Our workforce can shape our future

What’s left is an unfamiliar territory where authorities are going to need to be thinking in new and perhaps uncomfortable ways, not least about how they use and “own” one of their most expensive resources - their people.

With contracting and outsourcing of services becoming more commonplace, conventional models of public sector employment are evolving rapidly.

There is a requirement for new skill-sets - for example around the commissioning and managing of services - and different forms of leadership. More widely, there is the challenge of managing, engaging, motivating and retaining an ageing workforce that may not necessarily be committed to seeing these evolutions through.

Yet many local authorities remain stuck in the mind-set of “everyone needs to be employed by us”. Often too, there can be a sense nothing can change because of national pay and reward agreements, whereas, in fact, more frequently than we might expect, a consensus for change can be reached.

Moreover, while one of the real positives about local government employees is their passion for their work, their commitment to their communities, this can also, at one level, potentially be a barrier to change. Councils moving to deliver services in different ways can find that if workers don’t “buy in” on the ground then nothing very much changes in practice.

So councils are going to have to work extremely hard in the coming years to engage their workers, communicate objectives and manage performance much more smartly.

Within this, inevitably, the role of local government HR and those who manage people, will be fundamental. HR up to now has been the engine of local government when it comes to taking out costs, but in the difficult years ahead it will drive the organisation’s evolution towards the agile council.

Councils will need to think creatively and flexibly about the terms on which they employ people and engage their employees when coming up with new solutions. What has been striking over the last couple of years is the readiness of employees to engage in discussions on flexible employment models, and councils should look to capitalise on that.

People management, in our view, will need to become more strategic, more a “resource broker” smoothing and managing peaks and troughs in workload supply and demand.

Local authority workers are very good at working in silos - a planner will always be in planning, a social care administrator will never stray from that department. Similarly, there will always be times of the day, week or month when some areas of an authority are much busier than others.

So, with a bit of imagination and smarter working, could personnel resources be deployed more effectively and efficiently? To provide a basic example, a planning application, at least initially, mostly involves ensuring the paperwork meets fairly set rules. It is only when the application starts to be evaluated that it becomes more specialist. Could this workload therefore be assigned in a different, more efficient way?

We’re not suggesting there are easy answers to any of this - there aren’t. Any radical workforce reform, moreover, will throw up many complicated challenges, such as how to protect people’s natural desire for a “full” career or managing progression to ensure there is still a flow into those more senior, specialist positions.

But what is very clear is that local government is entering a new, uncertain world and so these are debates which must be had.

Ian Tomlinson-Roe, partner & Juliet Stuttard, director, PwC

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