Warm welcome

With a workforce of more than 11,000 delivering hundreds of services that touch the lives of thousands of people from birth to old age every day it’s fair to say we’re a large and complex organisation. So if you’re a new starter you might feel a bit daunted about exactly who we are and how you fit in. That’s why, as part of our workforce development strategy, we’re reviewing and revamping our induction programme. It’s early days and I’ll keep you posted about developments, but I caught up with the HR&OD team last week to go over an outline of how the programme will work. It’s planned that for those who don’t have regular access to the intranet, inductions will be delivered face-to-face by line managers with online support. Those who are largely office-based will likely have access to an online eLearning package. I’ll be part of the process, delivering my own perspective via video, welcoming the new starters and highlighting what I think about who we are and what we do. If you’ve got ideas on how we can make inductions more meaningful I’d like to hear from you. After all, the one thing we all have in common is that we were all starters once, but for some of us, it’s a little longer ago.

Many of us who have council email accounts will know of the attempted cyber-attack on our network earlier this week by criminals targeting us with an email purporting to be from a ‘HR manager’. Thankfully, it didn’t succeed and I’m grateful to all those who did the right thing by reporting it to our IT team. I’d also like to thank IT for its robust approach to keeping our data safe. It’s an important lesson that we all have our part to play in keeping such attacks at bay by being vigilant and not taking at face value every email or online correspondence each of us receives.

Yesterday Cabinet agreed to proceed with a feasibility study to determine the potential value of a district heating network that could help cut the carbon footprint of major public and private sector buildings in the city centre area. It’s an important milestone, partly because the study is being funded by the UK government and provides further confidence that we are moving closer to delivering the wider lagoon and Blue Eden project which would be a world-first innovation on our doorstep.

Also yesterday I was pleased to visit Olchfa Comprehensive School for the official opening of our latest 3G sports pitch. The £1.6m project will be a boost for sport at the school and will support the health and wellbeing of the wider community too. My thanks to those who’ve delivered this pitch and others like it around the city.

Our libraries service has been shortlisted in the UK Libraries Connected Awards for the outstanding work Swansea Central Library is doing to become a place of sanctuary and support that welcomes new people settling here. All our libraries are sanctuaries at the heart of their communities, so well done to all those involved and good luck in the final.

Congratulations also to our tourism team for their innovative video initiative promoting our city to the wider world. Featuring stories from local people and businesses, video views in the last 12 months have surpassed the 1m mark – significant backing for an industry worth £500m a year locally. They say Swansea is our happy place. They’re right.