Chris Henning, Executive Director of Place, has been leading on 3 areas in our Organisation Action Plan, these are:
- how we make decisions as a council
- recruitment
- procurement
With the support of colleagues from each of our 4 departments, some great progress has been made in these areas.
We held a fantastic session on 3 February 2023 in the Member's Room with around 40 colleagues who asked to be involved. This was an intensive 4-hour long session where we split people into 3 groups to walk through these processes and share their experiences, thoughts and creative ideas for how we could make some improvements.
Our workforce planning and recruitment teams are putting in place some actions on things like:
- removing some of the hold ups and bottle necks in our vacancy control process, by ensuring approval is sought at the right levels
- reviewing where we ask managers for information and ensuring that it is captured and flows through the full process so we don't need to request the same information multiple times
- creating more visibility of the recruitment process through better automation and available tools so managers can see what stage the request is at and removing the need to chase people
- provide more guidance and workshops on interviewing and selection, as well as how to give feedback to unsuccessful candidates
- reviewing our new starter process to ensure they get access to the IT, equipment and other things they need on day one of starting
- continuing to improve our time to hire
- improving a lot of the guidance available to managers so they can fully understand and follow the recruitment process from start to finish, helping to fill their roles more quickly
Our procurement team are putting in place some actions on things like:
- making procurement guidance more visible to managers on our website, including the different types of procurement and which route to apply, depending on the product needed
- making the decision tree more prominent on the website and linked to the guidance
- improvements to the '3 quotes' template to make it easier to understand and complete
- improving the way in which we link in with other teams, such as IT, to minimise duplication and different forms a person is asked to complete
- creating more clarity of expected timescales from the start to finish of a procurement process
- better understanding of who does what regarding things like contracts being signed off
Our democratic services team are putting in place some actions on things like:
- developing e-learning modules on local government basics, governance and decision-making basics and how to write a decision-making report
- including information on decision-making and councillors as part of our corporate induction - this is already live on Derbyshire Learning Online
- creating better awareness of the help on offer amongst officers
- working with the new project management office to embed a better understanding of the decision-making process amongst newly appointed project managers
- creating more clarity around contact with councillors and also a better understanding of what they do
Some of these actions will be quick fixes and others will take a bit more time to implement, but no doubt many colleagues will see improvements in the coming weeks and months. Our 2023 employee survey launches next week - please take the opportunity to share your views.