Agenda item

Context

“People to Purpose”, is the latest iteration of “Monmouthshire people” our current People and organisational development Strategy’, published in 2015. Building on “ Monmouthshire People”, People to Purpose, continues to build on our  belief that our people are best placed to identify, design and deliver the changes we need to make to effectively respond to continued austerity, rising demand and increasingly challenging demographics. As public servants, in Monmouthshire, we are committed to building a culture, founded on our organisational values and expected behaviours, which we believe, will enable our people to deliver against our purpose of “building sustainable resilient communities”

Key Issues

“Monmouthshire People “ our previous people and organisational development strategy focused on creating the conditions for the workforce to thrive and delivering impact in measureable outcomes. The strategy focused on the following key themes

·         Our Work Environment

·         Engaging our people

·         Building Careers

·         Training coaching and development

·         Diversity, Inclusion and well- being

·         And bringing it all together

Significant progress has been made against each of the themes and we have moved a long way to creating the conditions for people to thrive. The People Services annual report 2015/16 and 2016/17  outline  what we have achieved so far and below are some examples of the activities we have engaged in which has shifted the organisational culture to enable the organisation to respond to the challenges we face reflecting the values, and behaviours we are committed to.:--

·         Development of People Services hub to include a range of guidance, workflows, FAQs around a range of issues such as managing sickness,  workforce planning, to enable the workforce to have easy access to information at all times.

·         Key policy review eg Attendance and Managing sickness, Fairness at work( grievance);Disciplinary Policy, Volunteering. Each policy was revised or newly created to match the aims of the strategy and the needs identified by the organisation.

·         Development of Evolve leadership programme based on considering identified societal/organisational problems, in order to identify potential short and medium term solutions. Two cohorts involving 12 officers from across the council have come together, so far, to consider; Customer service which identified the overall problem of how we engage with customers. Main outcome has led to us working with a new start-up organisation to embed AI (Artificial Intelligence) into our customer service offer; Transport Evolve has led to Transport Review, Personal Transport Budgets being introduced making significant savings in home to school transport, Vehicle trackers to optimise routes etc and to identify how best we use our fleet including sharing of vehicles/pool cars etc.

·         In response to concerns regarding accountability and responsibility mandatory corporate training requirements for managers and all employees have been introduced including safeguarding, attendance management, induction, GDPR, to name a few, to ensure the workforce has a consistent level of skills and knowledge  needed to operate effectively and accountably.

·         Development of HR dashboard and My view to provide better workforce data around sickness, gender, age profile thus providing managers with the data and evidence to better workforce plan and manage sickness and performance. (  Put in Enabling

·         Improved well- being offer for staff to include; increased staff benefits, access to cycle to work scheme, access to individual health screening. Colleague well- being is fundamentally important to the organisation and activity is related to what colleagues tell us is important to them and improves well- being.

·         Implementation of new corporate volunteer management database and volunteer coordinator role. We value the contribution volunteers make to our organisation and the community and we are committed to ensuring that their experience is safe and purposeful.

We have made significant progress against the actions identified in “Monmouthshire people” and our culture and operating practice reflects that. We will continue to build on the activity to date, whilst ensuring we support and facilitate the objectives and ambitions of the corporate plan and enabling strategies.

Member comments

It was asked if increased partnership work with other Councils and other bodies would influence current training provided.

A Member asked for a more concise strategy and disliked the reference to managers and employees as surely everyone is an employee.

A comment was made in regard to the positive effect of agile working and applauded the work undertaken so far.

Members supported the work of the Go to Group as a non-official group to allow staff let off steam and talk in a less formal setting.

It was asked if agile working impacted performance.