HR AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Kevin Croft is President of the Healthcare People Management Association (HPMA), and Director of People and Organisational Development at Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, a large acute trust serving South West London and Surrey with around 5,000 staff.
Can you tell us about your day- to-day role, and your strategic role at the Trust? What is your vision as Director of People?
Q)
My day-to-day role involves providing leadership to the HR team, taking part in executive decision-making and leading working groups.
As I’ve only just started, this is about setting direction and engaging the team in how we improve the service we provide. It also means highlighting to my executive colleagues the importance of the ‘people aspect’ in everything they are working to achieve.
At a more strategic level, I’m leading the people aspects of our major transformation programmes, ensuring staff feel supported in what could be an unsettling time, as well as our organisational development programme.
My vision is to fully engage people to help further improve the services they provide, and empower them to make the changes and improvements they think are necessary. We need to equip, enable and support them to do this through the way the organisation is run, and the Trust has a genuine commit- ment to improving staff engagement.
42 | national health executive Jul/Aug 11
What are the NHS-specifi c factors in human resources, compared to other parts of the public sector and the wider economy?
I’m not sure there are many NHS-specifi c issues. When I speak with colleagues from other parts of the public sector, most of the issues are the same: delivering major improvements in quality at the same time as signifi cantly reducing costs, politics, and the challenges of engaging staff, staff-side representatives and unions in delivering major savings programmes and structural change.
The people aspects of this agenda are very similar, whether it’s local government, education, police or
the civil service.
The Healthcare People Management Association (HPMA) is looking to collaborate with the PPMA (Public Sector People Management Association) as there is so much commonality in what our members are trying to achieve.
Are there any trends that particularly worry or excite you?
The trend that worries me is Chief Executives disconnecting the people and organisational
development agendas because they don’t think they can fi nd an
HR Director that can lead organisational development.
As a result many HR teams only deal with organisational dysfunction – grievances, disciplinaries, vacancies, sickness, skills gaps – without being actively involved in developing business solutions. This is a downward spiral as teams fail to learn organisational development skills and are seen as process, policy and problem- focused rather than strategic, system and solution-focused.
A counter-trend that excites me is Chief Executives who recognise that both people and organisational development is critical to their success and can’t be separated. In this situation the People and Organisational Development Director has a clear priority to deliver a good HR service but the agenda is much broader than processing people problems.
Here, a positive approach to people is seen as a key driver of success and organisational development has a large people component to it.
Unfortunately, it feels like the trend for the former still dominates, so the challenge for those HR Directors and HR teams is to show, through leading the people and
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