Productive Places: Workforce and Skills - Web viewProductive Places: Workforce and Skills. Building the Future Public Service Workforce. Learning Conversations. Word Cloud of all transcripts.

Productive Places: Workforce and SkillsBuilding the Future Public Service Workforce

Learning Conversations

Word Cloud of all transcripts

Introduction

If the future public service is to focus on place and the workforce is to be aligned to that future vision then it is essential to understand perspectives from people in many places and with different foci. We then need to use an understanding of the congruence and difference to help move in the right direction.

This is an account of the challenges and actions from and in the words of those in the front line who deal with workforce issues day to day and who will be key to making a vision of the future a reality.

This document reports on a series of interviews with individuals from across the sectors of public service. The work was conducted using "Learning Histories" methodology which involves interviews that are recorded and transcribed and then analysed to break them into a number of discrete conceptual or descriptive points. These are then grouped into a number of themes driven directly by the content of the interviews. The quotes included in the text are anonymous but are all taken directly from the transcripts. The quotes are to the left of each page and a brief comment by the authors is to the right.

This is one of a series of papers produced as part of the place focussed work in the Local Government Group's Productive Places initiative. Its purpose is to promote innovative thinking and action which will lead to a highly productive workforce which is fit to support and deliver the highest quality public services into the mid years of the 21st century.

Jonathan TrubshawLocal Government Improvement and Development

Roger BrittonWorcestershire County CouncilFor the Worcestershire Partnership

For more information go to www.local.gov.uk

Version 1.2, March 2011

Overview

"Actually, people are critical to any operation and organisation and where you've got people working well with people and managing people well , it’s going to work best"

The quotes and comments on the following pages demonstrate a compelling and common understanding of the need for significant changes in the structure, composition and behaviours of the future public service workforce if it is to be fit for purpose in the mid years of the 21st century.

"The more the squeeze comes on the more ridiculous it is that we duplicate; it's ludicrous that we do lots of things separately."

There are fundamental drivers for change. We have to recognise them and create a more flexible workforce.

"I think one of the drivers is creating conditions for success and the themes around those are we want to have a multi-skilled, multi-disciplined workforce which has the right attitude and is very customer focussed. We don't have Directorates any more we just have groups called People and Place. Moving to more of a matrix structure, we're changing the lines of accountability looking at professional demarcations and managerial demarcations so we're changing a lot of the environment that will move people away from – "I'm a planner, I come in to Shire Hall, I work Monday to Friday, and that's what I do. I might have loads of great ideas around customer service, but actually that's not my bag". Rather than maybe you can offer greatness across the organisation, you don't have to sit in that functional Directorate."

"Who would have thought fifteen years ago that you would go to the supermarket to do your banking but you do. Who's to say that you can't go to a retailer to provide social care? Everything is possible, and that's the risk, people are too precious about it. If a big private organisation can do it better, let them do it." We have to rebuild

the fabric of public service workforce taking out current boundaries and confining, traditionalist thinking.

"I think there will be more public-private partnerships with a place model where you would see moving a more traditional service delivery model to those partnerships that are more accepted in other places. I think we will see more of a mixed economy and that will change the shape of the workforce and people could be working in the same area but for a different employer."

"There will be less people employed by the Council because we will be doing less work."

"We have to learn a new way to engage with people in the community and make sure that everyone in public service knows how to do it. We have to learn from the people we serve."

The community is an integral part of the new greater "workforce".

“It's making the residents part of the workforce, part of the solution not the problem. How do we help them to not need us in the same way so they become more able to deal with things and I think that shift is a difficult one particularly if you are trained as a professional you are the one who has got all the answers and what we are trying to say is you are now more of a facilitator rather than sort of liking to be needed. We will still be needed but in a different way.”

Workers

"It’s not the role of the public servant to just apply the policy; it’s the role of the public servant to ensure the policy is fit for purpose."

The way people do their jobs will need to change with a development of new skills and attitudes and the ability to work across a wider sphere.

"We need bright intelligent entrepreneurial people who will make decisions and do it; not people to build a big machine that they will spend all their effort looking after."

Thinking in a very different way will be essential for all involved.

"In terms of behaviours, what people are going to have to do is think the unthinkable. I know this is a bit of a pat thing to say but we have to work from zero. You have got to try to suspend reality and pretend that you've never done it before. If you were starting again how would you do it? Return to year zero. Lets say we're not going to have a library service so what is it that people really value and how could that be provided in a different way… if people's life's work is around this you are asking rather a lot of them to pretend that it wasn't really necessary."

"A good example is when we had the Commonwealth Games and there was a big need at that stage and we termed it people being the eyes and ears of the organisation. … we want to create a good impression of this place, here's the number to ring. It doesn't matter who you are, what you do, if you spot some fly tipping from the bus on the way into work, if you spot some kids that should be in school who are out and about, this is the number that you call. It's that on a broader basis really."

The job will always be more than what is on the job description.“…so that they are in a position where when they are out and about doing

the day to day work they become the eyes and ears of the organisation. They are not just going out with the very narrow view that I will do this job and tick the box and come away again.”

"The challenge is that you will need more people who can both see the bigger picture and understand how the detail impacts on it. And the difficulty of that is you are either someone who sees the picture conceptually very good or your somebody who does detail very well. So whenever you look at these pieces of work you are going to have to have a mixed group of people because you are never going to bang square pegs into round holes. You are actually going to have to have a collective of people around that project who could do both between them and more importantly respect what each other bring to it so that you get the whole picture."

Real team working will become more and more important to understand the whole picture and use collaborative strengths."How you get people to work better together is a challenge because they

are seeing it through different eyes, they just don't see the same thing that you are seeing."

"So having a good understanding of the residents, who they are, what they need. A much more external view if you like not just the professional expertise and technical skills and so on but having much more of an empathy with the people that they are supporting."

Understanding that the community is at the heart of things is vital… and then translating that into the way that the job is done.

"We don’t have a name for this skill set because we've never had someone who works like this before with a much broader control and authority... Citizen Champions who own the interactions and the solutions and can follow up and ask agencies if they have resolved the problem. Real, ownership of the issue rather than passing it off. It’s a mentality shift really."

"What we are trying to get from is people who are traditionally " I have worked in service x and can only do this part of this job" and bring them to

Changed thinking

a place where they can work much more flexibly so they can work for service x, y or z, right across and have skills so they can help people in the community to develop."

must result in changed behaviour

"We've trained people to be workplace health champions so they can help other employees. We have an NVQ 2 in Health promotion. They are doing it in the workforce but they are also taking it out into the Borough so someone who works in a customer Revs and Bens centre just sorting out applications or council tax issues can now go out and work in one of out Life Centres and can decide that there are issues in the locality and gets some activity going."

"We will be required to be more specialist, expected to provide more high end, added value public services but we will also be expected to be much more flexible in all sorts of ways. Currently we have probably the most stratified and structures workforce in the whole of the economy, in all sorts of ways; how we work, when we work, what we do, so on and so forth. Issue after issue emerges and we have to change the way we work and things like that."

"So this will not only mean looking after the systems, it will also mean setting up training events and things like professional supervision and CPD. It’s a cost but it's essential if we're going to have a broader base that works."

We have to have a serious commitment to training."I am very much in favour of the co-training idea. It's very stimulating and

allows you to swap ideas."

"We have been thinking of almost a pool of resource that we can use. That you almost have a transfer market like football that you can put people on loan and that they would develop their skills but the receiving organisation would benefit. We partly pay their wages and they partly get the skills and insight; the organisation learns and we still retain the talent." Moving people

around, and being genuinely positive about it will be a feature.

"So at the moment we are looking at how could we support managers and employees to move around the organisation, to invest in skills, talent management, do succession planning in a more active way than we have done in the past and perhaps moving towards a more private sector approach where we identify particular needs and we know we have got individuals with particular skills else where in the organisation and in the business unit."

"When you get down to it there is no point in sending someone out who is fabulously talented at facilitation but knows nothing about the technical specifics. Their face validity with the community would be zero and they would get it wrong"!

At the end of the day we have to deliver the goods.

"I guess that’s what you call the Alamo; you know you draw the line in the sand. And finally people have to understand that this is the new order. That’s going to be even more difficult when you get to the altruistic end of public service, around; child protection, elderly care, caring for vulnerable adults and so on. People working in those fields do a fantastic job and have a modus operandi which may have to change. What you’re actually doing is changing their emotional commitment to their clients because they don’t want to change. The reason they don’t want to change is not out of some stubborn public sector sloth philosophy it is because they genuinely believe that this is the best way to help the client. Actually the future isn’t going to allow that."

Change may be tough but it is imperative.

"Every volunteer does not have a halo over their head. They can be difficult, they can be aggressive, they can be awkward and they are not on the payroll so what are you going to do?"

Volunteers will be an increasingly important and significant element of the workforce

“We’ve always taken the view that volunteers should be there to supplement and not subsidise. So what we don’t want volunteers to be

doing is activities that we are funded to provide…volunteers should be there to be doing some additional activity that we would not be able to do were it not for the fact that we had those volunteers.” delivering public

services.

Managers

"For me flexibility is the key to all of this"Managers will need to be extremely agile in their thinking and behaviours and drive what really makes a difference across a wide and complex stage.

"So what we’re saying is rather than presume here is the 2020 manager we are saying here are the individual competencies that the new 2020 manager is going to have. .. I don’t think we could presume now what the 2020 manager is but what we can certainly say is that we have got high expectations of how that manager will operate, what success will look like."

The skills profile for managers will be quite different and it is difficult if not impossible to describe it properly yet.

"There are going to be new skills people will need to have like commissioning resource that isn't yours. Living with natural tensions. Not having all, the pieces of the jigsaw. Entrepreneurial skills. It's going to be about attitude and behaviour."

"The new public sector manager has to have a whole new approach to understanding budgeting and financial management. You’ve got to have a whole different understanding of how they engage with the individual partners, a different appreciation of no longer having long-term certainty in their life. You know, gone are the days when you can have a five year strategy; my goodness at the moment we’re lucky if we have a five month strategy."

"People will have to have a much harder focus on what's value for money, not from a conceptual focus but actually doing it cheaper and driving cost out of the system."

"We need to change the way we develop our staff. The leadership and probably the kind of project management qualities they have. The way they see themselves working perhaps in a matrix way, in a much more flexible and amoeba like way; they don’t want to be necessarily constrained by structures. And that is a huge change."

"We like to be the experts. We like to be the ones that people come to because we're the only ones that can do it. Shifting that so your role is not to do it, it's to help other people to do that. I think it’s going to be quite different. It's that same shift with some of our residents, it's that bit about making them increasingly more in control of their own destiny and not be wholly dependent on us where in the past we have relied on that dependence almost to justify our existence. "

It is the manager's job to refocus the practical delivery to the community.

"There has been a reputation of big County Council – we know best - there needs to be a different relationship".

"There is a lot of lip service given to engagement. The skill that managers need is to set the right tone." Valuing intelligence

from the front line and communities is vital and sometimes it is hard.

"We need to develop our mangers just to sit on their hands, go in with an open mind and not try to defend and justify, just to listen and understand, maybe with a fresh pair of ears. We need to listen to the issue before jumping to the answer. Some of the answers are unknowable, the skill that we should have is to develop policy and ways of working from issues not impose pre-formed solutions the on issues".

"Have we got evidence that backs up what our assumptions are and if we haven't how do we get that evidence but not in an overly bureaucratic way that becomes an industry in its own right? The bit for me is that analytical bit, the analytical thinking, being able to objectively look at some of that evidence and say what that is actually telling us."

Decisions have to be driven by real evidence.

"People have got to learn to use information, use empirical data well to formulate decisions about what they do, formulate a view not just support what they are already doing."

Leaders

"Unless we get leadership right we're dead in the water."A new model of political and managerial leadership will drive transformation and deal with a deliberately messy environment in which relationship and influence trumps command and control.

"I think for me that has quite big implications for what's the DNA of leadership that we are going to be looking for in the future because with my experience of Total Place and the work I've been doing since is back to the thing about trust and actually moving to a situation where people are pleased to lead through a sphere of influence and they may be aligning a set of services, they may be enabling a particular topic or outcome so I hope in ten yeas time that you have something that's not a relay team because that's sequential but it’s something like people running a parallel joined up race and taking pride in their ability to link, network and facilitate rather than just run their bit of the empire."

The nature of leadership will be quite different and demand different skills.

"At senior levels I think one of the skills you need is being able to surf different cultures and different organisational politics and so on."

"There is recognition across all parties here that in five years time the elected member role will not be the role they are doing today and recognition that the type of skill, the type of person we may have in some of our members now will not be the people going forward. It will be about that community activist role."

This calls for a shift in the role of elected members and relationships.

"There are two lines of democratic accountability, one is your local member which in theory should be relatively straightforward – they are on the spot and can work with all the groups who are working in that area and pump-priming the community. The second element is the cabinet system which is increasingly the executive arm of the authority so the Cabinet member who is in charge of a particular portfolio is the one who has to respond in the newspaper not the local member. They are accountable for the policy which is developed on that but the trouble is you have a wonderful policy that says these are going to be the outcomes but not knowing if they are being achieved at the bottom end. As delivery of outcomes is splintered into lots of different places it gets harder to draw a line of accountability."

"People need to understand the political context. Historically we have seen workforce and elected members very separate as part of the whole bigger workforce. We all have something to contribute. We have to work effectively together and form the policy together. They have to be seen to make a difference so their focus is different, maybe more short term and visible than longer term strategy. We need to help to maintain the legitimacy at local level. We need to be sensitive to that situation."

"When things get hot it often is the local authority elected Councillors who are in the firing line of an angry decision and then you end up with tricky legitimacy conversations so where should leadership be weighted."

Dealing with accountability is one of the core leadership functions, the very definition of what this means will be reconstructed.

"I think there are real challenges on the democratic accountability for some of this stuff and there are already challenges if you look at the commissioning model and the conflict between that and the statutory role of some Directors because actually, in reality these people should be commissioning outcomes with other people delivering them but actually when Ofsted come in they expect you to know, down to the last social worker what their case load looks like. So it's not just the democratically elected it’s the statutory roles that are potentially in conflict with it. …somehow you have got to have contract management to do with quality control not performance indicators so you will have to have something put I n that is quite innovative that will give you a level of understanding of

what is happening without it being down to the last decimal point – the decimal point may not represent the truth of what's happening."

"I think that the interesting thing will be about letting go of authority and control and I think that will be the difficulty around many organisations because there is one thing engaging another party, whether it's voluntary sector, private sector or somebody else but in most instances we still hold control. I think it is going to need to be a very mature relationship where we are going to let go of control and going to work in partnership here. I think that it will depend on the service and the level and will depend on accountability."

"I'm worried that we just don't give time to thinking through the problem because we feel obliged just to rush at the answer. We treat ourselves as if thinking time is a bit of a jolly and we're frightened that the press will see senior people away just talking as a jolly and condemn for that. In fact we waste a lot of effort rushing at doing things we would get better value for money if we spent more time thinking, framing the problem. We should also be happy to say that we don't know the answer. We all have the idea – bring me solutions not problems but that's wrong, we need to share problems and only then make the solutions."

Leaders need real thinking time to address novel challenges.

Citizens and Communities

"It’s being much more about, excuse the word, co-production,to be much more about – we're all in this together"

Citizens in communities are part of the new workforce. They will have a much greater role in driving and informing decisions, will be intimately involved in making things happen on the ground and will provide direct and visceral accountability.

"A classic one for me would be there are some stunning hospices who happen to run some end of life care services but actually the really stunning ones are running real conversations with local people about mortality, about what it means to have a good death, what it means to be confident in a good death and how formal services and family and friends networks can work together to do that. Actually what they are doing is trying to shift the barrier or boundary about what a good death is so they're beginning to redefine society’s expectations and the boundary between formal and informal services and I suppose coming from a heath service background that feels absolutely essential because the national statistic is that if you added up the time that unpaid carers give, it adds something like the same cost as the NHS so there is just this real sense of that there is another world of delivery out there that is at least as big as the one we formally see above the waterline."

We need to think differently about the problem as well as the solution.

"One of our exciting trends here has been seeing ourselves move from wanting to be inspectors of third party providers to actually being partners with third party providers and that’s quite a challenging mind set change."

The nature of the relationship between statutory sector and VCS will be quite different

"Their reason for being there isn’t solely picking up a salary cheque at the end of the month. They are there because it is their library, it’s their area and it’s their children and it’s they themselves who want access to information and books. So how do you engage with that level of partner? If it’s a partner you are paying money to in terms of a contractor then you have a contract. If it’s staff then you have an employment contract. Suddenly we’ve got this new partner joining whose motives, desires and expectations are very different. And that’s what’s missing from the bailiwick of management competence." "I am a real believer in partnership working but we have created a system where you have too many people tripping over each other; so almost partnership becomes aligning the fact that you have too many people trying to run things whereas if you could divert that partnership, because often the partnership is just the public sector trying to get its act together between itself where all that partnership energy could be focussed in a completely different way trying to enable and capture the energy that's going on in communities."

"We have encouraged volunteering from within the council. I think it has been effective to some extent but not as much as it could be." Statutory agencies

are part of the community as well! We need to think about how they deliver what in business would be Corporate Social Responsibility

"The idea that there is a workforce and there is society is quite alien to me because I do a number of things in the community not because I get paid for it, because it brings me personal pleasure where what I find irritating from some of my colleagues is this kind of idea that we’re not society, we’re not residents or whatever. We sometimes have conversations that we need to go and speak to residents or citizens about this – we are kind of those things as well so we should have some views on it but also getting away from this patronising idea that we'll go and have a little conversation with some carers and then we'll decide what carers need."

"A brilliant example again for us, we have very real issues about keeping many of the open spaces, especially some of the squares, regularly cleaned. But residents say to us, “Well we want to clean it” but you know

Build the conditions where the

there is a whole lot of nonsense about health and safety and everything else. We said no, let’s get rid of all of that. Let’s work with you now to find a way in which you can be part of keeping your square tidy and keeping your small green in the centre of your square in a suitable condition for your children to play in."

community can just get on and do it.

"You know, we have got to get real. You know, “I can’t clear my driveway for fear of someone suing me”. Of course you can. What you can’t do is go out with a bucket of hot water and throw it on the pavement and two minutes later it turns to ice; of course you can’t. What does the progressive borough do? A progressive borough says a leaflet or here’s an on-line site that tells you how to do it well. Not only that, if you come along to our depot with a couple of buckets we’ll fill you up with some grit and sand."

"What's often struck me as a bit bizarre is the public sector trying to stimulate community development and I just wonder should not such resources as we have go into community self development in some way, there is just this sense, in most places where I have worked you have your neighbourhood forums and all those sort of things and they become a bit ritualistic and in may ways it almost becomes this is the place where citizens moan about public services rather than places where we create new conversations."

Reform the lines of communication

"Invest to make the business of volunteering more stable and more secure. This is about getting volunteers as an end in itself. There is a significance to the front door to volunteering. How do you bring people in? People come from the Jobcentre, from mental health charity, a lot of students who go off to college and have their horizons broadened and a time where they become idealistic and want to put something back, try something new."

We need to see volunteers as part of the greater workforce and therefore take a serious approach to their recruitment and retention.

"We will see people move out of paid employment into voluntary employment and we already have some of those."

"I am asking is how far do you want us to be involved? Is it over to you sort it out guys? Or are we saying, as part of our role as community builder, if you like, is to provide some support and skills development to the people who might be taking this on? It's the revenue costs or the revenue costs plus a couple of workshops on how to get started? Community enablement. It's not about giving it to the big boys of old it's about small groups delivering stuff that is particularly pertinent to particular needs. "

Help communities build their assets and capacity so they can become part of the greater workforce and deliver quality outcomes."Each community will have a different skills set. One of your roles will be

to help them understand what they have and what they haven't and help fill the gaps. Your job is to make this a success. A bit like small business start-up approach."

"We've been doing a lot more thinking about starting with the assets in the community, rather than starting by thinking about the needs of the community. Think about what people have already got in their portfolio of skills and experience and how we can help them with that. One of the issues is the pastoral care you give to the public and trying to get over that and get people doing it for themselves, maybe with help."

"There is an issue about creating synergy amongst people who do things collectively or provide part of the solution and though we are some way off getting there that has already started. In the third sector how far do we get involved in …. workforce development with people who are delivering services for you? Do we just spec it, do we just say, if you are going to do this for us these are the things we expect you to do or do we as part of the offer put development in there to assist them to develop in the way that we want them to."

"We don’t need to put in enthusiasm, the community will have that in spades, they have willingness and energy. What they want is a bit of know how at that point, but know how that is given to them in a way they can work with – not know how which is a million reasons why this won't work but yes we can sort of know how, these are the ways round it, this is what you can do. …. So you’ve got to be good at community engagement, fabulous with people, you’ve got to be able to sign up to their enthusiasm and go with a decent toolkit that allows them to get from point A to point B, otherwise there's no point in you being there. ""I mean voluntary sector organisations vary in their effectiveness, in their professionalism, in their premises, in their costs, in their user base and I think that there is a lot of work to be done and what the council wants from the voluntary sector and how much it is prepared to pay to get it and what support it puts in."

"There were a lot of people involved because there was money to be decided on and there were all sorts of people around the table, but when it came to setting up the trust where the money had run out you could see those people scatter away as individuals and as the organisations they represent they were not interested in staying around the table to be part of that Board of Trustees and I think that is because there was no money, no resource just hard slog."

Sustainable solutions are essential

"I think a lot of the ideas of the Big Society, that charities are organised to take on new schemes but I think you've got to have someone who is paid at the top to have the time to organise all the volunteers. A lot of volunteers want to volunteer on a regular basis, say three or four hours per week. Now you're not going to be able to do a lot of organising of other volunteers within that time. You might be able to encourage more volunteers but you need people who are paid to set up and do the organising to recruit and support them."

You need to build infrastructure otherwise efforts will be unfocussed

"If young people can be encouraged to volunteer they will continue to do so throughout their life because they started at an early age or they may come back to it at a later stage."

"We need to segment the market. Young people who are thinking about volunteering will need a different door to go through than the retirees. A different feel about it, they want to do different stuff and feel different about it. They want someone to relate to."

"Localism's fine but it will collapse after the initial enthusiasm has worn off, so it's working with them about building continuity and succession planning."

Organisations

"If by 2018 when we don't have radically different organisations then we've failed." Organisations need to be fit for their purpose. Local authorities will not only be effective commissioners but also effective engagers with the public and effective negotiators to enable services to be provided in a variety of ways. This may include dismantling current standardising structures so they are responsive to public policy, such as the variations that direct payments to service users will generate.

"There'll be much more flexibility and we can shift people about. They won't work for an organisation they'll work for a location, that will be the fulcrum for them and they can mix and match, not the – not in my job description reaction. This will be attitudes not skills. How they think about the job. How committed they are. How they're willing to put themselves out. I don't know how we will be able to do the sort of stuff we're going to do without this sort of shake up and we can't go at the pace of the slowest we have got to push on and if someone gets upset well it's just hard luck them." Flexibility is the

key, without a completely flexible workforce we will not succeed.

“…and the most important thing is to get the right people into those posts. And that comes back to how we recruit and looking for people who have enthusiasm, committed, all those kinds of things really, rather than necessarily skills or experience. And then what we have been able to do is grow some of those people into becoming managers.”

"The current concept of jobs is a very rigid solution to what is a very plastic problem. The problem is the nature of what needs to be done is very elastic; consumer demand changes, public policy changes and we have to rethink what we mean by jobs."

"Let's look at creating a service around the locality rather than trying to fit the service in the buildings we've got to operate. The place itself becomes a lot more of the centre rather than we just happen to deliver services in that place. So we are looking at the service structure, looking at organisational structure and the behavioural structure. We normally make decisions at the centre so you can abdicate responsibility up the line to your manager so someone else can take the rap for things and we are creating a lot more ability down at the front line.”

Structure will be driven by place with the focus on front line interaction.

"It's about understanding the locality and then driving the service for that locality, so everyone's not going to have the same vanilla. They're going to have the same services but actually it's not a post code lottery, it's a post code choice. There is going to more around celebrating the differences of the towns under the banner The Uniqueness of XXX. It's recognising the differences."

“The other thing that we're doing is integrating the whole people life cycle so we've tried to pull together where people are going to need to work together to support people from childhood through to adult to old age which is how we support people rather than split ourselves as a workforce in terms of supporting people separately we'll try to get a more integrated approach. It's about looking at what support we need. That will change the way we do our work and the way people have traditional worked in silos which are sector based or areas. There will be more diversity and more choice about the things that we do.”

"It's going back to that Best Value stuff, dare I say it, who is best placed to do that. It might not actually be us it might be somebody else. What we've got to do, our role is going to be shifting some of that ownership and doing that in a way that does not leave a big gap as things move."

We have to draw solutions from all sectors.

"So you'll probably see more shared services arrangements and much

closer working with our local government partners than we have had in the past. We have quite a good record but I think it will pick up to a quite different pace in terms of people being more happy to accept that somebody else can do things for them or vice versa or indeed move into different legal entities and different models."

“There is a definite sense from central Government that Direct Payments is the way forward; that message clearly hasn’t got as far as the local authority. It’s difficult to know when that message will get to local authorities, if that message will get to local authorities and if that message does get to local authorities are they going to want to do something about it? Because local authorities seem so intent on tendering and tendering processes and big lump contracts for service and moving away from that is not going to be quick or easy.”

"I do have a sense that we are going back to the Charles Handy view of workforces in the future which is the core workforce and the marginal."

The business of employment can be delivered separately from service delivery.

"What we want is a system that will let some big organisation do all the backroom work to get the people to the front line where they do the good stuff and free up the time, particularly of the voluntary sector and maybe smaller other organisations, so everyone is concentrating on what they are best at. This will mean that we can have more smaller organisations without having to re-invent the wheel every time. We'll need to somehow wrap pensions into the package as well, though that's a big ask."

"We probably need to find a market way of addressing it as I suspect the public sector workforce will become much more commercialised, in terms of who is employed but also how they work. We are employing a larger proportion than ever on temporary agency short term outcome oriented contracts. We are commissioning now what we used to provide before."

"If you are a support service you're a business your job is to support the activity at the cheapest possible cost because you are the overhead the more you spend on that the less you spend on the core business. Some parts of our business get that confused. So people in HR should behave the same as if they were in a bank. Same in finance and so on."

"So just because we have offices and services based out of an office environment – do they have to be there, do they have to be based in Shire Hall, do we have to have back offices or services that are none to five, Monday to Friday. Why can't we improve the IT infrastructure and change the environment in which people work to actually challenge the services they deliver and change the way in which we react to the customer. So we are challenging the whole construct around work as an entity. We’re moving to annualised hours as part of our change to terms and conditions so we're just moving a lot of the barriers away. I don't need to come into Shire Hall, Monday to Friday, nine to five. I live 35 miles in the north, I've got a laptop other localities are much nearer, the police station is just at the bottom of the road why can't I use the entity of the place in which I work to deliver my service rather than I have to do that travel."

Work is an activity not a place, so build a structure that reflects this.

"Your role becomes an enabler because these things just won't spring out from nowhere, so this is about market development working with organisations to fine tune what's available to be provided through a third sector because they will not just pop up from nowhere. There will be something about the big public bodies understanding what the needs are and then working with individual organisations to build a not for profit business that will provide support in that particular area. So we end up with enablers and hard edge contracts teams and analysing what you want people to do as opposed to just rolling out what we have always done year on year."

The purpose of organisations will be fundamentally different.

"You cannot be innovative; you cannot be creative without taking risks. And you cannot take risks without them sometimes going wrong,

Organisations can no longer be so risk

otherwise it’s not a risk. If you take risks all the time and it goes right on every single occasion then what risk have you taken? Now we’ve got to manage that, if you’re talking about children’s services or something and people are going to die that’s different. But, I think there has got to be an understanding of that."

averse; in fact they need to be the opposite.

"You have got to do less of the routine stuff in-house and you will be left with a core of things that either other people don't want to or it doesn't make sense or financially it doesn’t work to do which is probably going to be child protection social work so we will end up slimmed down to research, intelligence analysis, strategic direction, voice of the people role then things that other people don't want to do, can't do or cost too much to do and the question then is how much of that is done jointly"

Don't think that, in reality, everything can be externalised.

“I think over time it will start to test us over whether people go into a new organisation if it’s the Council or a mutual or how it's going to be delivered. People are in their own organisations working together at the moment. We have done some joint appointments but what tends to happen is that people belong to one organisation but typically they will work across a couple of organisations. I think that health angle will be quite a dominant factor in terms of looking at some of those issues and the way that we work together.”

People will no longer work for one organisation alone, regardless of who actually employs them.

"People are not going to retire so early so we will have more experience in the workforce. That may be experience that does not want to be in the workforce. By 2018 we know we are going to have the impact of youth unemployment coming through. We need now to invest in young people and try to compensate for the lack of opportunities for them to get experience."

Macro issues such as age demographics will have a significant impact.

Beliefs to Behaviours

"You can strategise it for ever. Just get on and do it"Managers have to be increasingly skilful at managing relationships; with their staff, with partners and with the public. They will need to behave objectively and decisively but above all empathetically. They will need to model how they expect others to behave.

"We have got some exceptionally professional staff but the way they are going to have to work in the future is different and we are going to reach a point where it is no longer an option. That’s when the tough decisions have to get made." The journey is

going to be challenging and complex and we have to manage people through the process.

"There are cultural differences in these workforces and you will have quite a complicated mix. Merging of cultures will be interesting to see."

"For the next ten years we’re going to have the challenge that they will all move to the new way of working at different speeds. And that’s going to be the problem. You’re going to get the exciting commercial enterprise that’s excited about being able to send in its building plans electronically and a planning department that wants everything in hard copy because they like to write pencil notes in the margin."

"We have to let people have the public service ethic, otherwise why would they be here? It's much messier than the private sector to work in but people do it for a reason. The thing is to take people from point A to point B without them losing their reason for being. One of the greatest strengths of our people is their passion for what they do and one of the down sides to that is they'll fight to the death not to give it up because they don't see it just from their own perspective they see it as something that is valued by the community. If you're going to shut a building society the staff there will see it from the perspective that they will lose their jobs our staff don’t just see it from that perspective they see it from the perspective that it is a dreadful thing like cutting the head off a kitten, they are coming to it from a different level of emotion. We have to get staff to see that it is a highly valued public service but it will look different."

But we have to sustain the public service ethos and understand that this makes people feel differently about their job.

"The terms and conditions stuff you can sort out, it’s mechanical and when it gets mechanical it gets easy really. The big challenges are cultural, huge cultural differences between people who have grown up in a health environment, people who have grown up in local government and people who have grown up in police, just the whole style of doing things. So it’s the culture that is the barrier not the technical stuff."

The challenge is the cultural not the technical change.

"We will ultimately have and I believe a very small percentage of people who are unable to make that emotional change, that move to a new culture. Then we cannot allow the success, the borough success to be hindered by the individual desire and expectation."

There will be some hard decisions along the way.

"That’s why it’s important that we are starting to look at the next decade’s managers now because we can’t wait until we get to 2020 to say, sorry you’re not suitable. We actually got to modelling our career succession planning and our workforce development modelling to actually present to the organisation what is the future model and what does today’s new manager understand that they have to develop if they want to have a career in management in the public service".

"Some first appointments maybe won’t last as long as they normally last and then people are replaced. To some extent it is going to be about saying, well we’ve got three of them and we only need one so which one do we pick? And some of them will pick themselves and may not be quite right for the job where as you recruit into it you have the opportunity of starting afresh."

"Morale and motivation is really important. We have said that this is the perfect storm. We need year on year motivation against all the pressures. How do you keep people tuned in and productive?"

We need to be certain that we keep staff engaged throughout.

"We have to create our own headlines within the organisation so we keep people positive and on board with this."

"We have to teach staff to live with uncertainty. It's not change from one steady state to another steady state it is into a world of uncertainty and change. You only get there if there is a willingness to learn."

"In terms of barriers we need to work on those political partnerships and politics you know can sometimes get in the way. Having said that let’s not use that as an excuse because if there was a relationship that at a political level that are maybe not as good as we would like I don’t think that stops officers collaborating and building good relationships. And you know we’ve certainly got examples of that where you know we’ve sort of cut through that to say sort of actually we’re going to work together on this. Maybe don’t necessarily allow that to get in the way; it can be used as an excuse I think."

Don't let apparent barriers be an excuse for stalling. There are ways around those barriers.

Structures and Rules

"Trouble is we spend time worrying about the rules for workers. Make the rules fit the need not the need fit the rules."

There are technical responses, such as changing terms and conditions, which organisations could work on to ease people’s transitions between employers. Energy could be better directed at building sustainable relationships and ensuring clear outcomes are agreed and understood. Employment technicalities can be worked through as and when they are relevant and useful.

"Some of the challenges then are around the contract and what that would look like. If we are much more integrated are we content enough and how much challenge will there be from the unions. If we all sit in a room together but are all on different terms and conditions and different salaries and how long is that sustainable or can we change the culture so this is OK for the future? Do you say that from now on what we are going to appoint to is a place Mutual Group and everyone who is employed becomes employed for the place but they don’t become employed by the Council, NHS or DWP or voluntary we have this new organisation called XXXX Place Mutual and if you come you can work in any of those areas because you are employed by this new entity."

We need to address the technical issues or they will block behavioural change.

"What I wouldn’t do is change terms and conditions. Which maybe sounds a bit off but; I think there is a balance to be made. In a sense we’re back to the cultural thing. We’ve had this discussion about whether we harmonise terms and conditions and I think for different reasons we are saying, well it sounds good in principal but I’m not sure that it’s necessary to do it before we bring teams together."

We need a measured approach focussed on outcomes.

"So there are some things, you are right, that genuinely need to be looked at, we need to look at some of the things like two-tier working within things like TUPE transfers because it simply does not help to move to a localism agenda at all."

We have to be willing to challenge things that get in the way

"We no longer want this ridiculous scenario that you have to make your best social workers managers to reward them; now our best social workers can earn as much as our social work managers but they’re earning it for a different reason they’re earning it for their contribution. The old public sector model was so flawed in that it required you to stop doing what you were good at to be rewarded for doing it. We promote you to be a manager of social workers or a manager of planners or a manager of environmental health officers rather than make you a champion of environmental health and reward you appropriately for it."

We must have an approach to pay and rewards which fits the new model.

"I think the whole issue of ripping up the reward book and starting again, this might be an opportunity to do it at a place level. Ask, what's the reward package to be employer of choice and putting together the whole package. That would be a potential opportunity. We would have to explore if that worked at a place level. We could wrap that into the formation of place based employment. While there are loads of positives about staying in a national scheme the direction is to local solutions. That whole issue about what is reward, what do we mean by a reward package is not just terms and conditions, it’s what's the career you are offering, what's the flexibility offer it’s the four components of reward:, looking at work in a more radical way than we have in the past."

"Job descriptions are a problem. It’s the way we do our grading. We measure things that were important in the past but we have not come up with a way to measure things that are important now. This gets in the way."

"It was quite difficult when they created my job to explain to the job evaluation panel why it should be the grade it was and why it is the role it

is, because it doesn't have budgets and it doesn't have groups of staff under it and if we are going to have a model that is much more about facilitating and engaging and strategic networking then we are going to have to get away from – you get paid because you've got a big budget and you've got a lot of staff and unfortunately you do – in local government it’s staff and budgets, in Health it’s beds and wards, in the fire service and police it’s how many stations you've got and we're stuck in that model"

"We have to be clear about our pay liabilities. Are we going to have Stefan Cross mark 2 and the whole issue round equal ,pay and we find ourselves stuck by some of the current legislation and those issues around mixing workforces together at a more technical level. Is this a minefield to explore or a minefield to ignore at the moment? But knowing the liabilities we have to have detailed thoughts about what that means."

We need to be aware of the risks but not be paralysed by them.

"I can almost understand the intellectual requirement to have the NJC, the national terms and conditions stuff, but for me it's so archaic. It feels like something that was set down in Bevan times, that's what it feels like. I can understand the rationale behind it but it's just not fit for purpose. So the argument around why don’t we go into local bargaining, there seems to be a disconnect between the logic and purpose."

We need to reform all terms and conditions; there is a real question about their fitness for purpose.

"On terms and conditions it's about annualised hours, flat-bedding holiday entitlement, standardising payments. Changing some things because it will save money but changing others because it's about simplification which allows us to move things forward."

"The ability to have standard terms and conditions (across all public services) is promising and gives us the ability for real flexibility. It breaks down quasi-professional barriers as well."

"There is no future for national terms and conditions, none at all. It was always an uneasy alliance anyway. Here what is important to us is not the same issues as in other places, not the same culture even. Salary is a sub-regional thing."

"It raises the question of flexibility in terms of maybe working hours , maybe roles that employees are involved in, in terms of the width of those roles not necessarily being a single role and I only do this but perhaps working more flexibly across functions so that in covering leave, sickness and in other unforeseen eventualities the organisation doesn't suddenly grind to a halt."

“On terms and conditions, you can mess about with this, you can TUPE transfer people over to different bodies or you can have people working alongside with different terms and conditions, I don’t really see that as being a huge deal. I think the issue for me is where you get to the joint management – whose actually managing these people, who are they accountable to, who sets the goals who decides what their performance should be? That's where it gets more complicated and that's where things can fall between two stools if you're not careful."

It's not just technical issues, it's the way you manage them.

"For me the biggest barrier is the pension scheme. I would be identifying this as a barrier to the concept of developing a wider public sector workforce. The solution is probably some creative approach around the transportability, comparative worth of the respective pension schemes. I think the solution lies in the current pension reforms slowly trying to equalise the pension schemes in some way."

Pension reform needs to be addressed.

"Thinking about things like pensions. Why do we have to have so many schemes? Why not just one that works for everyone? How is it that the all run differently? Hutton should come up with one that everyone doing public work can join. Properly funded and it can move with people, but not even that it will be one scheme and apply wherever you are. That would

encourage movement which is going to be really important to the way we will have to work in the future."

"A pension scheme that the voluntary sector can buy into is a good idea as long as you can keep out Mickey Mouse organisations that will go belly up."

Timing and Opportunity

"Staff do see this as an opportunity. I have been in a box for so long I want to work outside of it. People are wanting to do more and have

got the skills to do more. The talent is often there."People find it difficult to conceive of what a workforce will be like in ten years. Public policy is changing the way we work now. How future changes will affect how people will be employed, what they will deliver and the skills they will need are challenging questions to answer. Therefore, leaders and managers need to consider the future they want; and work with others towards creating it.

" I don’t know if we are in something different and new and we really need to wake up and recognise it; or is it the same cycle of centralising everything, realising we've become a monolith and it’s very expensive and out of touch; decentralising everything, realising it’s all a bit scattered and we don't know what's going on and it's quite expensive as well and then sort of centralising again in the interests of efficiencies. Are we condemned to always be in this cycle? Condemned is a very pejorative word, but perhaps that's OK, perhaps what we need to do is to recognise that, and in local government we seem to restructure every couple of years from what I can see, whether you want to or not, whether you need to or not possibly, and are we really saying, are we always going to be fluid, always going to need to skill people up to realise that they are in a process."

Change and uncertainty are endemic; we must help people thrive in that environment if we are to achieve our ambitions for civil society.

"I am very sceptical about the Big Society and localism for HR people we'll have to be mindful of the pendulum. If this doesn't work then we have a big restoration task to try and repair things that have not come out correctly."

"Look at doing things differently and there are some positives that are coming out of the resource situation that local government and public sector find themselves in. One of those positives is that actually you can think in different ways and consider doing perhaps radical things that you couldn’t have done, you know wouldn’t have got the air space in the past that actually people do now consider. And therefore I think the climate for change is ripe for that. If you don’t do it now you know in four years time you might miss the boat and that opportunity."

Carpe diem!

"If we're not careful a hell of a lot of time reconditioning our workforce to have about eighteen months worth of effort out of them and those people would have gone through a change like no-one's ever gone through before and then they're all going to go and were going to be referring to stuff and we will need to know what it was like in the old world and what it’s like in the new world we need historical reference and knowledge transfer and I can’t see anyone that's really thinking about talent growing, talent management, pipeline and that's a bit scary."

Manage and grow the talent we have across the sectors.

"It’s understanding who you’ve got and it’s the challenge of doing that in different organisations – it’s difficult enough in one organisation to know who you’ve got there will be people with skills and talents that nobody has identified that could do some of this stuff. You have got to identify the people who can do this sort of thing in the brave new world because some of them wont be doing it now but that doesn’t mean that the cant do it in the future. The key thing is how the agencies identify who can do this. The fact that people are paid differently isn’t the big challenge, you can bring people together in multidisciplinary teams fairly easily and we've got some evidence to say that we do that."

" When you look at, when you ask the question, the fundamental question, what will the workforce look like in 2018, 2020, my experience of local government anyway has been, actually we don’t do workforce planning that well if at all in the long-term. You know, there’s lots of conversations

Workforce planning is a conundrum – we have to develop

about it, we’ve tried to address it a number of times but planning beyond the year, you know we’ll plan for the next year, but making an assessment about the number of people you want in post in five years time? Getting managers to get their head around that one when it’s all very, quite uncertain has been a real challenge. "

a pragmatic approach.

Thanks

Our sincere thanks to all those who were interviewed and facilitated the interviews including:Caroline Yates, Worcestershire County CouncilDilys Wynn, Gloucestershire County CouncilAlison McKensie-Folan, Metropolitan Borough of WiganCat Parker, Coventry City CouncilMike Attwood, Coventry PCTSally Hunter, Derbyshire County CouncilJackie Kelly, Shropshire County CouncilKay Bromley , Volunteer BureauRobert Britton, Bristol City CouncilMartin Stein, Local Government GroupAmanda Attfield, Cheltenham Borough CouncilDeborah Summerfield, British Red Cross SocietyGraham White, Westminster City CouncilGeorge Bishop, London Borough of Kensington and ChelseaNigel Fairburn, Kent County CouncilPauline Lucas, Walsall CouncilAndreas Ghosh, London Borough of LewishamKirsty Cornell, Outward (Part of the Newlon Group)Philip Evans, Careers Development GroupDawn Aunger and Jennifer Nolan, Cornwall Council

A note on methodologyThe "Learning Histories" methodology which was originally devised by the MIT Center for Organisational Learning as a tool for capturing the collective learning emerging from organisational experience. A useful decryption of the approach is available in Harvard Business Review September – October 1997 (97506). The approach was used to good effect in the analysis of learning from the Total Place Pilots in 2010.

The methodology involves the interviewer being limited to a small number of open questions and follow-up closed questions to sustain the comments of the interviewee. The interview is recorded and the recordings used to create full transcripts of the interviewees comments. When all the interviews are complete the transcripts are each divided into a series of separate ideas, themes or comments which are sufficiently complete and cogent to stand on their own. At this point some extraneous and incidental comments are excluded. The typed comments are then printed and physically cut up into these individual quotes.

The interviewers working together take the quotes and group them with similarly themed quotes with those of very similar content being attached together. These thematic narratives are then collated and reviewed to reduce the total number to a manageable level. (In this work there were originally over 500 separate quotes.) The creation of the final version involves (a) rejecting those quotes which are either not part of a coherent theme or have very few similar quotes and (b) selecting a representative quotes where a number are very similar, in order to reduce the length of the finished paper.

The final sets of quotes are grouped under general themes and a very short commentary added to assist the reader to navigate the whole.

The particular benefit of this approach is that it captures all the expressed ideas from the interviews and only filters these when it is possible to compare them all. Having the full transcripts also significantly reduces interviewer bias which is inevitable when the filtering is done at the interview in the process of note taking.

A full copy of the anonomised transcripts is available for research purposes from [email protected].