HR strategy forum (2): prioritising local authority HR strategy
Personnel Today's HR strategy forum provides readers
with practical step-by-step advice on strategic dilemmas. This week:
prioritising local authority HR strategy.
The
dilemma
By Dilys Winn is HR director, Gloucestershire County Council
Work with the management team to address the immediate difficulties, and
consider better, more effective ways of working. Decide whether current
arrangements could be streamlined, if technology could help to reduce
administrative burdens, and whether managers are organising workloads in the most
sensible way.
Consider your recruitment and retention strategies. In the competition for
scarce workers, does your organisation attract or repel good people? Look at
the recruitment arrangements: are they modern, quick and user-friendly? Do you
pay a market rate? Even in a relatively easy labour market, you need to keep
pace. Are staff properly supported when they work for you? Make sure people are
not leaving as fast as you are recruiting them, and look for people with
potential and then train them.
Then address the medium-term. Consider options such as getting the
management team to consider partnership as a way to deliver services by sharing
scarce resources, growing your own people through the use of bursaries and
training schemes, and - most difficult of all - challenging them to think about
using staff who have not progressed through traditional training routes.
Create a longer-term approach by developing a proper workforce plan. Take a
snapshot of your workforce at present, including skills, age and potential.
Develop a picture with the management team of the service in the future, and
then consider with them what the workforce profile must become to deliver it.
Your role must then be to address the gaps and devise a plan to get your
workforce into a position where they have the capacity to meet the future needs
of the business. This is likely to include development programmes, addressing
traditional management hierarchies and breaking through professional
stereotypes.
By Jim Matthewman is a worldwide partner, Mercer HR Consulting
The immediate need in social care could be used as a pilot for the wider
issue, and in doing so would be likely to gain better buy-in from stakeholders
for a revised council-wide people strategy, rather than a knee-jerk demand to
raise pay levels.
How well do you attract qualified talent? Could this be improved through
better implementation of flexible working arrangements and key worker housing
and career prospects, and by loosening up the succession process to provide
more opportunities for would-be candidates?
Preview your partnership arrangements with third-party community agencies.
Together, you could deliver services differently, attract alternative funding
and provide a means to 'piggyback' existing employees and community staff into
the new Government professional social work qualifications.
I would also recommend a business review of your social care requirements
for the next three to five years. This must include an analysis of your current
and required capabilities in employees and local management. You would need
Cabinet agreement for the department to specifically focus on high-risk groups,
such as older people and the vulnerable young (who are likely vote winners),
and in doing so, you would ensure that sufficient resource is re-allocated.
The study should provide an opportunity to step back and review whether the
current organisation structure is effective, and how operational processes
(including better absence management and staff and caseload utilisation) could
be streamlined to lift some of the workload.
