Your council
Agenda item
People Strategy update
Please see attached and to note that a short video will also be played for this item.
Minutes:
P Maginnis (Service Director- Corporate Services) introduced the Peoples Strategy report, updating the meeting on the recent employee survey carried out in June and July of this year. The meeting also received a short PowerPoint presentation.
The meeting noted that there was a 77% response to this survey and that the results would be put in the Council Bulletin. At present about 53% of staff work from home or remotely most of the time. 81% said that they felt as though they could be flexible in their role. 86% said that having a flexible working pattern was beneficial to them.
Asked about the 77% response rate Ms Maginnis said that amounted to about 410 employees and this also included interim staff.
The committee noted that although 79% had agreed that their manager had supported them on understanding Hybrid working; only 23% would actively promote the council to friends and family – were officers exploring the reasons for this? They were told that they were looking further into the data, but at this stage were not going back to ask specific questions. It seems that the longer a person had been employed here the less they would recommend it.
The committee asked what sort of safeguards did the council have in place that they could monitor that they were getting value for money, and how was the quality of work monitored? They were told that the council had a performance management programme, with managers holding regular one to ones with staff, and also set targets and measurements for individual staff and parts of the organisation. The committee came back by asking how the council controlled the allocation of work to the individuals. They were told that line managers controlled the allocation of work and monitored it.
They had noted that just about 50% of staff did not come into the office, so they could lose contact with their colleagues and managers; was there a policy on how many times a person needed to come into work? They were told that they did not have such a policy, it was down to the line manager how they managed this; some teams did have regular team meetings via ‘Teams’. Although they were aware that a number of organisations had this type of policy, this council had chosen to go down the line to give officers a choice. They try not to lose contact with individuals, and this was where team meetings came in. Working from home was easier for some roles than others. There were benefits and gains from staff working from home, it was a balance.
The committee noted that the issue was that there were not many people in the office anymore and councillors did not know who to contact when they had a problem. It would be handy to have a list of contacts. Also, do we check that the home workers had the right facilities at home and did we pay for equipment? They were told that there was the member portal to raise queries, the next step was to go to the customer services team. But if at the end of the day a councillor did not get an answer, contact either Andrew Small or Jennifer Gould. This was a similar problem that the Town and Parish council had, and we advised them to go through the Customer Services Team. It was important that any questions did go through the customer services desk initially in order to keep track of any problems so they could be fixed. As for assessment of equipment, there was an electronic form that an employee fills out and then it goes to their manager to deal with.
The committee noted that nearly half of the employees had joined the council in the last two years. Most of them would not have met a councillor or know what a councillor did or what they were for. What did we know of why the new staff joined the council or at the other end why did people leave the council. They were told that as a council they were working hard on the recruitment process. 7 years ago, they reviewed roles and salaries, which resulted in moving away from the national pay structure and towards the beginnings of flexible working. These practices have been some of the positives why people were choosing to join us. The committee noted that some posts were still hard to fill such as where flexible working was not an option. How was the People Strategy evolving to answer those questions. They were told that they had picked up that Hybrid working was a good way to work, and they would develop a new peoples’ strategy to look at this. The committee asked where the biggest area of change would need to be? They were told that it would be in the way they tackled isolation and looking at performance and in developing managers skills sets. There was still work to be done, hence the surveys to get more information.
The committee then asked if the number of employees had gone up or down and what were the number of vacancies at present. They were told that the officers did not have these numbers to hand. This survey was just a snapshot of the council’s position a few months ago. The last time they had noted it, there were about 80 vacancies, some of which were being held at present because of the budget pressures. Some they were trying to fill. They reviewed every post that became available to make sure they could balance the budget. In all, the number of employees were going down.
The committee commended the officers for organising the recent member / officer meetings.
Officers noted that they were looking at customers and their needs in what we did, that was key in what we do. Also, they were looking at better ways in how we communicated and how we could improve our systems to make them more effective.
RESOLVED:
The Select Committee noted the update on the People’s Strategy.
Supporting documents: