Archived decisions

HFRA Human Resources Committee 29 11 2005

Re: Workforce Plan and People Strategy

HAMPSHIRE FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICE

Appendix 1

Draft v.5 17.11.05

WORKFORCE PLAN 2005-08

Purpose of our Workforce Plan

Workforce planning involves analysing our current workforce to see how we deploy people against current and predicted influences, at national, local and Service levels, and taking account of historical data. This will inform our forecast for the numbers, levels and skills required to achieve this.

Our Workforce Plan is driven by the need for flexibility and responsiveness to meet our Integrated Risk Management Plan (IRMP) and to deliver the Government's modernisation agenda. This requires a structured approach to workforce planning, development and performance, and takes account of financial planning and wider business and political implications. It also gives better control over, and prediction of, the pay bill as this forms a significant proportion of the overall Fire Authority budget.

What we are seeking to achieve

Our Workforce Plan has been prepared as a flexible, living document that identifies possible impacts on our ability to deliver our service. It provides a management tool to inform our decision-making processes over a 3 year cycle. We want to predict and support future demand for types of employees by identifying the required skills and competencies for the future and planning for this. Managers will be able to impact assess alternative options and solutions in advance of making decisions to meet those needs.

The gaps or surpluses we identify between our current workforce and what we will need for the future will be the focus of the People Strategy and this will be reviewed and updated on a regular basis to reflect our changing needs.

Benefits of Workforce planning

Examples of benefits include:

· the timing and extent of recruitment activities;

· planning and resourcing training and development initiatives and where the needs are;

· revisions to induction programmes to reduce employee turnover;

· examining the effectiveness of payment systems, or other benefits in retaining key groups of workers or skills;

· motivational issues

· planning for, and encouragement of, career opportunities

· matching our employment practices to our equality and diversity policies

· demonstrating how far our practices underpin our corporate values.

Planning assumptions

As we develop the wider role of prevention and protection and equipping ourselves to respond to threats of terrorism and environmental disasters, we need to plan to respond appropriately. Traditional workforce planning assumptions will be influenced by changes we need to bring about to support our IRMP. This will include revisions to how we deploy people and how new demands will impact on working patterns and duty systems.

Integrated Personal Development System (IPDS)

IPDS impacts on workforce planning and the recognition and reward of stages of development and competence. The focus is on demonstrating potential through new national firefighter selection tests, and assessment and development centres. The focus is also on criteria contained within role maps, combined with support through targeted development interventions in the workplace. Predictions will need to be made regarding likely vacancies at all levels and we will need to plan accordingly.

Leadership and Succession Planning

Activities to prepare our employees for future roles and enhance leadership skills include acting up into temporary vacancies or special projects which go beyond the scope of the current role. These are normally determined as part of a structured development plan which comes from attendance at Assessment and Development centres, or has been identified through the appraisal meeting with the line manager. As assessment through IPDS progresses and becomes more embedded into our organisation, the resulting development plans and planned activities to support them, will become key to our succession planning processes. Perceived issues surrounding succession planning will need to be carefully monitored to ensure equality of opportunity, particularly where certain groups are under-represented. Succession planning can be a positive aspect of managing our workforce, particularly where:

· Skills shortages cannot be met from the wider labour market

· Job areas for succession planning are identified through evidence-based planning mechanisms

· Equalities issues are taken into account and impact assessed during the succession planning activities

· There is a need to retain key employees and provide development opportunities

· Jobs are open to competition to test the wider labour market

Appointment, promotion and working practices

We have an opportunity to review and modernize our recruitment and career progression processes through the new national Firefighter Selection Tests and Assessment and Development Centres. These are already impacting on our selection processes and the standards we apply in assessing and developing our employees.

We will build on our regional partnership working to achieve greater efficiencies in delivering this. This includes consideration of multi-tier entry to widen our experience base as appropriate. Through on-going training needs analysis, we will give our employees the opportunity to achieve their potential.

Requirements for employers to increase flexibility in working practices are significant. This includes changes arising from the national June 2003 Agreement such as the introduction of pre-arranged overtime, wholetime firefighters taking on additional retained duties, and retained cover becoming a duty system rather than a separate employee group.

In addition, there are issues surrounding work-life balance, working time regulations, greater employment rights that all impact on our ability to support our business needs, including crewing appliances and this will influence our workforce planning assumptions.

Equality and Diversity

There is considerable work to be done on equality and diversity. We need to raise the profile of the fire and rescue service as a career choice for under represented groups and become more flexible in our expectations of our employees. Our employee profile in terms of gender, race, disability, age etc will influence the focus of our positive action initiatives to achieve the levels defined in the Local Government Standard for Equality and our action plan in our Race Equality Scheme. Equality Impact Assessments carried out by our managers will play a key role in informing our decisions and activities.

Core Values

We have developed our Core Values based on the national Core Values. This underpins the culture we wish to develop within HFRS. This includes the principles of integrity, openness and honesty, recognising the value of diversity, mutual trust and respect, responsibility and accountability, valuing and empowerment of employees and the recognition of team and individual contributions. We will expect all our employees to conduct themselves in a way that supports our values and we will develop our

standards for recruitment, appraisal and development based on these values.

Societal changes

Societal changes will need to be responded to if we wish to remain an employer of choice. Rigid adherence to historical and restrictive working patterns will prohibit modernisation. Changing demographics and legislation will affect future recruitment opportunities as we see an increase in older workers, more women entering the workplace, increasing single parent workers and workers with other dependant responsibilities that need to be accommodated. We want to attract and retain good workers.

How we have prepared our Workforce Plan

Our Workforce Plan has been prepared by reviewing our key decision documents in the context of environmental influences and statistical information and we have aligned this to our key employee groups.

The environmental influences we have considered are:

Political

Economic

Sociological

Technological (PESTLEE)

Legislation

Environmental

Ethical

Statistics have come from a range of sources, with specific focus on demographic, recruitment and termination data, absence, pay information and employment costs to our business.

Workforce Profile

A key part of understanding the skill and capacity needs of the Service is to know what our current employee composition is and what people management issues we currently face. The following is a `snap shot' of our current position drawn from our employee database.

Statistical summary and analysis

At 31 October 2005, HFRS employs 1863 people. Of these, 1501 are conditioned to the `Grey Book' conditions of service, 780 are wholetime firefighters and 721 are employed on the retained duty system. We have 41 control operators and 318 are conditioned to the `Green Book' in various roles and professions.

Of these employees:

· 13% are female

· Approximately 45% of our total workforce work part time hours (this includes those who work the retained duty system)

· The average age of our employees is 39 years and 255 are aged 50 and over.

· Around 1.61% of our employees indicate they are from a black or minority ethnic background and 1.83% have declared a disability

· Our sickness absence figures are the third lowest within our family group but on a trend upwards

· More time is lost through musculo skeletal injuries (includes neck, back, knee) than any other single reason for absence (around 46% of days lost in 2004/05)

· Our turnover figures are stable at but there are pockets where turnover levels are affecting workforce stability

· Our recruitment activities show particular difficulties in attracting and retaining firefighters conditioned to the retained duty system in certain geographical areas of Hampshire

The Employment Challenges

We have analysed our current and future pressures and demands and the current workforce profile and skills gaps. This indicates a number of employment challenges and issues that need to be actioned across the Service and this will be provided through our People Strategy Action plan.

The Workforce Planning Checklist framework - Appendix 1

This provides a framework for reviewing key decision documents and data, assessing our current position and identifying future needs.

Workforce Plan documentation and statistics - Appendix 2

Through proper management of our corporate and functional aims, objectives and medium term plans, our policies and data sources, we intend to `hot-link' our key decision documents to our workforce plan, so that up to date information is accessible. We are progressing towards this, but there is further work to do to e-link this and build this into our new `knowledge management' system. Currently, the information is available either electronically or in paper version, but ad-hoc.

In addition to e-linking relevant documents to our workforce plan, we are already reviewing and working to improve our data collection processes. Key decision documents and statistics are already referenced, with issue or review dates.

Workforce Plan - Analysis of national / local and service influences - Appendix 3

This provides an analysis of posts by grade/role. Elements of the plan are further broken down where appropriate to enable better targeting of planning and resources and, in some cases, more individual workforce management.

It is envisaged that the electronic management of workforce planning will be improved by further developing the Service's Information Technology and knowledge management systems and integrating/ interfacing systems to enable easier and more appropriate planning information to be gathered. This will also increase people management data analysis internally and externally in line with Implementing Electronic Government requirements (IEG).

Identified obstacles to achieving Workforce planning

Currently there are a number of obstacles we are faced with in trying to collect this information. We are working on reducing these obstacles and they include:

· Up to date information being easily accessible - Current issues surrounding our payroll system SAP, upon which we have to rely for HR and training data and management information. The possibility of purchasing an HR computerised system is currently being explored, but it is recognised this may take some time to fully implement. We have established a Workforce Information Group to identify our requirements and prepare a specification for an HR information system. This will be funded from existing resources.

· Data analysis being easy to achieve - accurate information is not available and this limits meaningful management information and reports being available. This is currently under review - (see above).

· Accurate Records - the impact of the modernisation programme places significant additional demands on the HR function. Workload priorities are regularly reviewed, but where significant additional projects are identified, such as Job Evaluation for Grey Book employees, changes to the HCC IT systems that impact on our workload etc., we have to employ additional temporary help, but this is funded from existing resources.

· Resources to collate the data and then identify a strategy to fill them - this is a specialised area of activity which will involve training and development for our existing team members. Timing of workforce planning is also critical as any shortfalls will need a strategy to overcome them.

· Ownership of the data - clear ownership of the data is to be defined to ensure data collection is kept up-to-date and accurately and properly stored and accessed. This will be carried out through the newly formed Workforce Information Group.

· Adequate data systems and business processes - how the information is updated and how the information flows, etc. in the organisation is vital. Without this, any analysis will be flawed.

· Benchmarking with other family groups and organisations - This will rely on comparable data to be identified, agreed upon, and available for cross-referencing. Work is currently being undertaken on a regional basis to try to achieve this.

· Management of trends and issues - it will take time and resources to build a data bank.

Timing and frequency of data collection and analysis

Once the right levels of data have been collected and in the appropriate format, data collection will become a process of update and review. Frequency of data collection and how this informs the corporate business planning cycle needs to be determined. On-going review mechanisms to test whether the business-planning assumptions are correct, and that we are responding appropriately, will need to be determined.

What do we do with information gathered?

Following data gathering, we intend to link skills to jobs so we can best match future skills needs with our changing business needs. This will ensure employees are appropriately deployed to meet Service needs. A training audit will be linked to job analysis, and this will be cross-referenced to the overall corporate aims, objectives and values. Ultimately, this will identify skills surplus areas or gaps and enable targeting of identified training or re-training needs. This will also provide opportunities for individuals or groups of employees, taking account of particular circumstances including issues of developmental opportunities, succession planning, redeployment or rehabilitation. Finally, we will need to consider how existing skills gaps can be filled by the various development options and what strategic plans need to be considered to fill identified future skills shortages, recognising that the future is difficult to predict.

How will the outcomes be monitored, measured and evaluated?

The issues identified in the Workforce Plan have been incorporated into the People Strategy, together with identified lead responsible people, performance indicators and reporting mechanisms to provide the audit trail of how each of these will be performance managed and reported. The outcomes of these will inform the on-going review process for our Workforce Plan and each annual update.

Communication

The activities within our Workforce Plan will need to be equality impact assessed, consulted with our stakeholders and outcomes used to inform our People Strategy. This will then be communicated across the Service to allow work programmes across all functions to take account of these actions in their planning processes.

We will use the expertise and specialist knowledge and skills of our managers, our employees, our trade unions and external community members as part of our consultation process to shape and develop further our Workforce Plan.

Jennifer McNeill

17.11.05

Appendix 1

Workforce Planning Framework Checklist

Groups/Sec/WP/Word/Corporate/HFRA HFRA HR 29 11 05 Workforce Plan App 1 JMC/17 11 05