny, did you realise that this large attachment also released around 50g of CO2 in the atmosphere? That’s the same amount as if you had used five plastic carrier bags… Use this handy calculator to work out the CO2 emissions of the emails as you clear them from your inbox.

Top tip: Use keywords to locate emails for deletion, for example ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘newsletter’ can be useful terms for finding emails for deletion. Don’t forget to empty your trash folder as well.

• Make better habits: Once you’ve unsubscribed from any newsletters or spam you have been receiving over the past year, then try super hard not to sign up to random newsletters with your main email in 2024.

• Get your ducks in a row: Create a mega to-do list of unfinished stuff from the year before, and add or update deadlines to help you stay on quack… ahem, track.

• Delete old files: Go back and delete unnecessary files from the year passed. Finished a project or task? Delete all the old versions of that file that might be saved to your desktop. Go through that ‘organise me’ folder and save any important documents to the DMS.

• Take your time: Decluttering can be really overwhelming so do it in chunks and enlist the help of others within your team if you can. Don’t create more stress for yourself so soon into 2024, instead chip away at this to hopefully put you in a better place for the rest of the year.

New year, new team!

Welcoming our new Content designer, Toyah…

Why did you want to join the team?

So, please don’t interpret this as me having stalkerish tendencies (!), but I read through ALL your weeknotes after deciding to apply and by the end I felt like I knew you all already. I said as much in my interview, as well as that from a reader’s perspective, the weeknotes really convey the pride that you take in your work and the commitment you have to making things the best they can be.

It reminded me of how I felt when I started my previous job in policing, when I (naively) thought that’s how my role would be…until it became soul-crushingly obvious that the organisation itself didn’t see it that way. There was no potential for creative thinking, or to focus on providing the best possible user experience on our website, and that was incredibly frustrating.

So the thought of working with lovely people, doing the kind of work I’ve long dreamed of, was just too perfect to resist. Also, when I read in the weeknotes that you use Umbraco, my heart did a little dance as that was the CMS we used before moving to a FAR worse one a couple of years ago. I feel like I’m coming home, in more ways than one!

What are you most looking forward to?

This might sound cheesy, but honestly, it’s being able to do work that actually helps people and makes their day that bit easier. I’ve come to NRW from a workplace where there was a lot of control and restriction (to put it mildly), so the prospect of being free to come up with and pursue ideas - to learn and then implement that learning for the benefit of others - is hugely exciting.

Most importantly, do you have a pet and will they be on camera?

I do indeed, a Jack Russell Terrier called Sammy. He’s a rescue dog, about 12 years old (he only has a vague date of birth) and like many of his kind, alternates between being thoroughly adorable and absolutely infuriating. One of his ‘quirks’ is that he doesn’t like being touched, so I’ll never have him on my knee on camera, but could possibly point the camera at him on the floor! Here’s a pic to tide you over till then:

Sammy the rescue dog

Llongyfarchiadau Lucinda

Also, a big congratulations to our very own Lucinda for starting on her role as Flood Content Designer within the team.

Noteworthy films and games from the holiday period…

During our first team call of the year, we discussed how we spent the holidays, and we pulled together a list of our favourite TV, film and games that were indulged in over the break.

TV shows:

Films:

Board games:

Video games:

Fun Fact Friday

A study published in Nature in 2019 noted that crocodiles have the “full range of quadrupedal footfall patterns used by mammals,” meaning that they have the ability to gallop like a horse—and occasionally do! Of course, they don’t look quite as graceful, but they can reach speeds of up to 11mph.

Here is a video showing the graceful gallop of a crocodile!