Friday 11 February 2011

Yesterday we had the first formal part of the budget process relating to the 2011-12 budget. Scrutiny reviewed the draft Business Plan and Financial Plan including the budget proposals for the next financial year. Key proposals in the budget are to reduce service budgets by an average of 12% next year. In Resources we have gone beyond this and our effective budget could be reduced by 15% if members approve the package on February 22 at Council. This will have an impact on the number of staff we employ, so I thought that I would use my blog this week to reiterate the message that Andrew gave yesterday about the timing and process that we will use to consult with staff on these proposals.

The 90 day formal consultation for the redundancies needed to deliver these savings will start week commencing 28 February 2011.

During this week collective consultation meetings with staff identified as being at risk of redundancy will take place.
The trade unions have been made aware of these arrangements and are being consulted at a department level in advance of these meetings taking place.
Managers responsible for managing this redundancy process and consultation will be briefed on the process next week. Letters inviting staff affected to collective consultation meetings will be given to managers at that briefing. If you are one of those members of staff who has been identified as “at risk” of redundancy you will receive a letter by the end of next week.
The letter will outline the reason your post, and therefore you, have been identified as “at risk” of redundancy. In advance of this, it may be useful to run through how the selection pool of “at risk” positions will be determined: -
· The redundancy policy includes a two stage approach to redundancy - voluntary and compulsory. This gives us the opportunity to seek a voluntary solution to redundancy. Volunteers will be sought from a selection pool of staff placed at risk of redundancy that is wider than those whose posts are deleted from structures.
· The posts that will be placed in the selection pool will include those that are;
o Deleted from new structures, or reduced to a lower number within those structures, or;
o Posts that have substantially changed as a result of other elements of the restructure – for example the addition or deletion of duties, or;
o Posts within the affected service area which are a grade above or below any post which is likely to be removed or substantially changed.
· These posts are included because if the post holder's volunteer for redundancy these posts may provide suitable alternative employment for an employee whose post has been deleted.
Those staff identified as being at risk of redundancy will be invited to attend a collective consultation meeting during week commencing 28 February. Details of the meeting will be included in the letter which will be handed out next week. At the meeting structure charts will be available. You will only be able to attend this meeting if you have been invited, or if you are the department union representative.

For those staff at risk of redundancy they will have the opportunity to attend an individual consultation meeting with their service director, or head of service. Any feedback they may have, including alternative suggestions to deliver equivalent savings, can be given at those meetings.

If you want to make comments, or make alternative suggestions about the proposed changes to structures - feedback will need to be provided by no later than 18 March 2011, to enable any changes to the structure charts to be made and consulted upon meaningfully within the consultation process timelines.

Whilst this news may cause concern, I am not anticipating significant numbers of redundancies. The vacancy management policy that has been in place since June 2010 means that a number of vacancies have been held and can now be deleted to deliver some of the savings needed.

You will be aware of the numbers of redundancies taking place in other large local authorities, which in many cases are in excess of 1,000, and in some cases 2,000. We are not in the same position - careful planning and the ability to deliver savings in other areas means we are better placed to meet the financial pressures we face. This means the number of redundancies that may be needed will be significantly lower than those planned in other local authorities.

Carlton

Friday 4 January 2011

Morning all – February already which means the cricket season is nearly here. I wish. Shame about our ODI performance down under though. I spent Christmas sledging my Auntie who lives down under, I guess it’s her turn now.

I’ve just completed the staff survey on line. You may well ask why we are bothering to survey staff in the middle of budget cuts and at a time when we are asking for volunteers to take redundancy? I believe that this is absolutely the right time to survey staff. We need to understand what’s going well, what’s not and how we can work together as a team to improve the latter. I shan’t be waving my magic wand when we get the results in a few weeks, but I do promise that we will work together to address the issues arising. Could you all please take the survey today – it’s on our intranet. While you’re there, take a look at HR Direct also – it’s a great, cutting edge web-based service that stands up to anything I’ve seen elsewhere.

On Tuesday, I had the privilege of visiting South Tyneside Council. I spent the day with their Corporate Leadership Team discussing new and innovative approaches to the issues we face jointly; better procurement and being more commercially minded, using Systems Thinking to improve service performance whilst reducing cost and some of the wider issues around management and leadership during tough times. It was great to spend time with like-minded and passionate colleagues who are trying to make a real difference to their community. Just like Wiltshire.

Finally for this week, here’s something for all you team leaders, supervisors, and managers to consider. Ten ways to reinvigorate your team on a wet and windy February morning:

1. Listen to them
2. Be honest and transparent
3. Tell good-news stories
4. Engage staff in decision making
5. Set ambitious targets...
6. ... but make sure they’re achievable
7. Give rewards for a job well done...
8. ... and hold bad performers to account
9. Take the team to the pub
10. Think glass half full

Thanks for reading and speak again next week.

Carlton

Friday 28 January

Another very busy week as we strive to finalise the budget and business plan which are due to be published early next week. I was in Browfort all day on Tuesday; initially at Cabinet and then at an extended Cabinet-Liaison meeting working on the budget and business plan detail. We are still receiving significant new information and changes in grant assumptions from central government which are difficult to assess this late in the process and cause delay and uncertainty. The Finance teams are doing a great job coping with these.

The ICT team continue to improve the performance of the new in-sourced service. Our first time fix rate has steadily improved again this week and I am pleased to announce that the team have been jointly awarded “Team of the Month” in our staff awards as a result of their incredible performance. This is well deserved and I would like to thank the whole team for all of their hard work and commitment to delivering such a great performance. I would also like to thank our customers who have been so helpful through such a tricky period of change for the team.

I have been interviewing for the Finance Heads of Service this week with Michael Hudson and others. I always enjoy these as it is probably the most important part of the leadership role, although I’m sure the candidates wouldn’t agree! Well done to the successful managers; Caroline Bee - Head of Procurement & Finance, Andy Brown - Head of Finance and Matthew Tiller - Chief Accountant. Now the difficult work starts...

We have agreed the date and broad content for our next Resources Team Day. The date is April 1 and we will hold it again in Devizes (no jokes about the date please – I did try and change it but the venue and some speakers couldn’t be co-ordinated). We’ll focus on the outcomes of the budget and business plans and what this means for DOR over the next few years. Please put the date in your diaries now.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton

Friday 21 January

This is the first full week of running our complete ICT service end-to-end and I must say we’re quietly pleased with the way the first seven days have gone. Our first-time fix rate (how many calls we can fix at the first point of contact from our customers) is well above the level that Steria handed over to us on January 13. I spent some time at Bradley Road on Monday with the team, and it’s fair to say they’ve done a brilliant job. It will take us some time for the service to settle down and I thank our customers for their patience over those calls that do take us some time to fix or if the line is engaged when they call. We’re still learning about how many people we need on the helpdesk at peak times.

Yesterday I attended the Resources Scrutiny Select Committee with around 12 elected members. There were two major items on the agenda; a review of where we are with our HR plans especially the status of the management review and a series of presentations on our procurement work, especially the status of the £9 million we plan to save in 2011-12. Both reviews went well with some robust questioning and scrutiny from all sides.

Talking about HR, our new HR Direct web facility will be going live on January 31. I had the opportunity to review and test the new site in the test environment yesterday and I have to say it looks brilliant; very easy to use and intuitive too. When I see functionality like this it reminds me that some areas of Wiltshire Council really are becoming cutting edge in our industry. Well done to all involved.

England have just bowled out Australia for 230 in the second ODI, so fingers crossed for the next four hours!

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton

Friday 14 January 2011

Hi everybody and a Happy New Year to you all. I hope you had a good break over the Christmas period and I also hope that you can still remember it! 2011 seems to have started with all the pace that 2010 finished.

It’s been a momentous week this week for the team. At 12.01 this morning, we took our ICT contract back in house and so from today the whole of the ICT service is delivered by the Wiltshire team. I’d like to thank the forty or so people who pulled an “all-nighter” last night to ensure this happened on time, and as smoothly as possible. Performance reports that I have so far received are all positive, but I would ask you for your patience as and when some of the bugs do occur while we sort these out. This programme has been technically very difficult, including an enormous amount of knowledge transfer required as our team have had to learn so much about parts of the system that we haven’t delivered for well over ten years. Well done to the whole ICT team – great job.

The second momentous event of the week has been the take-over of the Monkton Park PFI building. This is an innovative first in local government where I believe that we are the first local authority to take over a PFI deal. This has been delivered by property, legal and workplace transformation colleagues including much negotiation with the banks over the Christmas period to pull it off. This deal gives us complete control of the building and importantly saves us around £300,000 per year – money that our elected members can now re-focus to their front line service priorities.

Finally for this week, work on the 11-12 budget continues apace. The final budget will be published in the next couple of weeks so we’re now into the minutiae of detail around specific proposals and how these are presented. I’m pleased to say that we’re just about balanced. Well done to the finance team. This week and next week we are consulting the public and businesses on their budget priorities so that these can be reflected in the final submission. More on this next week.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week