Like many post-election councils, we are in the throes of developing a new borough plan and the people strategy needed to support it. In developing this strategy, we have tried to get beyond jaded words such as ‘flexible’, ‘commercial’, ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘creative’ and to challenge any lazy thinking on three themes in particular: agility, skills and recruitment and development.
Agility is not a loose, free-for-all mode of operation. As much as we need curious people who can adapt their skills to different situations, we also need highly disciplined ways of working. In order to promote agility, certain basic conditions need to be in place. Without simple, standardised processes, without good data and, above all, without clear, empowering management, our people will not have the security they need to operate flexibly.
So one of the challenges for us is how to strike the right balance between creativity and compliance – between ‘can-do’ and ‘must-do’ if you like. Most organisations tend to favour one side of the equation or, worse, flip between them. Our conclusion is that bringing together the uneasy bedfellows of innovative people development and radical business process change is a necessary condition for success.
As far as skills are concerned, the future is already with us. Change management, project delivery, commercial and customer service skills, data analysis and digital competency should be the essence of most jobs in a modern council. But the forces that are driving changes in working life will focus us on these even more so.
Take one, albeit major disruption in the workplace: automation. Much of what we do in a council relates to processing information of one sort or another. Tax collection, benefits administration, financial transactions and many more tasks rely on using data to make rules-based decisions. These are precisely the tasks that will almost entirely be automated within the next few years. There is an unavoidable service quality and efficiency logic to doing so.
In Haringey, for example, we recently piloted a robotic programme for an element of our housing benefit process. An activity that previously absorbed 240 days of staff time took just 19 automated days – with zero errors. We cannot ignore the benefits of applying these capabilities to much more of what we do in local government, and what that suggests about skills in the workforce is profound.
All technological skills, both advanced and basic, will see a substantial growth in demand. Advanced technologies require people who understand how they work. People with these skills will inevitably be a minority and unless we grow our own, the sector will continue to pay significant sums to the consultancies who can provide them.
There is also a need for everyone to develop basic digital skills. As more customer service activity is automated, for example, the role of the customer service officer will require data analysis skills over traditional telephone or even webchat capabilities.
Accompanying this will be an increase in the need for workers with finely tuned social and emotional skills – those that machines are a long way from mastering. Some of these are of course innate, but many can be honed and taught. Similarly, demand for higher cognitive skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, decision-making, and complex information processing will grow.
This takes us to a third area that is taxing our thinking: how best to develop and recruit talent now and in the future?
First and foremost, we have a talented workforce already, one that is keen to learn and grow. Moreover, in a tight labour market, the pool of highly skilled people available to join the council is shallow. So we must continue to develop our own people, going further than we have in recent years. In Haringey, we have long since discarded most classroom-based training programmes. Equally, we do not have an annual appraisal process. In its place we have ‘My Conversation’ – as the name suggests, an approach based around ongoing discussion about performance and development between staff and their managers.
Developing the skills we need in the future, at pace, will require us to invest even more energy in both of these approaches. Our learning will become more rapid, observational and conversational. Energising this peer learning will be a key element of our people strategy.
But we do need to recruit too. It is not easy to create the space for fresh thinking and skills to come into the organisation when our staff base has been shrinking, but the challenges we face as a borough are such that we need a wide diversity of skills and experiences in order to develop complex solutions. That requires originality. As Barry Quirk said in The MJ in May: ‘Localism is great, but parochialism is awful.’
As I have said, we will invest in training and development that emphasises the social, emotional and technical skills that the new world of work requires. That means we can focus our recruitment on attitude and ideas, which will create particular challenges we will need to address, such as some recruitment practices that emphasise the need for experience over attitude and aptitude. We know from research with our own staff that this can dissuade whole groups from applying to us, young people for example.
So we are thinking hard about what it actually means to be agile, skilled and attractive to talented people. The answers are both difficult and exciting but if we are to be ambitious for Haringey and the people who live here, we have to be equally ambitious for our staff.
Richard Grice is director for customers, transformation and resources at Haringey LBC