HR AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
organisational development agenda, that their Chief Executives are better off taking the first approach rather than the second.
How about on the technology front – how different is the job now than a decade ago because of IT and mobile technology?
We’ve had system-wide advances with the introduction of a single electronic staff record, the use of the NHS Jobs website for recruitment and a variety of e-learning tools. For example, and Epsom and St Helier hospitals, the time taken to recruit has been significantly reduced by the use of electronic Criminal Records Bureau checks.
A number of employers have taken advantage of online people management support systems as well as specialist HR support systems. This means, as an industry, we’re probably doing more with less, at a quicker pace, but we’ve not really been good at tracking this as an improvement in productivity.
about the theory of Lean or Six Sigma.
At a personal level, the Blackberry means people can work anywhere, anytime, but the risk here is ensuring that work doesn’t engulf every area of our lives.
More generally in healthcare, technology has allowed new ways of working, such as interpreting scans remotely, tracking patients through the system and getting instant patient feedback – all of which is excellent for patients. One of the key agendas for improving efficiency is to maximise the benefits of this new technology by changing the way we work.
Does your job take on a different dimension because of the need to find efficiency savings?
From an HR perspective it means being on top of the change management basics – staff communication, vacancy controls, consultation, negotiating with unions, redundancies and redeployment.
There tends to be a focus on financial con- trols and many of these are necessary. The greater challenge is convincing leaders that engaging and empowering front line staff is the real answer to delivering sustainable quality and productivity improvement. This requires loosening, but not losing, control and building service improvement skills.
The latter needs to be done through de- livering real improvement projects rather than people sitting in classrooms learning
In the health service, clinical engagement and leadership is crucial, and developing a system of ‘earned autonomy’ for those who are delivering is critical. You need to be the advocate for empowerment without being seen as the soft HR guy who can’t handle tough leadership decisions!
HR is often named as one of the areas where savings should be targeted to ‘protect’ clinical staff – how do you reply to this and explain the importance of what you do?
I agree we can be more efficient in HR and we should do more. It’s also important to maintain credibility that you do your share. I would agree that we should be protecting clinical services, but a key factor in improving the quality and productivity of clinical services is the people. The importance of what we do is not in dealing with the dysfunctions such as grievances and sickness, or managing a redundancy programme. Nor is it because the largest part of the budget, and therefore the largest part of the savings programme, needs to focus on pay.
The important part of what we do is making sure that leaders and managers are engaging and empowering people to change the way they work so that there is a culture of continuous quality and productivity improvement.
As Paul Corrigan says, “culture eats
strategy for breakfast”. My view of HR is that it’s about culture change; if, as an HR Director, you’re not involved in changing the culture it becomes difficult to explain the importance of what you do.
Finally, can you tell us about the challenges you have across becoming president of the HPMA?
since
Since taking up the Presidency I’ve tried to shift the focus onto building the capability and practice of HR professionals so they make a greater impact on the people management agenda.
Ideally, we would have a national programme of activities, or at least a consistent set of activities at regional level. One of the challenges in taking this forward during a transitional time at Department of Health and Strategic Health Authority level is the need to co-ordinate activities across a number of partner organisations.
One of the ways we are trying to alleviate these difficulties is by working with commercial partners to build our branches and activities from the bottom up.
Delivering this presents the biggest challenge, as although I am the HPMA President, my work at Epsom and St Helier hospitals always comes first.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit
www.epsom-sthelier.nhs.uk or
www.hpma.org.uk
national health executive Jul/Aug 11 | 43
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