Guide to Raising the Profile of HR - Case Studies

Cambridgeshire County Council

At Cambridgeshire, Stephen Moir, Corporate Director: People, Policy and Law explains that although their approach is based on the Ulrich model it is structured to suit the needs of the council. The People Strategy is refreshed as necessary and is seen to be owned across the council. Consequently, HR work closely with their stakeholders to deliver an HR service that meets their current and emerging needs with regard to workforce issues. They use employee surveys and focus groups which include members.

Local HR performance indicators have been developed and their explicit ambition is to always be in the top quartile. This ambition is increased with regard to sickness absence for example. Moir explains that the council compares itself with the private sector as he sees no reason for their absence figures to be higher. Consequently, sickness averages for the council were 5.01 days for 2008. Additionally, they set different sickness absence targets for different departments depending on the type of work undertaken.

There is an emphasis on providing evidence of successful HR outcomes and benchmarking internally and externally are mechanisms used for this. 95% of Moir’s team are CIPD qualified and it is viewed as a cost effective function. Internally, the HR function is seen to be ‘first class’ by the senior management team and is regarded as an equal partner of finance.

In Cambridgeshire, there is a high visibility of the HR function seen to add value in its strategic contribution to the business and this is evidenced by Cambridgeshire specific HR outcomes and involvement in the highest levels of management.

Royal Borough Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC)

There is a tradition of HR proactive initiatives that have been implemented at RBKC which go over and beyond compliance to the legal requirements related to its workforce. These initiatives address the current and emerging challenges that local government needs to respond to. In addition, RBKC HR take a broad view of the environment and engage with external stakeholders to a large extent thus raising the profile of HR. George Bishop, Director of Personnel and General Services asserts that they have the ‘best e-hr in London’ and the evidence bears this out. There are highly developed e-hr systems for all aspects of the transactional HR activities so that managers take full responsibility for their own HR matters. This has freed up HR practitioners to develop a number of initiatives that support the organisation in its business. These include:

  • Working in partnership with a private organisation to develop a bespoke Kensington and Chelsea theatrical interactive production play that addresses bullying and harassment that all employees attended, feedback was extremely positive:
  • Adopting an entrepreneurial approach so that HR looks outside the organisation for opportunities including contracting to deliver HR services for other organisations: there is an emphasis on financial return from the function demonstrating contribution to the business.
  • HR performance indicators are built into managers objectives so that HR outcomes are delivered by managers. This is allied with performance related pay
  • Undertaking research to investigate recruitment and retention issues and putting in place a range of incentives to address this.

2. London Borough of Sutton

The London Borough of Sutton is raising its HR profile in a number of ways and Dean Shoesmith Executive Head of HR at the London Boroughs of Sutton and Merton is clear that HR needs to be visible and able to demonstrate how the function makes a strategic contribution to the business. His view is that HR must work closely with the business and anticipate what is required. Two major initiatives that HR has been responsible for developing and implementing have raised the profile of HR and also, crucially, made a strategic contribution to the business. These are:

  • HR has worked closely with senior managers and MENCAP to increase the number of employees with a learning disability who are employed by the council. Job carving – where a job is broken down into all its components and then reassembled to develop a job that will allow an employee with a learning disability to be successful – has been used to facilitate this. The development started with two potential employees and to date 40 have been appointed. As a result the recruitment and selection processes were amended to ensure that potential employees with a learning disability were not disadvantaged. Their success is demonstrated by an increase in employees with a disability from 1.3% (in 2006) to 8.73% (in 2008). Shoesmith sees this as a case of practice informing policy. This also demonstrates how HR can raise its profile by working more closely with community based organisations as well as delivering tangible outcomes.
  • HR have undertaken a programme to address essential skills gaps (literacy, numeracy and ICT) in a number of frontline services – in particular waste management and care homes (developing well over 100 people across the Council). There is a strong correlation between this work, improved employee engagement (as measured through their employee survey) and customer satisfaction (as measured through the residents’ MORI survey). Sutton has had this work externally assessed for the beneficial impact on front line services – including winning the London region National Training Awards, the PPMA Talent Management Award, and double-winner of the IDeA Skills for Life awards. Sutton has also worked with Merton, Croydon and Kingston to draw upon external funding from the Learning and Skills Council to support the initiative and the four-borough partnership was recognised
  • The London Boroughs Recruitment Partnership .The vision and focus of this project, which is led by Sutton Council is to improve the image of the sector through modern, efficient and, most importantly, customer-focussed recruitment. This unique and effective partnership, consisting of twenty seven local authorities, between recruitment professionals in London Boroughs, who have traditionally competed for scarce staff, is a significant model and exemplar for partnership working across diverse public sector organisations.
  • A clear outcome of this project is that the creation of a shared recruitment administration service has created unified cost savings and consistent standards of recruitment service across partner Boroughs. This project assists in the promotion of London local government as an employer of choice. All partner Boroughs share a common desire to obtain and use meaningful management information on the recruitment process, and meaningful data on equalities monitoring. All Boroughs have similar policy objectives to ensure that they are a non-discriminatory employer, and that all jobs are open and accessible to the whole community. By working in partnership to specify in-depth management information, comparisons can be drawn between partners to facilitate discussions on best practice in recruitment in London local government. Until now, differing collection and reporting methods of this data have meant that it is difficult to see best practice emerging.In terms of recruitment advertising; the cashable saving across the whole partnership is circa £1m in the 2008/9 financial year demonstrating the quantifiable value added contribution of HR to the business.

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