People strategy

Hinckley & Bosworth Borough Council needs a suitably skilled, motivated and engaged workforce that meets the changing needs of our residents as we continue to work through challenging times. 

Recruiting and retaining our staff has never been more of a priority given the significant movement in the jobs market because of the pandemic and Brexit. With the introduction of hybrid working, our staff have adapted to new ways of working while responding to ongoing and increasing customer demand.

Managing our diverse age profiles for both our workforce and customers is challenging given different needs and expectations. This is against a backdrop of an ongoing and unstable financial landscape, which will have an impact on service delivery. 

While there are clearly challenges it’s important to reflect on our achievements since our last People Strategy.

Our corporate plan for 2024 to 2028 sets out our vision in creating great places to live, work and enjoy and has three strategic aims.

This People Strategy aligns to the council’s Corporate Plan supporting all three aims, and directly supporting 
the aim ‘People’. 

We want our employees to feel valued, inspired and motivated to provide the best services to our residents. 

To do this we will: 

• Attract and retain a skilled and motivated workforce
• Encourage a positive working environment so that wellbeing is supported, and staff feel ‘psychologically safe’ 
• Have a workforce that is adaptable and resilient to change 

The challenges arising from struggling to recruit and retain staff is a key strategic issue particularly affecting ‘pockets’of our workforce including roles such as. planners, solicitors and environmental health officers.

However, in recent years national influences – such as our departure of the European Union, the Covid-19 pandemic,and the private sector paying more competitively than local government has had a broader impact across the UK as some workers left the market prematurely.

This directly affected our wider service delivery such as Housing and Streetscene Services, resulting in the council developing an innovative partnership with a local employer to provide HGV Drivers to assist with service delivery.

While we are still experiencing gaps in some areas, the general market has now settled, with broader recruitment shortages having now recovered. However, we still need to develop and retain our new staff and support the staff who have worked through difficult times during high demand and staffing gaps.

Given the challenging employment environment, we value a workforce that not only reflects the community we serve, but is rich in diversity, experience and talent. This means we are best equipped to the challenges we face and enables and nurtures our younger staff members. We value and respect each other’s opinions and recognise that all staff members have a contribution to make.

Age:

• 6%: under 26 years
• 16%: 26-35 years 
• 23%: 36-45 years 
• 25%: 46-55 years
• 27%: 56-65 years 
• 3%: over 66 years

• Hinckley & Bosworth: 53.90%
• Nuneaton and North Warks: 9.56%
• Blaby: 6.25%
• Leicester: 6.05%
• North West Leicestershire: 4.68%
• Harborough: 4.68%
• West Midlands 2.92%
• Coventry; 2.34%
• Rugby and Northants: 2.15%
• Charnwood: 1.95%
• Oadby and Wigston: 0.98%
• Other areas in the UK: 4.54%
   

Data collection is key to monitoring our workforce. The Corporate Equality Steering Group (CESG) oversees this to ensure that staff in minority strands do not suffer any detriment. We are committed to deliver equality training for all sectors of our workforce and recently updated our grievance procedure. We also do drama-based training to bring examples to life.

In the last 20 years, the age profile was disproportionately higher at 45 years and above. However, recent data shows that the workforce profile has shifted positively and is more proportionate across the middle three age ranges. This has been influenced by the national employment landscape.

Recruitment is a competitive business. We need to ensure that we are an Employer of Choice if we are to do our best for our communities. We also understand how important it is to continue to invest in our staff as the cost of recruitment ‘churn’ is high. 

Last year we invested in a new recruitment system which has allowed us to speed up and modernise how we recruit and onboard candidates, which has improved the overall experience as we do not want to deter top talent.

We are also keen to build on the positive work we have done so far in developing our trainee workforce and raising our profile in schools. While local government offers generous employment packages such as hybrid working and pensions, we do need to collectively, as a sector, raise our national brand profile in line with other public sector employers. We want to build on this by developing a broader employment brand by adopting the LGA’s national recruitment campaign 'make a difference work for your local council' to attract prospective candidates.

Since we introduced hybrid working, the pace of technical transformation required has been significant. We need to ensure that IT systems match the requirements of both customers and staff and develop our intelligence to assess our staff technical skills. 

Equally, good communication across the council for both staff and customers is paramount, and the communication infrastructure needs to be updated to reflect this change. This work will form part of the Digital Strategy refresh to understand how we can support our workforce and deliver toolkits and training to support their needs. We also need to ensure that our HR policies and procedures match the pace of change and support our new way of working. 

We have done a lot of work at senior level to support employee wellbeing given that the transition to hybrid working may have led to isolation for some staff members. This was identified following a pulse hybrid working survey. 

Additionally, the last general staff survey carried out in 2022 showed that whilst there was a positive increase in staff perception that their work-life balance had improved, they highlighted concerns about ongoing increased stress levels due the cost-of-living crisis which has increased customer demand. 

In response, we mandate team days on site to encourage team links as we believe that staying connected is important as an organisation.

We also established a wellbeing group, led at senior level, surveying staff via a workplace health needs assessment. The outcomes of this survey have allowed us to shape and deliver health initiatives to support staff with their physical and mental wellbeing. The group, working with our Cultural Services Team, has championed many initiatives including menopause staff group, health themed wellbeing bi-monthly updates to staff, Health MOT’, Art Therapy Group and Pilates. We need to maintain the momentum to continue supporting our staff. 

We have successfully delivered a coaching programme, ‘Be Inspired’. In this, coaching skills were built into the way managers support and develop team members. We know that since the introduction of hybrid working, we need to re-visit our approach to coaching and reconsider how we will further embed coaching within the organisation. This will effectively support and motivate staff working in a challenging and demanding environment. 

Our action plan to support the strategy is set out in the next section.