Why the civil service’s OD innovator, Sally Hulks, is radically reimagining government from the inside out
The chancellor’s drive to reduce the UK’s budget deficit has been dominating headlines for months. But at the sharp end of the changes, they’re not panicking. In fact, a more softly-softly approach is gaining traction.
“The civil service (CS) needs big plans but planned change can only take you so far. Getting to a different way of working can’t happen by diktat,” says Sally Hulks, director of a new organisational development and design (OD&D) service that has been making quiet waves since it was conceived at the beginning of 2011.
“It’s about working with people so they feel the difference [following change initiatives], helping the people who are staying be part of the future,” she adds. “We try to operate through participation and co-creation, openness and experimentation. I think it is the bit that makes change sustainable.”
Officially, the OD&D service is the fourth of the civil service HR shared services, after CS Resourcing, CS Learning and CS Employee Policy, which were launched as part of the transformation project Next Generation HR. But that’s where the similarity ends. While the others were planned, the OD&D service – effectively, an internal HR consultancy – started life as an experiment, one that is seeing OD taken to a new level across the civil service and could offer a blueprint for change in public services and beyond.
“A group of 12 of us with organisation development backgrounds came up with the idea of operating in each other’s departments to give us a different perspective and more of an edge,” says Hulks, who leads the service in addition to her day job as an HR director at the Home Office. “The idea was to nudge people into different ways of thinking about change.”
Rather than imposing their methods on others, the service adopted an invitation-only approach from the outset – and they weren’t short of requests from HR directors keen to get a more humanistic perspective on their change programmes.
Following the initial success, the go-ahead was given for a formal nine-month pilot on a “low-risk” basis, and in 2012 the service was officially launched and given its own budget. This covers four full-time OD consultants and an admin/business manager, but the service still relies heavily on an expanded group of 20 associate OD professionals, who provide help when needed, on top of their day-to-day roles.
“People were very surprised at how much work we had done and how well it had gone,” says Hulks, adding that it shows it is alright to be different, even in a top-down organisation like the civil service. “It’s OK to be an exemplar of working differently even when the grain of the whole place is different, so long as you are there in service of the organisation.” Here’s what that means in practice…
Small is beautiful
The OD&D service was never intended to replace embedded departmental change resources. The idea was to create an expert internal consultancy that HR directors wanting a “thought partner” could draw on.
A typical piece of work might be helping to create the culture and design of a new directorate. “Mainly we work as a pair. Most of the work is small and at the front end of change. It’s an initially modest piece of work but with a collective impact,” says Hulks, adding that that’s very much in keeping with the organisation development principle that “small, well-focused actions create enduring improvements”.
Rand Alhashimi, head of judicial leadership projects at the Judicial Office, adds that introducing the service in a modest way rather than with a big fanfare has contributed to its success – by March this year, 48 projects had been delivered.
“It has been implemented in a very grown-up and responsive way,” she says. “It’s grown project by project, when we tend to do things the other way round. Because OD isn’t well established, it’s been the right way to grow credibility. People can see the real value in it.”
Build capability
The service itself may be small but it thinks big – one of its key aims is to build OD capability across civil service HR by putting HR leaders and business partners through a practice-based development programme.
So far, around 150 HR practitioners have completed the course, which last year was run by Ashridge Business School, and another 60 are currently taking part.
“At the end [of the first programme] we held a day’s summit, which was attended by 100 people. It’s fantastic that it mattered so much to them,” says Hulks. “I almost can’t believe that we have got this far.”
Alhashimi, one of the first cohort to go through the programme, adds that the training was “completely different to anything else I have been involved in”.
She is working on an OD resource pack that will allow departments to do their own in-house training. “Growing capability is absolutely crucial,” says Hulks. “It’s the only way we will [really] get anywhere.”
Bolster HR impact
Hulks believes one of the main benefits of the way the service is run is that it allows the team to join a change project as an outsider. But it is also giving HR business partners and leaders more clout when dealing with senior staff. “We have got so far in our model of HR business partners but it is still hard for them to be anything but subordinate,” says Hulks. “This allows them to have more of an adult-to-adult conversation.”
Alhashimi agrees. Her current role is to develop the leadership capability of judges, a group of individuals not known for their experience of leading or being managed. “It’s been completely invaluable,” she says. “When you work with judges there is a massive power differential. It takes a lot of understanding and the ability to influence.”
Work collaboratively
Right from the start, working together has been integral to the success of the OD&D service and, says Hulks, the collaborative approach can have an increasing impact on the civil service reform agenda. “We have the opportunity to pull out themes and find connections. We can join people up.”
That’s not something that will happen by itself, and the group has worked hard to create a community for OD practitioners to network and share experience and knowledge. A range of material has been made live on the CS Learning website and the associate group meets regularly to discuss what they are doing, agree frameworks and attend masterclasses and supervision sessions.
“It’s about ensuring there is an ongoing ability for people to share what they are doing,” says Hulks, adding that that’s particularly important in OD work as “a lot of the time we are challenging people’s thinking and that’s tiring work”.
Together but apart
Where OD sits is the topic of much general debate – some argue there is a good fit with HR and others counter that it goes beyond the people aspects of a business. Within the civil service, it is very much part of HR.
“We have some very skilled HR people who have to work across the change agenda. You don’t want a rival service in any way,” says Hulks but she adds that, wherever OD sits, it should have enough independence as a specialism: “We are still part of HR but aside from it.”
She adds, however, that she believes the “future of HR is in having an OD skillset”. That’s something that chimes with Alhashimi: “I think OD sits in the business and is responsive to business needs,” she says. “You can do most HR work with an OD lens.”