The HR profession is adapting to help other parts of the civil service respond to challenging times. Suzannah Brecknell reports on a session exploring the likely future of the civil service's HR systems and staff.
The HR function has changed, and must continue to change, because the civil service has to change. That was the key message from two civil service HR leaders speaking at a CSL session on the profession’s future.
“We have to make ourselves more effective in order to support the civil service as a whole,” said Kevin White, director general of HR at the Home Office and leader of Civil Service Learning – the new centralised function for learning and development.
White explained that three main strands of change are affecting the HR profession. The Next Generation HR programme, which has been running for some time and is just coming to fruition, is about “building common practices and policies across the civil service”, with key services centralised to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Second, bringing expert functions together in this way will allow departmental HR teams to take on a more strategic role as ‘business partners’ whose role is to “help the business to deliver, rather than setting down the rules”. And third, these reforms are cutting job numbers: about half of the civil service’s HR staff are to leave by March 2015.
Mike Falvey, director general for HR at HMRC and head of Civil Service Employee Resourcing (CSER), tried to dispel concerns that departments will no longer be able to provide some HR services. The programme is about “ensuring that the core and critical HR functions can still be delivered”, he said, though “it may not always be designed by a team sitting in your building”.
Falvey also explained how CSER has changed its role, broadening out from a focus on recruitment to help departments with redeployment and ‘outplacement’ (jobsearch support). The team is also looking at creating a central unit to manage public and senior appointment processes, with the aim of producing “greater efficiency, both monetary and [in reducing] time to hire”, he said.
The wider reforms, he emphasised, are “not about diluting the HR space. We think HR is going to be even more critical in the next four years than it has been in the last four, because of the [financial] challenges.”
During the question session, Falvey was asked whether these key, centralised HR services will remain within the civil service, or whether they might be moved out into a mutual organisation or private provider. He said it is something he is asked often, and it’s important to recognise that many HR services are already provided externally.
“There will be constant pressure to look at different operating models within the HR space,” he continued, but if the profession can get its functions operating well “and we demonstrate what we can deliver”, then whether they remain in-house or not, the structures and responsibilities established by the civil service are likely to survive. “Whether we remain in the civil service or whether there’s an interest to take it outside, we will have such a compelling narrative that people will want to keep us as a single entity,” he said.
The two men were then asked for their advice to other professions undergoing reform. Engage carefully with senior business sponsors, said White, and don’t “give any house room to [those saying]: ‘It has to be different in this department because…’.”
Falvey advised being flexible in your approach, but maintaining “a clear sense of direction and where you’re trying to get to”. The experience of HR, he said, shows that external consultants aren’t required for reform: “We’ve done it to ourselves, with ourselves. We need to recognise that within the civil service, within all of the functions, we probably have the expertise to drive these transformation agendas forward.”