The number of HR workers has shrunk by over a third in three years. But while HR departments haven’t enjoyed distributing P45s to their own staff, managers are proud that service quality hasn’t suffered. Colin Marrs reports.
pic cap: Giving with one hand... HR departments have found themselves laying off their own staff
In 2009, the civil service employed an HR professional for every 50 staff: twice as many as a typical large private company. So the coalition introduced a set of major reforms to the government’s HR operations, including creating a stronger central team and outsourcing much of the management of training provision.
The result, according to the government’s head of HR services Chris Last, has been a dramatic fall in the number of HR staff – from 9,000 in 2008-9 to 5,600 in 2011-12. The ratio of HR workers to staff is now 1:89, he said, and he expects it to fall to 1:100 by 2013.
“The target ratio is in line with most large private sector companies,” Last told a session at Civil Service Live, adding that government has reduced its overall spending on HR from £524 million in 2008-9 to £371 million last year, with the aim of reaching £277 million by April 2013.
Such deep cuts are bound to put pressure on staff – but Last argued that more efficient ways of working have cushioned the blow. “It is not simply reducing the number of human resources people and telling the remainder to work harder,” he said. The central team’s work to develop cross-Whitehall HR policies has reduced the workload within departments, he said, while some HR work has been outsourced.
Alison Stanley, director of civil service employee policy, attempted to illustrate how cross-departmental HR work is delivering better-coordinated policy as well as cost savings. The Civil Service Reform Plan requires departments to undertake reviews of staff terms and conditions, she said, and her team has already completed preliminary work on a common approach. “Many of the issues each department encounters will be the same,” she said. “We are going to run a series of sessions to take them through the thinking that we have been doing. It wouldn’t make sense for all departments to start from scratch – they will be able to learn from each other.”
Stanley also revealed that a shared service which currently runs recruitment campaigns for HMRC and the Department of Work and Pensions will have five more departments under its wing by the end of this year. “We have got 30 people planning to do that activity, covering all the departments – including the five new ones,” she said, setting out the advantages. “It is about streamlining resources, rather than having people focused on one department and having fallow periods. They are experts on recruitment, and able to provide the service more efficiently than individual departments.”
The central HR team can also help departments run individual psychological assessments, which have already been adopted by almost all the departments. Last year, 600 people took these tests – which, said Stanley, give “a consistent benchmark across the civil service.” It is also making progress on shared recruitment: the Civil Service Jobs website, said Last, has so far advertised 17,105 vacancies and logged the details of 182,862 jobseekers.
In a separate session Mike Falvey, chief people officer at HMRC, said that attendance levels are set to “increasingly become a reputational issue for the civil service”. He cited figures showing that HMRC has reduced the average number of days of absence per employee from over 11 to seven during the past year.
Colin Herring, a specialist HR manager at the Department of Work and Pensions, said that managers need to work more flexibly with staff taking sickness leave to find ways of getting them back into work more quickly. “We have to break out of thinking that you have to be fully fit to be working,” he said.