local government

#lgworkforce – Successfully redesigning your organisation

Duncan Brown, Director of the Institute for Employment Studies, provides some lessons from research, what works in practice and pitfalls to avoid.

  • How many major reorganisations have we all been through? Lots and lots, it would seem. Not many seem to have gone that well.
  • Context: budget cuts, redundancies rising, private sector is still cutting costs, more partnerships, outsourcing, shared services, flexible working, service removal
  • HR and OD depts are being challenged with fundamental questions around organisation structure and culture
  • How many people, in how many layers, does a council really need?
  • To get a 10% cost reduction, you need to target 25% cuts?
  • Restructuring: it’s happening more and more, isn’t going away, high stakes activity, organisations need to be good at it – because at the moment they aren’t
  • Less focus on internal issues than external which often leads to reduced success
  • What do you need to consider during a restructure? Incidence and influences.
  • Nature of change is shaped primarily by managers’ prior experiences, much less so on external advice
  • Reductions/Recruitment/Redeployment of staff
  • What are the causes of the change – what effect does this have on the nature of the change?
  • Don’t just look at total cost and numbers. Consider organisation of services – and workflow and geography.
  • Specialisation v co-ordination
  • New forms such as networks, modular, processes and project based structures
  • Get your risk management right
  • Balance of internal and external, fixed and flexible sourcing
  • Strategy, structure, processes, rewards and people – star model of change (Galbraith?)
  • Consider competence and capability early – need for knowledge and experience
  • ‘Organisation architecture’
  • To be successful – Choose a team to manage change, craft a vision, connect organisation-wide change, consult stakeholders and employees, communicate clearly, support people so they can cope with change, capture learning
  • Also – early planning, address cultural issues, manage risk, capable HR function attending to the basics, appropriate speed
  • Success is nothing to do with numbers of layers or the scale of cuts
  • What would employers do differently in reorgs? More training, better comms with staff, better project management, redesign career structures, learn from other orgs
  • Difference between programmatic change and adaptive change. Programmatic more command and control. All about implementation, less about humans
  • Get the strategy right first, then assess, plan and prepare, then implement and manage. Evaluate, and keep doing it.
  • Removing layers not always the easy win it first appears.
  • Maintain staff engagement: lower turnover, better attendance, greater initiative, wanting to develop, higher productivity, improved customer service
  • Employee reductions – consider survivor symptoms – they have organisational outcomes: morale, risk avoidance, reduced motivation and commitment. Done well, the reverse can be true.
  • Prepare well, drive and leadership from the top, customers at the heart of change, don’t waste a good crisis, learn from outside but find right fit for your org, invest to save (get expertise and resources you need), ensure good union and staff relationships, communicate extensively, proceed with pace, be bold

#lgworkforce – Welcome & Introduction

Andrew Hancox, Director of Improvement and Efficiency West Midlands introduces the day.

  • The money really does seem to be running out in local government
  • Leaked CLG memo – 40% reductions. Leaders and managers need to consider how their organisations operate.
  • How do we preserve front line services while reducing costs?
  • Changing org structures can help to produce efficiencies, so this event very timely
  • Online resource available on organisational redesign, outlining key issues, case studies and guidance on change
  • We must now pick up the pace when it comes to organisational change
  • Sharing good practice will be vital – this must be the start of a conversation
  • RIEPs very keen to support the discussions where possible.

Designing a fit for the future organisation

I’m at the IDeA-organised ‘Designing a fit for the future organisation‘ event today, in Birmingham. It’s all about organisational redesign and development, and how councils can help meet the challenges they face by changing the way they work.

There are a load of interesting speakers, and I’m going to be live-ish blogging as much of it as I can, as well as catching some of the speakers afterwards for some quick video summaries of what they have been talking about.

You can also follow the action on Twitter, with the #lgworkforce tag.

Also, next week there will be http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/c/4236123/home.do#mce_temp_url# on the Communities of Practice exploring these issues (various levels of signup required).

Using social media in learning

A question was asked in the social media community of practice (various levels of authentication required) about using web 2.0 technology to support learning. I couldn’t help myself…

Blogging

Using blogs to record and share learning is a really nice use of technolog. Blogging is great for writing stories and sharing experience, especially when everyone in an organisation can access and search the information on a blog. Fundamentally blogs are just really easy ways of getting content online, but the personal nature of them also helps individuals write about their own knowledge and learning. Get people to blog about a recent learning experience they have had, or about tips and tricks that they have come across in their work that others could make use of.

Forums

One of the things we have come across at Learning Pool when it comes to e-learning is that when people can talk to others about something, it tends to stick in their minds much better than when they just read about it. So our e-learning management system provides forums along with courses so that those studying that lessons can ask questions of the rest of the learning community, discuss the content and work together on problems. Forums can also be used to support face to face training and learning activity too – enabling people to talk to each other about what they learned in the classroom afterwards, helping to make that learning stick in their heads, and to clear up any confusions people might have walked away with!

Wikis

Blogs are good for people to record their personal learning experiences, and forums for having conversations about learning, but what about building collections of resources for people to refer to, and add to, over time? For that you need a more traditionally structured website, but one which lots of people can contribute to. That’s where wikis come in. Any kind of useful web resource, where large groups of people can contribute material, is great for a wiki. Rather than handing out loads of sheets of paper during a training session, why not put them all up on a wiki for people to access online? That way everyone always gets the latest version, and if there’s is something that needs correcting or updating, someone from the community can do it for you. Alternatively, wikis are great for building online dictionaries or jargon busters, for example.

Twitter

It might be considered a distraction to have people sat in a training sessions fiddling away with their phones, but actually having people recording and sharing what they are finding out is a great way to learn! It’s just like taking notes with paper, only everyone can re-use it. If you use a common hashtag with your training, everything that has been tweeted during the sessions can be drawn together in one place and everyone can benefit from it. Even better, by using a public platform like Twitter, you can get people not present in the training giving their input too, adding to the mix of ideas.

Media sharing

A great way for people to consolidate learning is to record training sessions and let them watch, or listen to them again later on. It’s simple enough to record a video of a talky bit of training using a Flip or Kodak video camera and then share it either publicly on the web or on an intranet, say. Alternatively, audio podcasts might be easier to do and share. Other resources can be shared online too, whether presentations using a public site like Slideshareor other documents and learning materials on Scribd. By sharing this stuff publicly, others can take what you have done and add bits and improve it in places and everyone can benefit. To see an example of this, check out this fantastic resource from the Scottish Government Library Services.

Social bookmarking

Sites like Delicious, which let you store links to useful web pages and sites on a public webpage are a great way for a group of learners to share the great stuff they find online. Once you get into the habit of bookmarking interesting articles using a social bookmarking tool, it becomes a quick and easy way to build up huge knowledge bases of related content. Using tagging to build up your own vocabulary of key words to describe content makes bringing together resources on a similar topic really fast too.

Social networks

Using social network type features, as seen on Facebook and others, is a really useful way of combining a lot of the activity above with a great method of further sharing people’s knowledge, talents and interests. Social networks tend to feature Twitter-like status updates, discussion boards and media sharing (but generally not wikis, sadly). What they also have is user profiles which are great ways for people in an organisation to share details of what they know about, what they do, what they are interested in and where there talents lie. So much more useful than the traditional ‘yellow pages’ style staff directories! So if you need some expertise on an issue, someone to lead a training session maybe, if you have an internal social network you could search and find the ideal person.

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