The civil service needs to deploy its skilled staff more flexibly and intelligently – and as our round table found, that’s as much about winning hearts and minds as it is about introducing new systems. Stuart Watson reports.
The efficiency agenda has created huge upheaval for government departments. Not only must they explore new ways of delivering services, but they have also been required to do so with a significantly reduced workforce.
The cost-cutting is far from over: June’s spending round squeezed budgets further. To succeed, departments must work smarter; and to do that, they need their most skilled people in the roles where they can make the greatest difference.
The Civil Service Reform Plan and cross-government Capability Plan have begun to address these issues at a high level, but civil servants must still undertake skills audits, talent and succession management programmes, flexible resourcing and performance management within their own departments.
Together with IBM-owned HR services company Kenexa, CSW organised a round table discussion to explore how civil servants can use effective workforce planning to meet future organisational and policy challenges.
Plugging the skills gap
At the outset of the discussion, the attendees identified the skills that will be needed in the future. There was consensus that the reform plan’s priority areas are the right ones: project and programme management; digital; commercial; and change management. “I think in most departments we have found that there are gaps in those four key areas,” admitted Diane Robinson from DWP.
Gillian Smith from Civil Service Resourcing observed that all departments should have identified any major gaps by now through their capability reviews. She is in charge of the graduate Fast Stream programme, which has changed to reflect the new priorities: “We previously used to say fast streamers would need a policy job, an operational delivery job and a corporate services job. Now we want them to pick up those specific skills at the earliest possible time in their careers,” she said.
The development of skills frameworks for professionals within government was discussed. “One of the things that somebody, somewhere, should be recommending to all departments is frameworks which they should adopt to capture skills. If we do that, it will make it easier to identify skills that are valuable – and that should then open doors in terms of moving people across government,” suggested DWP’s Richard Grondalski.
Paul Smith from the Home Office said that he’s frustrated at the slow progress made by the civil service professions in this area. “They actually did it a little bit with PPM within the big departments, but it is not just PPM, it is finance, learning and development and a whole range of things where they need to be creating this culture. Even within HR we haven’t got a framework we can access,” he complained.
Coping with cuts
Departments’ efforts to ensure that they have enough skilled staff are taking place against a background of reducing numbers. “Most departments don’t know if they have kept or lost people with the right skills,” confessed DWP’s Dean Smith. “With anyone who leaves on a voluntary exit scheme, you are losing some experience.”
Paul Smith was worried that people leaving under voluntary redundancy schemes might be those that the civil service can least afford to lose: “The people who leave the civil service and go out into the private sector and get another job may be the people with the get up and go,” he said. However, he added that a veto can be put in place so that managers can prevent anyone with irreplaceable skills from leaving under such schemes.
Rachel Baker from the animal health and veterinary laboratories agency argued that the civil service must keep investing in skills evaluation, despite the pressure to cut costs: “If you don’t invest enough man hours having conversations at the base level, there is no solid foundation,” she said.
Talent management
“A huge opportunity for people who do workforce planning is the work around talent,” said Paul Smith. Departments are beginning to carry out career conversations between employees and managers, trying to identify the most talented people through a tool known as the “nine box grid” – a matrix measuring performance and potential. He argued that it represents a good example of co-ordinated work that could allow talent to be identified and shared across government.
Gillian Smith suggested that identifying future leaders through talent programmes would help to prevent high flyers from leaving through voluntary redundancy programmes, because they know that they have been earmarked for progression.
However, Baker admitted that so far her agency’s success in applying the talent identification process has been patchy. “I don’t think we are very practised at self-assessing, and sometimes our managers aren’t either, but there have been a couple of cases where it has been a really good conversation because of how good the relationship is between the employee and the line manager,” she observed.
Flexible working
Workforce planners would like to adopt more flexible ways of working so that managers can transfer skilled people from place to place, maximising their value within an organisation, or bring people into positions on a temporary basis. Such an approach can be difficult to adopt: “Flexible working is a huge step,” said Dean Smith, “but given the challenges that we have about reducing budgets, we don’t have much choice. One of the things that bothers me is that there aren’t necessarily the HR policies in place to support it.”
Paul Smith claimed that the Home Office had scored a notable success in this area during the Olympics: “We went out to people who we could employ on fee-paying contracts, and brought them in only for the peak periods. It was a huge exercise, but incredibly successful,” he said. However, he added that the difficulty of moving existing employees onto more flexible contracts “boggles the mind.”
Baker commented that getting specialist scientists within the veterinary agency to move between areas is proving difficult. And Kenexa’s Asif Ahmed recalled observing something similar in the pharmaceutical and engineering sectors: “You often see people who are really very technical and they love their work, but they don’t want to be pulled too far away from that work,” he said.
Sharing skills across government
Moving skilled personnel between civil service organisations presents an even bigger opportunity – but a greater challenge, too. Robinson summed up the advantages of such an approach: “In a former job at DWP we were trying to recruit analysts and all the departments were fishing in the same pool for the same analysts. We were all in competition with one another. That’s madness. Why don’t we – and I know this is a huge ask – get together, work out when we need our analysts, and share them between us? It is the only way we are going to manage with reduced resources.”
Gillian Smith argued that a radical cultural change is needed. “In the old world, staff were something that a department owned. In the new world we have a collective responsibility to deliver the whole set of services for government,” she said.
Helen Carrier from DCMS agreed that parochial barriers need to be overcome: “People don’t like to lose their analyst or their specialist,” she pointed out. “How do we incorporate that broader thinking across Whitehall on what the priorities are and where we need to focus our resources?”
Gillian Smith believes that hopes for progress lie within the next generation HR transformation programme: “They have already got a working group on workforce planning as part of the development of the operating model, so I take some comfort from that,” she said.
Data and IT systems
Carrier argued that a deep knowledge of a department’s staff and their skills is necessary for flexible resourcing to work well: “You need a real understanding of what your organisation is. That is probably easier in a small department than a bigger one, but it is still fraught with difficulty and requires really high-quality data,” she said.
Grondalski said that in its corporate centre, DWP has introduced a system called Skills Manager, which has enabled the organisation to move skilled staff into appropriate positions. “If we have a major project or programme that closes down and we have to reallocate 50-200 staff at a time, we can quickly identify the skills of those staff to effectively move them into jobs they can do,” he claimed.
Kenexa’s Lesley Briant argued that computer systems are not the main problem: “You can put all the systems in the world in place, but until you make the cultural changes [needed for flexible working] they won’t make a difference. The data will only be useful after the change management has been achieved,” she said.
Planning for the future
The discipline of strategic workforce planning has only recently gained a foothold within government, Gillian Smith said. “I used to see the counting of people and posts, but not a great focus on capability and skills. That has shifted in the last couple of years, but we are only just getting to the point where we are mature enough to think of skills and capability for the future,” she observed.
Paul Smith agreed that this agenda isn’t focused purely on reacting to current needs, but also about preparing departments to face the future. “It is not just about understanding the skills and capability of the staff you’ve got, but understanding those you are going to need in a rapidly-changing world,” he said. “That is the big journey we have made. It has been a struggle, but it is all about looking to the future.”
Chair: Joshua Chambers, deputy and online editor, Civil Service World