More pressure than ever has been placed on the delivery of support services, but in Glasgow, Tomorrow's Support Services (TSS) is transforming how they are delivered.
TSS protects frontline services by delivering more efficient support services by making best use of resources, people and technology.
It has created a single organisational model, controlling processes and seeking to automate where possible. Support services are now organised by function to reduce and rebalance workloads; increase productivity; be more flexible; and create opportunities for innovation and sharing ideas and best practice
Implementing TSS has reduced spend on support services while maintaining or improving outcomes for customers. Savings in excess of £4m have already been delivered and the programme is ahead of schedule.
More than 2,600 people from more than 300 locations have transitioned into Customer and Business Services (CBS) to bring work together, streamlining processes and to share best practice, thus taking work out and delivering savings.
People who leave the council do not need to be replaced because workloads are being reduced and reorganised to maintain services. The programme will save £5m over four years allowing budgets to be rebalanced to support council priorities and maintain frontline services.
Glasgow City Council said: ‘Our vision was to broaden the delivery of leaner support services while also supporting the delivery of the council's strategic plan and contributing to the reduction of pressure on frontline budgets.
‘We wanted to reduce/rebalance the council's administration activities by creating common approaches to common work and decreasing manual/paper processes. TSS would help us to manage the need for future recruitment due to natural attrition. We aimed to create manageable workloads for our people, invest in their skills and development, while investing in technology.'
TSS would:
- Reduce the share of council spend on support services
- Deliver services that meet the needs/expectations of clients/customers
- Involve the people – engaging them and highlighting their achievements
- Deliver services in an environment that is always in control.
Maintaining service performance and confidence during the process was vital. To achieve this, the leadership team:
- Consulted with HR and finance to manage staff, trade unions and an annual budget of £50m
- Created service transition boards
- Utilised existing channels of high-level communication to ensure there was strong engagement
- Established service level agreements to measure/improve performance
- Delivered face-to-face engagement
- Adopted an account management approach to document the voice of the customer
- Made all information from briefings available online
- Celebrated ‘wins' and thanked people along the way
- Encouraged staff to ask questions/put forward ideas
- Empowered staff to make changes which deliver process improvements/efficiencies
- Implemented a ‘LEAN' strategy to embed new ways of working.
The council said: ‘TSS supports the development of our people to increase and expand capability/capacity/leadership skills, to respond to future challenges. Benefits include job sustainability, development courses, performance coaching and talent management.'
A key objective of the programme is to deliver high quality, leaner support services by constantly reviewing process methodology through its LEAN programme, which involves providing staff and customers with a platform to identify where the council could do things better.
The key outcomes have been:
- Creation of LEAN teams – more than 200 staff have received continuous improvement training
- Introduction of ‘Employee Voice' – more than 1,000 ideas submitted with 165 implemented
- LEAN Six Sigma training
- Staff are better equipped to identify waste or non-value added activities and to implement projects to improve their own processes.
The council said: ‘We have involved our people in creating a sustainable culture of efficiency and effectiveness, as well as improving planning and service delivery that focus on outcomes for the customer.
‘In recognition of the huge impact of Tomorrow's Support Services our workforce transformation programme is being rolled out across the council family as Transforming Glasgow.
‘This will allow the council to continue to deliver services with fewer staff as it is estimated that up to 3,000 staff will leave naturally in the next two years.
‘Like TSS, savings will come from not replacing staff that have left instead of from voluntary redundancy or early retirement.'
The Judges' View
‘A worthy winner that displayed real impact with supporting metrics across various services. There was also evidence of very open staff engagement throughout. The impacts on ways of working have clearly been very significant. We were particularly impressed with the positivity surrounding the transformation of significant numbers of business support staff.'
Category: Workforce Transformation
Winner: Glasgow City Council
Highly Commended: Nottingham City Council, Westminster Council
Commended: Sandwell MBC, Calderdale MBC, East Riding Council, Staffordshire CC, South Norfolk DC, Stoke on Trent City Council, Tameside MBC, West Dunbartonshire Council
Finalists: Enfield LBC, South Northamptonshire DC, South Ham DC/Devon BC, North Tyneside MBC
Sponsor: GatenbySanderson / PPMA
