Economic recovery presents a challenge for public sector talent management, as the cap on salaries makes it hard to recruit and retain talent. Stuart Watson reports on a round table that discussed how to deal with the problem.
The economy is growing again. Buoyed by house price rises and growing consumer spending, British businesses are more confident about the future. If that confidence leads many of them to recruit new staff, the jobs market should pick up – and with it, wage growth.
In the public sector, though, salaries are capped. Indeed, Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the permanent secretary of the Treasury, argued earlier this month that the Treasury should be “tougher” on public sector pay in the next Parliament.
If private sector wages do rise, the public sector may find it increasingly difficult to recruit talent from the world of business. The best civil servants, meanwhile, may be tempted to move elsewhere to boost their standard of living. So the task of recruiting and retaining top-performing civil servants is likely to become ever-tougher: to discuss how to tackle this thorny problem hidden within the green shoots of recovery, CSW teamed up with learning and talent management service provider Cornerstone OnDemand to host a round table bringing together HR professionals from across the civil service.
The case for talent management
As part of its Civil Service Reform Plan, the government has introduced new competency and performance management frameworks to identify the best performers and better manage its talent pool. However, new research by CSW and Cornerstone OnDemand has found that 40% of civil servants are unaware of any schemes to reward high-performers, while a further 34% do not think that their department’s scheme is effective.
Participants discussed how to increase awareness of, and engagement, with talent management schemes. They agreed that a more compelling narrative is required to drive home the benefits of a coherent approach to talent.
Tim Sims, leader of HR planning at HMRC, asked whether talent schemes are “impacting on everybody, or just a few people at the top?” He added that, having worked in the private sector, he believes that companies place much greater emphasis on attracting talent than does the civil service.
As the new frameworks start to affect civil service careers, people’s awareness and engagement will rise, predicted Trish Archer, head of HR for the Higher Education Funding Council for England. “It is early days – we are still fighting through that resistance of people being suspicious of it,” she added.
In the Home Office, some managers in operational delivery areas are wary of centralised talent management schemes because they cannot see how they fit with their own activities, according to Jasmine Kelly, a HR business partner in the department. “There needs to be a recognition that talent [management] in some of those business areas might need to be different to suit the needs of the business,” she concluded.
Talent schemes risk being sidelined within organisations, Archer suggested – particularly if they’re seen as just another HR initiative.“If HR is driving things, people will sometimes see it that way; whereas if the executive team are driving, it is seen as good for the business,” she said.
The push for better talent management schemes in the Civil Service Reform Plan has helped, said Tony Dight, senior HR business partner at the Home Office. The plan “sees talent as a pillar of the civil service reform agenda. It is pretty clear about the skills and competencies it wants to develop – particularly digital,” he said.
Identifying talent
One of the most commonly used tools in identifying potential high-flyers is the ‘nine-box grid’: a matrix measuring performance and potential. Many of the participants have worked with managers to identify the position of employees on the grid. Several of them identified a problem in the inconsistent use of terminology for classifying candidates’ potential, although it was agreed that the process is becoming better-established and more transparent.
Dight noted that classifying candidates according to the grid is only a small part of a larger process: real results depend on good communication about performance between managers and staff, resulting in high-quality decisions on grading staff, and clarity over why those decisions were made. “Then you have to drive the process forward, and get people to understand it and change their behaviour,” he said.
The Care Quality Commission has chosen not to use the grid, however. Rhonda Johnston, its organisational development manager, argued that in her experience “it was often seen as an instrument for defining people in boxes, rather than being really meaningful to the dialogue and development plans that individuals needed to grow.”
HMRC’s Sims suggested that these talent identification processes should be used to help the civil service to become more diverse. “We get a lot of the same types of people,” he said. “We are not doing very well at part-timers or people from ethnic minorities. There must be some hidden talent out there. We have to work to dig it out.”
Developing talent
What happens to someone after they are identified as having leadership potential? If the answer is nothing, the participants agreed, there is a greatly increased chance of that person becoming disaffected and seeking advancement elsewhere.
Raising expectations could be dangerous, Archer said – particularly for smaller organisations, and those outside London with limited opportunities for advancement. “If you suddenly say: ‘We have identified you as talent,’ they then expect something to happen as a result. We need to identify the talent and motivate it, but also be realistic about what that may or may not mean,” she warned.
Nigel Lower, learning and talent development group leader at the the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), said the nine box grid tends to be seen as an end in itself. “After it’s completed, it sits in a drawer,” he said. “This year we are very clearly separating out talent identification in our conversations with individuals, and then we go into what they can do about developing that talent.”
One of the participants, Marcia Humphries from the Intellectual Property Office, has first-hand experience of talent development: she is part of a future leaders programme. Her experience has been a positive one: “Once you’re on the programme, you get development opportunities, secondments, mentoring and coaching. The work you put in determines what you get out. You might not have a big career jump at the end of it, but you can fight for that.”
Retaining talent
How can the civil service keep the talent it has, particularly if it can’t compete on pay? “It’s about the whole package,” suggested Dight. Offering people variety by moving staff around and giving them different kinds of work, Dight believes, helps to convince them to stay in the public sector.
The Higher Education Funding Council is using “flexible resourcing” to keep its staff, Archer said. “We advertise across the organisation when projects come up, and then people can express an interest in taking on those projects – so they are motivated to stay and have an element of choice about what they are doing,” she explained.
DSTL is faced with the challenge of retaining specialist scientists who could earn large sums in the private sector. It therefore employs an unconventional promotion regime to encourage them to stay: “We have a career framework which allows specialist scientists to sometimes rise two or three grades in the same job,” said Lower.
Several participants advocated secondments as a way of holding onto the best people. “It’s a great retention tool,” said Dight. “If they like what they see there is a risk they might go off, but letting someone go out and do a secondment for a year may well satisfy their desire to do something different, and they come back more enthused.”
Another participant, asking not to be named, pointed out that centrally-organised secondments for talented people are becoming more commonplace. “They’re a great opportunity for increasing the skills that we need, in line with the Capabilities Plan,” she suggested. However, like several other attendees, she warned that unless the reintegration of employees returning from secondment is handled carefully, they can swiftly become disaffected if the new skills they have learned are not being put to use.
What’s more, secondments are complicated to organise. Kathy McMurray from the Department for Communities and Local Government said: “It takes a lot of resource from small HR teams to go and find those opportunities for secondments and market them fairly across an organisation.”
Sharing talent
The participants agreed that civil service bodies could benefit from sharing talent across government, but this rarely happens. “That is a huge challenge for the civil service,” admitted Dight. “You have to have people talking to each other and buying into the idea. Someone has to drive that and make that happen.” Harpal Johal, an HR deputy director from the Home Office, called for a “cultural shift” so that managers become more willing to release their talent.
Meanwhile, Land Registry HR chief Linda Chamberlain suggested that suitable non-critical posts within departments could be set aside for employees on secondment from other parts of government.
It was agreed that some form of central framework, backed up by a talent management IT system, would help departments to co-operate in identifying and developing high performers.
Sims is confident that will soon happen, but said that more co-ordinated strategic planning across the civil service is required. “I think that is an element that might come into play as part of the next generation of work on civil service reform,” he said.
The participants seemed confident that civil service reform will help improve cross-departmental talent management. It’s rare to hear civil servants call for more centralisation, but many were keen to hear more from the Cabinet Office on this topic over the next year. As the green shoots of economic growth – hopefully – rise ever taller, civil servants want to hear more about career ladders that will help their organisations to pick staff from the top branches.
Chair: Joshua Chambers, deputy and online editor, Civil Service World