Agenda and draft minutes

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Contact: Andrea Tomlinson  Democratic Services

Items
No. Item

HRA.118

DECLARATIONS OF INTEREST

Members of Human Resources Committee are asked to consider whether they have an interest in any of the matters on the Agenda, and, if so, to formally declare that interest.

Minutes:

There were no declarations of interest made at the meeting.

HRA.119

ESTABLISH A CORPORATE HR SERVICE FOR THE COUNCIL pdf icon PDF 95 KB

Report and appendices attached.

Additional documents:

Minutes:

Simon Bagley presented a report outlining the outcome of the HR/OD review across the Council.

 

It was explained that currently, back office support functions of HR/OD, finance, procurement, ICT support, performance intelligence and communications are all largely based in and controlled by each Directorate.  This is inefficient and is holding back the ability to implement change.

 

The Chief Executive has instigated the development of a Corporate Core, which will deliver efficiencies, resilience, consistency and capacity.

 

A HR/OD Review was initiated by the Deputy Chief Executive in March 2019.  A lot of work has been undertaken over the last few months, involving employees from within the services in scope, customers, stakeholders and self-selected change agents.

A number of actions for improvement have been identified, including:

 

·         Progress work to clarify constitutional provisions for staffing decisions including HR Appeals panel

·         Refresh People Strategy principles: identity; culture & workforce priorities

·         Communication with HR/OD staff in relation to the review process & to codesign outcomes

·         Undertake a squad-led review of every HR policy in consultation with TU

·         Review i-Trent capability & options for maximising

·         Develop HRMI & technology strategy

 

However this report concerns only the following additional recommendation:

 

·         Bring together the function into a single corporately-led service, aligned to new departmental structures.

 

In accordance with Council policy and legal requirements, a consultation exercise was undertaken with all employees from within the in scope services across the Council between 18th July – 19th August 2019, concerning the following proposals:

 

  • Co-location of all Human Resources staff from across the Council
  • Establishment of a single, unified service as part of the Council’s wider vision of creating a strong Corporate Core
  • Dis-establishment of the existing Recruitment and Contracts Team and integrate within a newly established Business Partnering/Operations Team
  • Maintain a service dedicated to supporting schools, operated under a SLA basis
  • Creation of a People Strategy & Development Team, a Policy & Compliance Team and a People Analytics Team
  • All payroll related activity transferred to Payroll Team, with a compensatory resource transfer
  • Future delivery of Employee Engagement activity to become responsibility of Communications , Marketing and Engagement Team, with a compensatory resource transfer
  • Future delivery of Member Development programme to transfer to Democratic Services
  • All Equality and Diversity (non-employment) matters to be transferred to the Policy team, under the leadership of the Chief Information Officer
  • Creation of a single Supply Service
  • Rationalisation of senior management roles

 

It is expected that transactional and recruitment activity will reduce in accordance with the budget strategy to minimise all recruitment and agency spend and the expected reduction in services to schools due to acadamisation. The proposed structure places the service below benchmarked costs ensuring that the HROD service is efficient in terms of costs.

 

The current and proposed structures were appended to the report.

 

It was explained that there is likely to be an in-year overspend (due to number of severances/exit costs) the restructure will meet all savings targets for 2019-20 circa £200k via an overall reduction in service costs.

 

The restructuring of the budgets  ...  view the full minutes text for item HRA.119