people & organisational development strategy

People & Organisational Development Strategy 2017-22

As we face new challenges in delivering our priorities I am pleased to present the People and Organisational Development Strategy. This strategy seeks to support further improvements in our service performance through developing our people, equipping you with the necessary skills, abilities and behaviours to deliver in current and future environments.

We wish to further develop our employees so that you all feel empowered to identify and implement new ideas and better ways of working, in how we do our jobs and to work more collaboratively with each other and our partners

John BarnesChairman

Through my visits around the Service, I have personally learned from each of you about your dedication and achievement. I see East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service consistently achieve a great deal as you go about providing a service to the Communities in East Sussex.

You continue to be a key to our future success. Our people are at the heart of this organisation and are what make it strong. Together we can continue to address the challenges we face and seek out new opportunities for the Service.

The biggest external driver for change is the significant re-focusing of the service delivery model and it’s re-shaping into the future as we all work with local partners in responding to demand in our communities.

With your support and engagement we can deliver on the themes of this strategy both for the benefit of our employees and to deliver even better services for East Sussex communities.

Dawn WhittakerChief Fire Officer

Foreword

People & Organisational Development Strategy | 2

INTRODUCTION

This strategy supports the National Fire Chiefs Counil people strategy and offers a response to the recommendations in the Sir Ken Knight ‘Facing the Future’ and Adrian Thomas ‘Independent Review of Conditions and Service for Fire and Rescue Staff in England’ reports. It has been developed to support the local delivery of the Fire Authority’s vision, our purpose and commitments and strategic plans including the Medium Term Financial Plan (MTFP) and Integrated Risk Management Action Plan (IRMP). It also draws out the main drivers for change over the next five years and the impact on our people. The delivery of this strategy will be monitored through the HR Strategic Group and through a detailed action plan.

East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service, along with all other public sector organisations, faces an unprecedented period of change with a drive to deliver services to the public at a significantly lower cost. Achieving savings and delivering better services and retaining a high level of staff motivation and participation means we are operating in a challenging environment. This strategy focuses on our intended response to the challenges, risks and opportunities in terms of people and outlines our broad commitments and planned actions in the coming years.

We need to address considerable external and internal challenges:

• Challenging financial environment, more demands on limited resources

• Developments in employment law and the changing landscape with pensions and the impact on the workforce and the employer

• Continued debate on how fire can integrate with other public services to deliver better outcomes for the community

• Potential risks of employee disputes and industrial action

• Increased staff turnover and increased employment costs

• Supporting the health and well-being of our staff including considering the issues of an ageing workforce.

3 | People & Organisational Development Strategy

Our Purpose, Commitments & Values

Our Purpose

“We make communities safer”

Our commitments

• Delivering high performing services• Educating our communities• Developing a multi-skilled, safe and valued workforce• Making effective use of our resource

Our values

Respect & Dignity for all• We treat our colleagues and all members of our Community in a way that values their

individuality. We will challenge discrimination and inappropriate behaviour at all levels.

Trust, integrity, initiative and innovation• We are honest and trust each other. We encourage initiative and lateral thinking.

Serving our whole Community• We are here to provide a professional and efficient service to our Community. We will provide

value for money.

We are proud of our Fire & Rescue Service and enjoy working in a positive environment.

• We enjoy the work we do and we work towards the continual improvement of our Service and ourselves. We encourage and will manage constructive challenge. We will be a good employer.


Our VisionUnderpinning principles – what will East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service feel like for staff in 2022

We want East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service to be an outstanding organisation that all our people are proud to be part of; an organisation that puts its people first, strives for excellence in all that it does and always remains community-focused and socially aware. We believe that our communities should be at the heart of everything we do; we are here because the community needs us.

The Service will be a dynamic place with motivated and innovative people whose opinions are listened to, considered and respected and whose enthusiasm delivers a positive impact on all our communities. Our people will be role models at all levels. We will pride ourselves on what we do, set our sights high and always push ourselves to provide a better, more efficient and effective service.

We will recognise that we all have a part to play in delivering an outstanding service and ensure that everyone involved has a clear understanding of what is expected of them. We will give them the resources, skills and knowledge to enable them to meet these expectations.

People will want to join and stay at East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service and to play a part in keeping our communities safe. Our commitment will be to help people develop and reach their potential.

Managers will be empowered to run their own teams and teams will help each other. We will have great leaders who will excel in setting and communicating clear direction, leading teams, and ensuring that all that we do is aligned to organisational objectives, plans and priorities.

We will be united, sharing ideas, values and goals, finding solutions to problems and identifying opportunities for improvement. This will by no means be solely the responsibility of our managers; everyone will have a part to play.

In everything we do we will help to ensure that in the future our communities can be safer, in the knowledge that we are acting responsibly on their behalf. Several factors will contribute to our success; our reputation, our network of partners, our management style, our communication and the way talent is empowered to flourish within the organisation.

The proof of our success will be real and tangible; in short, our Service will be an employer of choice and a Service that others will look up to.


Local ContextEast Sussex Fire Authority is responsible for providing prevention, protection and response services to the City of Brighton and Hove and the County of East Sussex.

Since the 2010/11 the Authority has made, and has planned to make, savings totalling £8.645m of which £8.128m will have been delivered by the end of 2017/18. The latest Medium Term Finance Plan (MTFP) sets out the need to identify further savings of up to £1.6m by 2022/23. This will require the Authority to adopt a more strategic approach to delivering efficiencies across all areas of the service, including our people resources. Staffing costs currently make up 73% of our total budget of £37.4m (2017/18) so inevitably we will need to consider how our People Strategy can contribute to this strategic approach.

Moving forward, the key drivers of this strategy are efficiency and effective use of our people and processes. We will also continue to review opportunities for collaboration.

Our Service operates from 24 Community Fire Stations, a Training Centre, Vehicle Workshops, Sussex Control Centre located at Haywards Heath and our Joint Service Headquarters at Lewes. Our staffing comprises:

• Sussex Control Centre – receive emergency calls, mobilise fire appliances for firefighting, rescue and humanitarian services, and also support the management and collection of operational information.

• Wholetime and Retained Duty System Fire Fighters – based at our community fire stations they provide the key intervention responses to incidents and proactive safety advice to the community.

• Specialist Staff – who provide Community Fire Safety Advice and Legislative fire safety services to the public and businesses.

• Senior Operational Managers and Specialist Advisors located at Shared Service Headquarters in Lewes.

• Support Staff – providing core services including information management, financial and procurement services, engineering services, estates management, health & safety, human resources (which includes inclusion & diversity, payroll and occupational health), training services, performance management, communications and key administration services


ThemesOur future aims are to ensure that we have shared values across the organisation, taking personal responsibility for delivering quality services and striving for excellence to the benefit of our communities.

In doing this, we actively support equality and diversity as everyone’s responsibility and we do this not only in terms of thinking, language, behaviour and values but also through ensuring that our policies and processes are fair, impartial and compliant with legislation. This is reflected in our Inclusion, Equality and Diversity Strategy 2017 - 2021.

We have specifically identified eight themes that will focus our priorities for action within this strategy.

These themes link to the following commitments:-

• Developing a multi-skilled, safe and valued workforce• Making effective use of our resources

1. Developing the skills and capacity of the Fire Authority

• This will focus on enhancing and enriching Member development to support them in realising their full potential as Fire and Rescue Authority Community Leaders within East Sussex and the City of Brighton and Hove.

2. Developing the skills and capacity of the workforce

• We are committed to strengthening our leadership and line management to support organisational change and improved community outcomes. We will focus on supporting and improving the quality of leadership in the service, our leaders are vital to our success and the success of this strategy. We need strong and effective leadership at all levels to ensure that everything we do aligns with the purpose and commitments of the fire and rescue service, both nationally and locally. We will equip our managers to lead our people and to be catalysts for achieving the culture we desire. Our managers will take responsibility and lead teams to deliver measurable outcomes, whilst being actively involved in their own learning and the learning of our future leaders. We will recognise and value effective leadership and leadership learning will be supported and embedded throughout our organisation.

3. Organisational Development

• We want to be the best Fire & Rescue Service we can be and that means having a clear vision of what we do, having shared values across the organisation, and staff taking personal responsibility for delivering quality services and striving for excellence to the benefit of our communities.

• We will create a culture based on effective people management including absence management which is based on ESFRS core values, which will be the basis for improvement. Diversity in every sense will be embedded into managing performance and workforce diversity issues will be tackled effectively.

• We want to build a successful relationship between all our staff with an emphasis on early engagement and communication in our employee interactions. We want to improve our approach and the distinction between communication, consultation and decision making to enable a change in the culture so that we can continually improve the organisation and the service we deliver to our communities.


• We want to equip our managers and staff with the necessary tools for personally managing change so we can deliver high quality and best practice change management initiatives and programmes

• We will investigate more flexible ways of resourcing our workforce, as well as flexible ways of working to enable us to deliver high quality and efficient customer focused services.

• We will deliver a modern working environment that supports our staff to work efficiently and flexibly in the way we deliver services. This will also ensure we continue to attract and retain excellent staff.

• We will develop a talent management process which focuses on both talent growth and development. There is a need to move away from a more traditional model of career management, which defines career progression purely in terms of an upward, linear trajectory. In the modern, highly complex world of work, careers take many different forms, and follow many different courses.

4. Resources - Recruitment, Retention and Workforce Planning

• Ensuring that we have the right people in the right roles at the right time is crucial to our success. To enable us to do this, we will identify future workforce requirements and how these can be achieved. We will recruit our people fairly and equitably based on merit and with regard to current employment legislation and good practice. Coupled with this we will also adopt effective strategies in order to recruit a diverse workforce reflecting the communities we serve. We will develop a more robust workforce and succession planning model across the service to ensure that our future requirements in terms of numbers, roles, skills and potential are identified and delivered.

5. Develop and implement new ways of working.

• We will continue to work on our short, medium and long term plans to introduce Apprenticeships into the Service. Short term we will seek to up-skill or retrain existing staff, people returning to work after a break. We will work with managers to highlight roles which have the potential to become Apprenticeships to support the business.

• To assist our activities in recruitment, retention and employee engagement we will seek to enhance the leaver data for voluntary resignations to show trends and capture more information.


6. Performance Management

Performance management (appraisals) is a process by which managers and employees work together to monitor and review an employee’s work based objectives and their overall contribution to the organisation.

• There is a strong relationship between skills, training and work performance. Development of employees’ skills and knowledge must be aligned to the Service’s needs as well as supporting personal development and career development. We will ensure that our workforce has highly skilled and competent people to deal with the challenges we face and to provide a diverse range of enhanced services to meet the needs and expectations of our communities. We will work with our staff to identify the knowledge, skills and attributes required for all roles and produce meaningful development plans in order to get the best out of our people and help them reach their true potential.

• All staff will have an annual appraisal which will be used, in part, to develop and maintain an individuals’ skills and knowledge to meet the needs of the Service, to support their own progression and to enable new ways of working.

• We will seek to devise a robust talent management process. A talent management model will be predicated on a commitment to use current data to formulate the best possible career prospects for our staff, whilst delivering our Purpose, Commitments and long-term priorities.

7. Reward and Recognition

• By rewarding our people and recognising their efforts in helping to make our organisation a leading fire and rescue service, we aim to strengthen their motivation and sense of value. We will focus on modernising local pay, reward and recognition structures and will go beyond pay and include benefits such as annual leave.

• In developing pay strategies we will, however, continue to combine the flexibility of local issues within the National Bargaining Framework as appropriate. We will also ensure that any national terms and conditions are adhered to.

• We understand that recognition goes beyond pay and benefits. As such we are reviewing the current awards and commendation process to ensure that there is recognition for individuals and teams that produce innovative work or make contributions to their local community such as supporting good causes, or for contributing ideas that generate efficiency for the service

8. Delivering the HR and OD Function

• We will focus on delivering the HR & Organisational Development function that supports the delivery of ESFRS. It will move from being a predominantly advisory and transactional service to a more strategic people centred partnership with the organisation. It will promote the added value of professional contributions to improved organisational performance.

• We will ensure that HR staff are trained to accredited standards and hold the appropriate professional qualifications.

• We will make optimum use of the HR database to improve people information, providing HR metrics for the better performance of the Service. As part of the developments in workforce planning we will create more advanced forecasting tools for future retirements and identified skills gaps for our Wholetime group.

• Policies and procedures will fit business requirements as well as being best practice and in line with legislation.


Audit, Monitoring and ReviewThis strategy covers the period from 2017 to 2022 and will be reviewed on an annual basis to ensure alignment with the Corporate Plans and other key priorities. We will regularly audit and monitor our HR policies and practices and will continue to work collaboratively with other services within the South East in the interests of consistency of approach and serve as benchmarks for assessment processes. People and HR activity already have an extensive set of performance measures in place, however in developing the underpinning action plan we may seek to recommend additional key performance measures to the suite of current indicators.

We will maintain learning and development records for all Members and employees on a computerised system. Copies will also be kept on staff electronic personnel records. The confidentiality of such records is vital and security will be built into computer systems accordingly. The systems will comply with the Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information Act. Electronic systems will comply with the relevant Government Standards.

Practical training, exercises and records will be the subject of regular audit to ensure that Service Policies are adhered to, and good practice observed. Audit outcomes will be acted upon and changes made to support quality of delivery for personnel, learning and development and organisational development issues.

As well as ensuring we are compliant with our Public Sector Equalities Duties we monitor information in relation to ethnicity, gender, race, age, religion and sexuality will be undertaken on annual basis (for existing staff) and via job applications, applications for promotion, attrition rate and exit interviews, training, discipline and grievance. We will use this information to ensure staff of all groups are treated fairly throughout the various employment processes.

Additionally, inclusion and equality monitoring will be undertaken to ensure that our workforce is developed to support and reflect the changing needs of our varying communities.


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