The sharing of services at four councils in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire will save £3.4 million and will secure HR’s role for the future, according to the HR executive lead on the project.
Cotswold District Council, West Oxfordshire District Council, Forest of Dean District Council and Cheltenham Borough Council are working towards sharing services in finance, procurement, HR and payroll in a project known as the “GO” programme.
Moving to a self-service model, with employees assisted by “centres of excellence”, will permit the councils' HR teams to streamline transactional processes and “focus on the strategic aim”, said Karen Gane, also HR manager at Forest of Dean District Council.
“We believe it will allow us to raise our profile and concentrate on the more added-value, strategic side of HR,” she said. “Sharing best practice, avoiding duplication, and identifying the best common processes are also key to realising the savings.”
The initiative was first conceived 18 months ago, but Gane said it was even more timely given the subsequent government cuts to local authority budgets, adding: “As a profession, we certainly think it secures our survival”.
She explained that the councils were hoping to exceed the envisaged £3.4 million savings across all the shared functions over the next 10 years. Although the final HR structure and locations of the centres of excellence were yet to be determined across the four town halls, Gane acknowledged there would be an “inevitable” reduction in the current 26 HR posts.
But she maintained that vacancy management and succession planning since the start of the project would keep cuts to “a minimum”.
“If anyone left we back-filled the roles with fixed term contracts, held the vacancy or shared staff between us, in order to the protect the staff we have and deliver the savings,” Gane explained.
Forest of Dean already operates a computerised self-service model for leave and absence, but expanding this across the three other local authorities and extending the online system to include expenses, invoicing, procurement and finance would be a “big culture change”, continued Gane.
“It’s a huge piece of work for the HR teams in terms of business change, training and mass communication - we’ve had to do a lot of talking with the unions, members and council leaders,” she added.
The four councils – which collectively employ the equivalent of 1,400 full-time staff – are using the UNIT4 Local Government Platform software solution to underpin the shared services programme. The project is going live at Forest of Dean and Cotswold councils this November, and the two remaining councils next April.
Gane was hopeful that once the programme was established, the local authorities be able to “secure other partners to join us on a client basis”, including other councils and private sector companies.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Michelle Stevens
Quelle/Source: People Management Magazine Online, 17.02.2011
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