The Performance Plan 2006

It is important for us to have the right staff with the right skills to deliver high quality services and achieve our objectives and priorities.

The Council has a workforce of up to 500 employees, a comparatively low number taking into account the range of services provided and in comparison with other councils.

In June 2005 the Council agreed its first Workforce Plan. The plan identified various aspects of workforce planning that needed to be addressed: -

• Age Profile: A workforce with disproportionately more staff in the older age ranges, with fewer young people joining the Council.
• Recruitment: Although turnover and recruitment difficulties had been addressed, it was recognised that recruitment would remain an important medium to long term issue for the Council because of national shortages in areas such as planning and environmental health, the cost of housing etc.
• Training and skills: We allocate significant resources to training and development and are satisfied that we have a high level of professional skills. There are however a number of general skills that we need to improve in areas such as: performance management, customer care and project management.
• Management: We need to improve our management capacity.
• Supporting our priorities - Customer Service: To support our priority of improving customer service we need to improve the ability of our managers to give leadership to a culture of customer service and performance improvement; we need to keep recruitment and retention under review to ensure that the Council has a continuity of skilled staff; we need to improve the skills and motivation of staff and a diverse workforce which is in tune with the needs and outlooks of our customers.
• Supporting our priorities: Growth Areas: We need a Medium Term Financial Strategy which will provide the resources to recruit and develop the necessary skills to work with partners in the planning, co-ordination and implementation of the new town of Northstowe and other growth areas.

2005/06 has been difficult for our employees with Council Tax capping and the possibility of redundancy, although in the end we managed to achieve the necessary reductions in our budgets with few redundancies. Turnover for 2005/06 increased from 8.1% in 2004/05 to 11%. However we achieved a reduction in days off through sickness (from 13.1 per employee in 2004/05 to 10.75 in 2005/06) and plan to reduce the figure further in future years.

In  2006/07 we plan to: -

• Review our strategic management through the Transformation Project.
• Address recruitment and retention by improving and learning from exit interviews and supporting managers in “hard to recruit” areas.
• Revise the Workforce Plan in the light of changed circumstances.