Care and maintenance is your most productive work
When I was starting out in local government, I used to get frustrated with the people that said, “we did that 10 years ago.” Now I think I am one of those people, and I’m ok with it.
This change has not happened overnight, but I became very aware of the shift when I read How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell and I noticed my own reaction to her description of our culture’s relationship to productivity:
“We inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”
I recognise this attraction for the new and different in myself, as well as in the organisations I have worked for, over the last 15 years. There seems to be a common belief that to be successful we are required to innovate and change things. I am now beginning to question how true this is, and whether we need to spend a more time caring for and nurturing what we already have.
Local Government fosters an ecosystem that promotes and celebrates ‘innovation’: consultants promise change and better ways of doing things; award ceremonies reward teams and councils that have demonstrated transformation and innovation; grants are for ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ projects; teams, labs or networks are created to help drive innovation. Success is seen through the lens of how things have been done differently and how quickly they have changed. ‘Innovation’ work gives individuals exposure and recognition within an organisation and helps you progress your career in way that maintenance and caring work do not.
It is only natural that people want to work in this space and be (seen as) an ‘innovator’. It can be exciting — work happens at pace and it feels important. If the team or council they work for can deliver innovative change, it is an opportunity to help people in a transformative way and we just might win some awards and a promotion along the way!
Having started to think about the importance of maintenance, I found lot of great people shining a light on the work that keeps communities and societies running smoothly. In their 2016 essay, Hail the Maintainers, Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel highlight how the bulk of the work people do is, in fact, maintenance:
“We can think of labour that goes into maintenance and repair as the work of the maintainers, those individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things. Brief reflection demonstrates that the vast majority of human labour, from laundry and trash removal to janitorial work and food preparation, is of this type: upkeep.”
Our connection to place during lockdown has highlighted the value of this upkeep maintenance in our lives, and the amazing and important work local councils do. We have noticed the value of someone cutting the grass in the park, collecting our bins or making sure a bar or restaurant is safe for us to visit. But these are the stories we often do not hear and these are not the jobs that lead to ‘success’. Each year we join in with Our Day, the celebration of the people in local government who keep our communities running, but we’re not seeing this as the big stuff — the work that is going to make the real difference to the lives of citizens.
Many of us are not in a traditional maintainer role (I work in Learning and Development) but we can play a role as a maintainer and carer in our organisations. This requires going beyond seeing maintenance as just being about traditional ‘upkeep’ work and increasing the value of care and maintenance in all that we do.
This means not only maintaining and caring for the great services and programmes we we already have but also nourishing and caring for our ‘innovative’ ideas, so they can be successful. We also need to recognising the maintenance and upkeep we all do in our jobs and finding ways to celebrate this work.
Maintain what you already have (if you can!)
Austerity was brutal for local government and made the work of maintenance and care increasingly challenging, not just for our infrastructure but also how we maintain people’s independence or support families to maintain healthy relationships. These challenges persist but we have to ensure that our attention is not only on what is seen to be ‘broken’ but also what is currently working and needs to be nourished and supported. We need to be rebellious and innovative but we must not lose sight of what is disappearing or being diminished by a lack of care, attention and underinvestment.
Last month a report from the children’s commissioner recommended that the government “develop ‘a national infrastructure’ of children and family hubs that provide a gateway to wraparound support services.” This sounds a lot like the Children’s Centres that were closed up and down the country over the last 10 years. But we cannot now say “let’s invest in Children’s Centres” because Children’s Centres are no longer see as innovative. It would also mean that many local authorities would have to admit that we got it wrong by underinvesting in the ‘old things’ that acted as the cornerstone of the national approach to the early years.
Those teams and services we do not hear from are often the maintainers — running great services quietly in the background. The waste and recycling collectors, environmental health officers, private sector housing inspectors, plumbers, electricians — there are so many. Can these areas of work be improved? Probably. Do we need to better understand what is working well and care for it? Definitely.
Innovation must not come at the expense of maintaining vital services, that while maybe not shiny and new, are important and have a huge impact on our citizens. We need to understand how we can care for what we already have and use this as the foundation for the new and innovative, rather than something these as something to be discarded and replaced.
Maintain and care for the innovative ideas
For many the status quo is not working and we need to find new ways of doing things than can improve the lives of citizens. I am not here to argue that there is no place for innovation. What I will argue is that we overvalue ‘innovate’ ideas and undervalue the care and maintenance required to turn these ideas into real change.
In the same way that we neglect our infrastructure, we too often do not care for and maintain our innovative ideas. We love them when they are new but they get old very fast, especially if they do not deliver change at pace or if there are bumps in the road. We know success is not a linear process but we are too quick to abandon ideas as soon as we are presented with a new shiny idea that has not disappointed us yet and promises to get us to the destination faster.
Turning ideas into meaningful change is mostly about hard work. Your innovation might have planted the seed of an idea, but this is when the real work needs to start. When I joined HENRY in 2012 I was fortunate enough to work with the Public Health team at Leeds City Council which commissioned and ran the HENRY programme — supporting families to get the best start in life. Two keys members of the team have cared for and nurtured the HENRY programme for over 10 years. It was in 2019 that the accolades for 10 years of hard work started to arrive and commissioners from around the country came looking for the answers to just how Leeds had managed to start reducing childhood obesity.
But it was not just the HENRY programme that lead to this success — the system conditions were in place to enable this success. Leeds City Council was able to maintain the vast majority of their Children’s Centres, and the council leadership had an innovative approach that they cared for over a number of years.
The ‘innovation’ in this instance was to stick with an idea, confident (or at least hopeful!) that with enough care and the right conditions it would flourish. When innovating we need to make sure we have a care and maintenance plan that can support the innovation to be a success. We also need to understand that it is over the long term that we will see change and that there is no innovation magic bullet that can fast track big systemic change.
Celebrate your own maintenance work
Like everyone, I spend a huge chunk of my time doing maintenance and care work. Having 1-to-1s with my team, monitoring the budget, reading internal communications, responding to emails, making sure everyone has done their mandatory compliance training. These are all vital parts of my job but I often feel like I am missing out if I just do ‘maintenance’. It can feel like I am not proving my value or showing my true worth.
On reflection, the work we have done as team to support and maintain the wellbeing of each other is some of the most important work we could have done. We have done innovative work, especially thinking about how we support learning in a virtual environment, but it has been looking after each other than has felt the most vital.
We all do a lot of maintenance work. Do not begrudge it, celebrate it. Make sure you are bringing it up at your 1-to-1s (both as manager of at member of team) and shine a light on the work of the maintainers in your team meetings and other forums. We are all the maintainers!
Further reading on Maintenance
In researching this blog I came across loads of great resources on maintenance that I drew on for ideas and to help me reflect. Here are three to get you started:
In Why is maintenance so difficult to talk about? @Naomi_Turner explores what makes it hard to talk about maintenance and the reasons that maintenance is still not valued as highly as innovation.
Linked to that I found out that there is a Festival of Maintenance — lots of interesting resources here and an amazing team of volunteers bring this festival together.
Final one is a Freakonomics podcast: In Praise of Maintenance, where they explore whether “our culture’s obsession with innovation led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of.”
Lastly (thanks for making it this far) — I had a pang of disappointment when I realised that this blog was not going to be as innovate as maybe I had hoped. Now it is finished I am happy that I have made my own (small) contribution to maintaining a focus on the maintainers.
