Background

Ealing’s HR Department has had a troubled history. In 2006 the Audit Commission found that the HR service ‘was not operating as effectively as it needs in moving the organisation forward. Staff have been spending too much time on fire fighting and not enough on development work. There have been improvements since then, but difficulties remained.

In August 2007, the new Director of HR and OD, Jacqueline Wiltshire arrived and commenced a review. Her key findings were:

HR has an appetite for change, despite being ‘change-weary’: no one wants to keep things as they are.
Past HR restructurings have failed to address underpinning systems and processes. The first step must be to radically improve the delivery of HR transactional processes.
At the same time, the professional, strategic function needs to be refocused, with a programme to redefine its purpose and improve HR skills and competencies.
Improving HR won’t in itself radically alter the way the organisation deals with its people: this is a whole Council issue. Ealing Council needs to define what it expects from its managers with regard to people management, and ensure managers have the competency and confidence to achieve this.
The HR function also had to respond to the needs for an enhanced HR advisory service, which had been identified by schools. A consultation exercise with schools led to agreement on a way forward.

With this, the HR Fit for Business Programme was born. The aims of the programme are:

Improve and simplify processes so that our internal customers (managers and employees) receive a better, quicker and more cost-effective service.
Create capacity at the strategic HR level so that we can concentrate on longer-term people and organisational issues.
Create capacity in the operational and advice areas through the use of a service centre approach to work sharing and request management.
Help the Council define what it expects from its managers with regard to people management, and ensure managers have competency and confidence to achieve this.

To address the first aim, we have opened the HR Shared Service Centre within Service Ealing, supported by resources and knowledge investment from Serco, our strategic partner.

To address the second aim, the Council is investing new resources in the development of a Core HR function with the capacity to work on strategic and long-term people issues for Directorates and the Council as a whole. This has resulted in the a successful recruitment campaing during the summer and now only two vacancies, including this one, remain.

The new Head of Improvement, Innovation and Information will play a pivotal role in ensuring the Programme is delivered, and will work in close partnership with the Head of HR Shared Service Centre.

Under the Head of HR Consultancy, 3 new Business Partners supported by HR Consultants will ensure our Service Directorates have the capacity to focus on longer-term people management issues, so that Directorates have the right people with the right skills to deliver their ambitious 3-year business plans. Both this team and the Recruitment, Retention and Reward team will deliver key corporate projects, such as a Council-wide Pay & Grading Review.

Under the Head of Schools HR, a new HR schools consultant will help focus the Schools HR Consultancy team to deliver the improvements and enhancements that featured in the consultation with schools. They will work closely with colleagues in the Schools Services Directorate to consolidate and develop the support that schools receive, with an emphasis on collaborative working and planning

The HR Business Manager will be responsible for creation of Core Human Resources’ own 3-year Business Plan, and monitoring performance indicators to track its successful delivery, in line with budgets.

Vision

The key reason for delivering this change is to ensure that the Council starts to improve its capacity in the area of strategic HR support. The main focus has been on moving to delivering a first class Core HR function by a team of staff who feel motivated about the services they are offering and are proud of the high standards of delivery.

At the heart of this will be the investment in the teams, the processes and the tools to allow Ealing Council to benefit from a first class HR service. Previous attempts to improve the function have failed to deliver for various reasons. This improvement programme is designed to learn from the past, to ensure the same mistakes are not repeated and will over a period of time, with the support from the teams, deliver this vision.

What is strategic HRM?

A key feature of the vision for the future is to have a Core HR function that is truly strategic in nature. Strategic HRM is an approach to the strategic management of human resources in accordance with the intentions of the Council on the direction it wants to take. What emerges from this process is a stream of decisions over time that form the pattern adopted by the Council for managing its human resources and define the areas in which specific HR strategies need to be developed. For the Core HR function, this means in practice working on 5 key priorities, as in the 2007 Local Government Workforce Strategy, that are:

1. Organisational development – effectively building workforce support for new structures and ways of working to deliver effective and efficient services which support the front line, customer facing functions of the Council.

2. Leadership development – building visionary and ambitious leadership, which makes best use of both political and managerial role, operating in a partnership context.

3. Skills development – with partners, developing employees’ skills and knowledge in an innovative, high performing, multi-agency context.

4. Recruitment and retention – with partners, taking action to address key future occupational skill shortages, promote jobs and careers, identify, develop and motivate talent and address diversity issues.

5. Pay and rewards – modernising reward systems to reflect new structures, new priorities and new ways of working and to reinforce high performance including encouraging a total rewards approach.

Facilitate, change and support the developing agenda of the Council
Provide strategic advice such as the ability to link people management with the overall objectives of the Council
Provide schools with high level support and advice enabling them to effectively manage their people issues
Provide specialist advice on key areas such as reward
Improve lines of communication across departments and between strategic and implementation activities
Position Core HR staff close to the customer and be able to influence decision-making pan-Council
Be flexible, innovative and responsive
Ensure HR best practice is effectively shared across the Council
Facilitate the ongoing professional and career development of HR staff

Value for Money

The HR Fit For Business Programme aligns to 2 key Council objectives:

1. To build a committed and motivated workforce which mirrors the diversity of the community and delivers quality services and improved resident satisfaction.

2. To provide value for money to Ealing’s residents by effectively managing the Council’s resources.

Benefits

By transferring Operational HR services to the HR Shared Service Centre (under the internal management of Service Ealing), the following benefits will accrue to Core HR

A core strategic HR Service that is freed up to focus on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the retained function

Time to allow Core HR staff to develop organisational capability by adding real value
Concentration of limited resources in the Core HR function on strategic activities that actually make a difference
A refocused, professional, strategic function with a programme to redefine its purpose and improve HR skills and competencies.
Increased scope to provide the strategic support the Council requires from HR.
Help the Council define what it expects from its managers with regard to people management, and ensure managers have the competency and confidence to achieve this.
Opportunity to assess and improve the competency of the professional HR function
Concentrating the efforts of HR so that its activities add value to the service departments and Council as a whole by improving HR competency i.e. developing skills and knowledge to effectively deliver Council-wide projects and programmes
Have a clear and stable vision to work towards and the time to do it.
HR seen as a core to the organisation and not as an administrative overhead.
Close the gap between rhetoric and reality of delivery and so increasing the morale of the HR staff.

The Approach to Change

The Director of HR and OD identified that the HR function could not implement a major improvement programme on top of ”business as usual” without additional resources. The new Core HR function integrates additional resources to enable the Director to deliver a sustainable programme of change. A Project Manager has been assigned to the Core HR Project for a defined period to support the Programme, including the delivery of a development plan for all Core HR employees. There is no quick fix. The HR Fit For Business programme is a 2 to 3 year initiative to achieve real and sustainable change and will be under-pinned by detailed project planning techniques.

The transformation for both the HR SSC and Core HR is being done in partnership with the Serco Group who have significant experience in HR transformation in the public sector and can provide a combination of practical, hands-on and remote support.

The timetable for moving from the current method of operation to having both a strategic HR function and fully functional HR shared service centre is as follows:

Consultation took place with all HR employees from 4th March – 4th April 2008

Phase 1 Transition. This phase introduces the new operating model, establishing the HRSSC and the new Core HR Function. From 21st April 2008, all the operational elements of the work currently done by HR have come together in one common area to form the HR SSC. Transition to the proposed new Core HR structure commenced with an assessment process to identify new Heads of teams from existing HR employees. All existing employees have now been allocated to a new role in either the HRSSC or Core HR. All but two of the vacancies within core HR have now been recruited to.

Phase 2 Implementation. This period has run from July 2008 and will see complete implementation of the new operating model and supporting IT business processes. Already the single contact number for HR has been implemented and the Contact Management system is due to be implemented in November 2008.

Please open the word document to see the Core HR Structure Chart.

Core HR Structure (doc: 80kb)

HR Business Plan (doc: 388kb)

Ealing People Strategy (pdf: 324kb)

Click here for the Ealing Website to access Reports to Cabinet on HR Fit for Business and HR Shared Service Centre on 29th January 2008