Workforce effectiveness

Aligning strategy and the workforce

Doing more with less

The public sector is facing unprecedented financial challenge with cuts of between 15 and 30% predicted. Organisations in this sector are now adept at reducing budgets through traditional methods such as recruitment freezes and overtime bans.

Today, they need a more radical approach to achieve the right level of savings, without severely impacting on service delivery.

Facing the issue

Our clients are acutely aware of the situation and they are concerned about the following:

• The social impact and employee relations implications of workforce change.
• Making sure the right costs are removed.
• How to make changes that immediately impact on key service delivery.
• Making cuts that will impact on the sustainability of future provision.
• Getting more from their people without running into employment relations issues.
• Making changes in a timely and cost efficient manner.
• Linking organisational transformation to workforce transformation.

How we help

Our Delivering Workforce Value diagnostic is an integrated, rigorous, evidence-based approach underpinned by benchmark data.

It enables public sector organisations to understand the profile of their existing workforce and the most appropriate way of aligning future resource demands with resource supply.

We work with practitioners in public sector organisations on the outputs of the diagnostic to identify where innovative solutions could be used in conjunction with the more traditional mechanisms such as exit programmes and improved performance management processes.

For example, one way to retain employment at the same time as reducing the employee cost base is through the targeted transfer of staff to third party private sector employment organisations.

The benefits of our approach include:

• cost savings;
• mitigating the risk of economic, political and social restructuring;
• greater access to a flexible employment pools;
• increased performance and staff retention, and;
• ensuring the right skills are in the right place, at the right time.

This approach complements the service transformation necessary to implement sustainable cost reduction.

Our team can stretch and challenge thinking and introduce tried and tested workforce change management tools and techniques to address the issues in the workforce aspects of the public agenda.