When Birmingham City Council and Capita set up their joint venture company, Service Birmingham, getting staff to buy into the vision was the key, says Phil Braithwaite Earlier this year, 500 Birmingham City Council Business Solutions and ICT support staff were seconded to Service Birmingham, a new joint venture company established by the council and Capita. With its goal of supporting the UK’s largest business-transformation programme in local government, it was imperative that every member of staff bought into the vision. We knew this would prove a significant HR challenge and that it needed careful planning and full employee consultation. The city council is the largest local authority in Europe, employing more than 50,000 people and delivering a full range of community services to almost one million people. If its services are to become even more efficient, creating £1bn of savings within 10 years for reinvestment into frontline services, staff must form an integral part of the transformation of the council’s business processes. We know the new team has the ability to deliver. The challenge is to ensure that we maximise staff potential from the outset. Much depends on creating the right kind of environment in which Service Birmingham can develop its own unique culture. We ensured every member of staff was fully involved in consultations from the planning phase. A range of communication tools was used, including e-mail, newsletters, intranet and informal lunch meetings. We also created a new staff forum to allow for a two-way communication channel to guarantee all voices were heard. I believe it’s very important to lead from the front, and I am visiting all our centres on a regular basis. This enables me to articulate the company vision, while providing everyone with an opportunity to air their views, provide feedback and engage in discussion. The way we look at it is that we now have a pool of 500 ICT professionals who we regard as gold dust, but who need additional training in order to equip them for what lies ahead. We devised a Talent Management programme to identify employees’ key strengths and any skills gaps, so we could establish the nature of the training each individual would require. Specialist skills such as how to work according to PRINCE project management and IT training in JAVA are now being acquired by employees. This approach ensures we get the best out of everyone. Understandably, many employees were sceptical about committing to a joint venture initiative to begin with. However, in this instance, we believe we were able to provide them with sufficient reassurance by offering them a choice in their method of transfer. They could opt for secondment to Service Birmingham or take the more traditional TUPE route, if they so wished. In the end, all but a handful elected for secondment and so remain employees of the council. We recognised that this might prove a difficult decision for many and, in a particularly innovative move, the council worked with Capita to develop what we called the ‘Choices’ model, which allowed everybody a chance of working three months under the new system to decide if it was for them. We are still not much more than 100 days into the contract, but the feeling so far is very good. We are already beginning to see a positive influence emerging from the employee-development programme. It has reconfirmed for us that engagement with staff is a continuous process, which starts before the contract begins and doesn’t stop until the project is accomplished. I am convinced that a positive contribution by an employer to the development of an individual’s career will reward an organisation with commitment and expertise, two key drivers in the quest for efficiency. w Phil Braithwaite is chief executive of Service Birmingham
