Effective workforce development ensures that councils are ready for transformation and can effectively forecast and mitigate the risks associated with changing needs.
What is workforce development?
The ability to align the workforce to the needs of the organisation through an ongoing process of skills development and effective management of change, enabling employee development activity to be aligned to business need and ensuring that adverse impacts of restructuring are minimised through early planning for, re-training and redeployment.
Knowledge
- Knowledge of organisation development methodologies and models.
- Understanding of change management methodologies.
- Understanding of project management methodologies and tools.
Skills
Able to:
- Analyse workforce data: To enable understanding of the impact of people related changes on overall workforce strategy, service plans and individual circumstances.
- Think strategically: To develop a workforce strategy, and consultation and engagement policy that takes into consideration planned transformation to achieve organisational goals.
- Provide advice and guidance: Drawing on knowledge of employment law, and HR policies and procedures to guide those leading the change.
- Identify stakeholders: Impacted by transformation and therefore anticipate their learning and development / displacement needs.
- Develop contextual awareness: To ensure that the approach to engagement and consultation aligns with and will be well received within the existing culture and ways of working of the organisation.
- Write and evaluate job descriptions: To support the achievement of the transformation outcomes and respond to workforce challenges, ensuring evaluation is fair and comparable.
- Engage effectively: Build trust and show empathy with staff and trade unions.
- Be emotionally intelligent: Recognising, understanding, and managing emotional responses effectively in the achievement of outcomes.
- Develop workforce support programmes: To help those displaced or at risk of redundancy to be redeployed within the organisation or seek alternative career prospects.
- Manage risks: Identify, assess, and seek to mitigate HR related risk.
Behaviours
Behaviours associated with transition and change management require team members to be:
- Fair / objective
- Collaborative
- Empathetic
- Respectful
- Inclusive
- Solution focused
- Resilient
- Adaptable and pragmatic
- Able to act with integrity
A related HR maturity index has been created to enable councils to understand their current maturity and to set, and work towards, a target state. This can be downloaded below.
