You’ve been in your role at the Cabinet Office since 2006. How would you say HR across the civil service has changed in that time?
When I arrived, HR was delivered within individual departments. One of the things I’m really proud of is that we’re working across boundaries and collaborating in some very fundamental areas in a way that wouldn’t have happened in the past. It’s happened because HR directors of departments have wanted to come together as a community and wanted to take advantage of the opportunities we have from collaboration. Those advantages are about, first, the quality and efficiency of service we can provide and, second, the career management of our people.
One of the biggest projects to come out of this is your Next Generation HR initiative. What was the impetus behind this?
We liked the Next Generation HR research that the CIPD was doing so much that we’ve built our programme on that same title. We’ve been working out how to achieve best practice in HR so we’re on a journey from where we were a few years ago, when we had an HR ratio of 1 to 49. In June 2009 we came together as an HR community. We spent a day challenging ourselves about what we need to do to get to a best practice ratio of 1 to 100. The answer was the work that has gone on to create the next generation framework, which is the map of how we’re going to organise HR. It’s a really radical look at how we deliver HR services across all of the departments and agencies and it’s about not just a shared service approach, but how we deliver really effective expert services (see panel, bottom).
The project was only conceived last year and, so far, has been based on voluntary buy-in from government departments and agencies. Do you think you’ve done enough to prepare for the sheer scale of the public-sector cutbacks planned?
So far we’ve worked as a group of volunteers, but politically it is now going to have a greater mandate. It’s obvious. You have got to save money, you have got to deliver a better service, and this is the way to do it. You never know how ready you are for any battle until it starts, but we are as well prepared as we can be. Inevitably what’s ahead is going to be tough, but when you start any journey obstacles arise, difficulties arise. The challenge is how well you respond to those things as they happen.
Dealing with the forthcoming cuts in budgets and staffing is going to be particularly tough for HR. Do you think the profession can rise to the challenge?
For HR it’s a complete double whammy when there is change going on because you have to change yourself and you have to help the organisation change. It’s double the effort and therefore double the pain. We currently have around 490,000 civil servants and HR has to help those people through an incredible period of change. We will need to get on with what needs to be done and we will need to get on with it in a way that is respectful to the individual. I am absolutely convinced that the HR community will rise to the challenge. It’s the complete test of professionalism and absolutely what HR professionals train and develop themselves to do.
Before joining the Cabinet Office you spent 27 years at Accenture, first in consultancy roles and then running various parts of the global business before, in 2002, taking up your first HR position as global chief leadership officer. How did that come about?
It was a difficult time in the company’s history. We had gone through a period of extraordinary growth before the dot.com bubble burst and 9/11 happened. We lost 12 people on that day, it was a really emotional hit.
The then chief executive said, “I’ve got a finance director who sits on my right hand and takes care of the numbers and I want somebody at that level to sit on my left hand and deal with the people issues.” All my career I had been consulting in change management in the people arena so it was familiar territory and a tremendous opportunity to really make a difference to an organisation that I cared enormously for (see panel, bottom).
What spurred you to make the move to the public sector?
I took a call from a headhunter. That’s not something I had done before and to this day I’m not sure why I did. I came in to meet Sir Gus O’Donnell, cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, and just found the whole environment completely intriguing. Gus talked about the four Ps of what he wanted to achieve: passion, professionalism, pace and pride. His agenda was a very close fit with what I personally believed in. As my own leadership career had taken off, passion had always been one of my words and I’ve been absolutely clear about the need for deep professional skills and capabilities.
How have you found working in the public sector after so long in the private sector?
A lot of what is different between the sectors is terribly obvious when you say it, but you have to actually live it to really understand what the words mean. In the private sector there’s this thing called profit and loss and it keeps businesses very focused on the bottom line, whereas in the public sector the outcomes and the measurements are just so much more complicated: what are you going to do to solve climate change? How are you going to prevent obesity? The second issue is that in a private sector organisation the leaders take the decisions and for the most part those decisions drive what happens.
Leaders in the civil service have to do that, but at the same time they have to serve the government of the day. That is absolutely at the heart of our democracy, but in between that point of you being a leader of an organisation and serving the ministers of the day is a great deal of complexity and ambiguity.
Initially your role was focused on HR and leadership development, but in 2007 you also took on responsibility for the Capability Review Programme– the civil service’s tool for improving performance across Whitehall. What prompted that?
I took it on because so much of what we are trying to change is about the people, the capability of the people and the leadership the people provide.
We use a very effective “model of capability” for reviewing each of the departments. It’s a very insightful process. So far the whole process has been done twice – with significant improvements across the board – and we are about to start again in the new year. Actually there’s a very good link with the CIPD’s Next Generation HR project, which is one of the reasons why the research resonates strongly with me. The skills and capabilities of next generation leaders is very much at the heart of what the capability reviews are about.
You mentioned earlier that one of the benefits of working collaboratively was career management. Can you expand on this?
I remember saying at my interview that it was very important that we didn’t create an organisation that was dependent on bringing people like me in from the outside. It’s not sustainable.
What we’ve tried to do over the past few years is to build a career structure for HR, to provide some training and development interventions and to provide some really good talent management to help people move around the departments. We have started to recruit HR graduates and are now one of the largest HR graduate recruiters in the country. HR in the civil service should be the best place in the UK to do HR. We have every type and variety of profession to work with, and every type of HR issue to deal with.
Part of this has been mapping HR careers through your HR “tube map”. That’s very similar to the work the CIPD has been doing with its own HR profession map, isn’t it?
As the CIPD was building its profession map we were trying to solve the same problem so we’ve worked together. As a consequence, our career map allows individuals – and I think this is really important – to be able to develop their HR career within the civil service, but also to map it onto what’s happening in other sectors. We’ve tried to use similar levels and similar terminology to the CIPD, but obviously there are areas within the civil service where we need to do things differently.
You’ve talked about the overlaps between the CIPD and your own Next Generation HR project, your career map and the capability reviews. Is that what attracted you to the role of president?
Undoubtedly it is. The agenda that the CIPD was following was what I believed the agenda should be. So when [chief executive] Jackie Orme asked me to be president I was delighted to provide whatever help I could. I was attracted to the role because of the path I see Jackie has been taking the CIPD on, driving HR into a space where it can really develop and change and help organisations thrive and succeed. The institute is looking at what our members need, and what the businesses we serve need, in a very fundamental, researched way. It is very “civil service” actually in terms of analysis and making sure you take the right investment decisions.
What do you bring to the party as incoming president?
When Jackie called me I was surprised, to say the least. It’s an enormous privilege to be asked to take on a role like this. One of the things in my favour is that I’ve worked in the private sector and the public sector. And I’ve been a businesswoman and an HR professional, which I think gives me quite a different mix of skills.
What are the key priorities for the CIPD?
What’s really important to me is business people’s understanding of what HR is and what good HR looks like. It’s really making sure that the CIPD is delivering what its members need and that we are really connected to them and they feel they are part of a thriving and sustainable organisation. I’d add growing the global footprint to that. The CIPD has grown to where it is by focusing on the needs of HR professionals in the UK and Ireland – but international boundaries are less and less relevant in today’s world. We need to make sure we are supporting professionals with their increasingly international roles and responsibilities, wherever in the world they’re based.
And what about the HR profession. What should our priorities be?
People management is always going to be the vital skill in organisations. That’s fundamental and so we need to get better and better at doing it. HR professionals need to understand the business they are in, and what the levers are that really make it productive. We also need to attract the best talent into HR. The CIPD’s Next Generation HR work lays out very clearly why HR is such an attractive career if you are the sort of person who wants to solve problems, who wants to make a difference, who wants to really understand what makes people tick and how you can get greater productivity out of the greatest resource that any organisation has. We really need to make sure we are getting the best talent into our profession.
Valuing stewardship
Ask Gill Rider about her views on leadership and it’s easy to see why she was headhunted from global consulting firm Accenture for her current role heading up the HR profession across the civil service and developing senior civil service leaders.
Rider had spent more than 20 years consulting and, as global chief leadership officer, had been responsible for the people aspects of Accenture. This included the transition from a partnership to a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and several difficult years of recession and downsizing.
A partner since 1990, she was responsible for the energy, utilities, chemicals and natural resources business in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America and became chair of Accenture UK and Ireland. In 2002 she took on the position of global chief leadership officer, reporting to the CEO, a role that focused heavily on human capital strategy, the leadership development of senior executives, talent management and succession planning.
“My own personal belief about leadership is that you have got to have passion for what you do because if you haven’t got that you can’t communicate. You’ve got to be able to inspire with a vision of the future,” she says.
“One of my most important personal values is inherited from my previous employer. It is stewardship – you need to leave things better than you find them; you need to help people to be the best that they can be.”
Next Generation HR
The civil service Next Generation HR project’s aim is to take the concept of sharing HR services across government to a whole new level.
Originally conceived in June 2009, the final plans for implementation were signed off this July at a meeting of the HR Leaders Council – a group of around 35 to 40 HR directors from across government departments and agencies, created by Gill Rider, head of civil service HR, to help drive change across Whitehall.
“It takes time to work out how the design will work,” says Rider. “But we are ready [for implementation] with the support of the minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, who has been supportive and energetic about what we are trying to achieve.”
The plan is to create cross-departmental centres of expertise for resourcing, policy, HR business partners, learning and development and shared services. In addition a single HR capability framework is being developed, as well as one development and assessment strategy for all civil service HR professionals.
The “go-live” date for most of the work is expected to be April 2011, but some initiatives are already under way. For instance, a new e-resourcing system has already been launched, the procurement process has kicked off in readiness for the switch to central provision of generic L&D, a role profile has been developed for HR business partners and a pilot is under way to test the model for delivering a single, service-wide response to changes in employment law.
As far as shared services are concerned, the Next Generation HR project will feed into the Efficiency and Reform Group in the Cabinet Office, which has overall responsibility for building on the services that already exist on behalf of a number of corporate functions.
Rider strongly backs this approach, believing shared services should “not be cut by functional lines”. “Finance, HR and procurement shared services should all share the same system so that you have one version of the truth when it comes to data,” she says. “What we are doing within HR is to make sure we have a very clear definition of what the HR transactions should look like and a clear view of what best practice is.”
Existing cross-departmental shared services include: The Department for Work and Pensions, which provides administrative HR and finance support for the Cabinet Office and the Department for Education; as well as the National Offender Management Service, which provides services for the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office.