It was the PPMA Policy Board meeting last Friday and we had a very large agenda to get through. It was a fast paced meeting with lots of important decisions made that will in time affect PPMA members.

The first item of interest was an update on the PPMA Business plan. This is an important document, which will determine the future direction of PPMA. The draft was posted on our website for comments so thank you to those who took the time to respond. Your comments were reported to the Policy Board and were debated at length.

The next, and hopefully final, iteration of the document will be presented to the Policy Board in February next year. Topical issues such as membership development, commercial planning and our future membership offering will all be addressed in the document.

The Board also agreed the next steps on an important piece of work on the future of reward in the public sector. I’m very excited about what we are trying to do as an organisation on reward. Rather than sitting on the sidelines and commenting on existing reward models we are looking to develop a picture of what we think the new model should be for the future. Watch this space for further developments.

The Board also agreed to go ahead with a proposal to set up its own Facebook page so any fellow active ‘Facebookers’ out there be sure to sign up when we go live.

Other items included a report on Membership Development, which we will now take forward as part of the business planning work and an update on the exciting conference that Dean is planning for next year. Finally we had updates from the regions and lead officers.

The Personnel Today Awards were held on the evening preceding the Board. PPMA hosted a table and were delighted to have as our guest important friends and partner organisations such as Julie Towers from the Tribal Group, Jan Parkinson from the LGE and Chris Johnson from Mercers. It was a good night for the public sector with Birmingham City Council winning yet another award for their fantastic work on employee engagement through the Birmingham Best programme. Also shortlisted were Lancashire County Council, the Metropolitan Police and our very own Past President, Stephen Moir in the category of HR Director of the Year. Thank you to everyone for attending and I hope you enjoyed the evening as much as I did.

Bye for now

Gill

I’m back from a very restful break – to a mound of emails and papers! Hope that you are all enjoying the summer and are managing to find time to take a break yourselves at some point. With this in mind I am reminded of the wise words of Dave Ulrich at our conference earlier this year when he talked about us looking after our health and being responsible for our own well-being!

I’ve been catching up on news that I missed whilst away and see that the debate on public sector pay still rumbles on. The reality of the current economic climate has to hit home at some point and the need for pay restraint must surely apply as equally to the public sector as it does in the private sector. BA have taken the interesting stance of asking its workforce to volunteer to work for nothing for periods of a week to a month. Can you imagine the response that would be received in the public sector to similar suggestions? Personally I think it’s an innovative response to difficult times and we will all be challenged over the coming months to be more and more creative in the solutions we need to find to keep out organisations afloat.

My first opnion piece in People Management magazine on the issue of the bureaucracy we create in HR seems to have caused a stir! The week after it appeared a flurry of letters were received by People Management on the subject from various commentators – exactly the response I was hoping for. I know that not everyone will agree with my views but it’s always healthy to have a debate and to take on board the views of others.

My next piece will be on the issue of organisational design and should appear in the August edition of People Management.

One of the great jobs I get to do as PPMA President is to judge the overall winner of the Personnel Today Awards, which will be announced later in the year. The rather large judging file has just landed on my desk – watch out for more news on this later in the year!

I’m also putting together a plan for the next PPMA Board meeting which I hope will cover the big issues of the future of reward in the public sector as well as looking at the future world of work and what the challenges might be.

I will be back with more blogs soon, In the meantime enjoy what little sun we seem to be getting!

Gill

It was PPMA Board meeting last week and we had a great turnout on a very hot and sticky day in London. I changed the format of the Board meetings slightly to incorporate a debate about the future of pay and reward in the public sector. We were joined by Jan Parkinson from the LGE and had an interesting discussion about what the future holds and how reward can be positioned to help drive organisations in the right direction.

Notes of the meetings are being written up and will appear on the website shortly. A follow up debate on the future shape of the public sector, our workforce needs and the reward system will be held in advance of the next Board meeting in September. It is hoped that this will then help shape and inform the national picture.

A number of our colleagues were lucky to be the HR Excellence Awards earlier this week. Although I wasn’t there it was a GREAT night for the public sector. he winners of these prestigious awards were:

• H R Excellence Gold Award – Winner: Birmingham City Council’s BEST Programme.
• Most Effective Use of Internal Communications – Highly commended: Cambridgeshire CC for Engaging Employees with Investors in People.
• Outstanding Employee Engagement Strategy – Winner: Birmingham City Council – BEST programme.
• Health and Wellbeing – Winner: Metropolitan Police Service for work to address Stress Management. Highly commended: East Sussex County Council.
• Best Public Sector H R Strategy or Initiative – Winner: Cambridgeshire CC for Engaging People with Investors in People. Highly Commended – National Offender Management Service.

Congratulations to everyone!

I’m off for a well deserved break for a couple of weeks now but my colleagues will be positing blogs on any items of interest during my break. In the meantime I hope you have a cooler couple of weeks and I’ll be back to blog at the end of July.

Gill

I’m just about to go off to the annual MJ Awards in London tonight at which PPMA and the LGE are jointly sponsoring the category of People and Workforce Achievement of the Year.

Shortlisted organisations in this category are Birmingham City Council (2 shortlisted entries), Fenland District Council, Hertfordshire County Council, Lancashire County Council and Winchester City Council. Good luck to everyone and well done for getting to the shortlist stage! I’m also hosting a PPMA table at the awards tonight which is an opportunity for PPMA to say thank you to our key sponsors and regional chairs/Lead Officers who put so much time into the work they do for PPMA. I’m looking forward to a great evening!

Last week saw the publication of my first opinion piece in People Management Magazine. I challenged colleagues to think more radically about the bureaucracy we often create around HR processes. My answer was to go back to basics and think about the real purpose underlying many of the procedures we have created. If you missed the article you can follow this link to an online version.

It’s PPMA Board meeting this Friday. It’s my first Board event and I’m taking a slightly different approach by holding a debate on one of my key manifesto issues. This week sees a debate on the future of reward in the sector and I’m delighted that our friend and colleague, Jan Parkinson, will be joining us form the LGE. Watch out for future blog posts on the outcome of the debate!

Have a great weekend everyone.

Gill

For once, I’m writing a blog update whilst sat working from home - what a pleasant novelty! 

Even more surprising is that this week there isn’t a huge amount to report on the PPMA front. Last week’s attendance at the Personnel Today Awards was hugely successful and the PPMA guests appeared to have enjoyed themselves, as did the PPMA members in attendance. I was delighted to see that there were a number of public sector finalists, including my former colleagues in South Tyneside - well done to all the public sector entrants who made it to the final stages and especially to those who won!

Other than updating on the tail end of last week, from a personal perspective PPMA business appears to be winding down towards the Christmas break - but I’m pretty sure that it will quickly ramp up again in the New Year. The one bit of business to highlight was a discussion I held this morning with our lead on Pay and Reward, Jim Savege, and Andy Cook from Marshall-James HR consulting. Our discussion was about employee relations training for HR teams and we agreed an outline proposal that I’ll be writing to PPMA Regional Chairs about to consider further.

Before closing for this week, I would like to make a personal comment about the national press and what appears to be an increasing anti-public sector line.  Newspaper articles have covered all sorts of issues from public sector pay and pensions to job titles - if I didn’t know better, I’d say that a general election was impending (you can call me a cynic at this point). When messages such as these start to appear in the broadsheets, it’s pretty clear that lobby groups and political parties are starting to flex their campaigning muscles.

Compound this with the additional public sector efficiency targets and increases in employer national insurance contributions, etc. then public servants and public sector employers are very much under the spotlight, especially our colleagues working in children’s services across the country.  With the backdrop of the credit crunch and interest rates at a 57 year low, this is not only going to be a tough time for HR teams supporting employers and employees alike, it’s unlikely to get any easier in the meantime. So, rather than crumble or hide away, HR really has to step up the pace and help the public sector as a whole weather the gathering storm.

Best wishes

Stephen

“It’s a rainy Tuesday evening and I’m heading down to London for HR Magazine’s ‘most influential’ reception for 2008.  I’m expecting to bump into a number of PPMA members tonight and hope that  public sector HR and PPMA gets the recognition they rightly deserve in this respect.”

“I know it’s a hobby horse of mine, but awards and external profile/publicity for PPMA and individual HR functions is important - it’s as much about see and be seen - or being in it, to win it! Watch this space and see what happens next.”

Best Wishes

Stephen