HR directors warned: Prove your worth or you will be dumped

With budget cuts and unprecedented job losses in the public sector now an inevitability, two senior public sector HR directors have warned the industry: raise your performance and add value, or you will see yourselves budgeted out.

The CIPD has predicted a colossal 725,000 public-sector job losses by 2015 and speaking just before the chancellor George Osborne's Emergency Budget at the Human Resources Forum on board Arcadia, Martin Tiplady, HR director of the Metropolitan Police Service, made it clear HR departments would by no means be safe. He issued the stark warning: "If we don't do HR with attitude, we will be dumped."

He added: "My organisation didn't have an HR department before I came, so I know it can survive without one. My job is to make the organisation more effective but nationally HR professionals need to understand and facilitate their businesses. They have to take a good hard look at themselves and ask if they have got it right. We need to continue to be relevant and cheaper and measure ourselves as the best.

"Let's not get carried away with whether or not HR sits on the board," he continued. "I think HR has become obsessed with job titles and what it is called - does anyone else care? We need to ask ourselves if this is a worthwhile argument. HR departments need to give the business good, pragmatic, common-sense solutions. They need to give a response today. It must be swift and jargon-free."

Tiplady concluded: "If the (HR) function is to survive we need to work quickly and there has never been a better time to do this. It is not just about being advocates for the workforce. We need to have independence of mind. The future of HR is about realising how what you do can affect your organisation's finished product."

Following on from Tiplady's presentation, Graham White, HR director of Westminster City Council, said: "We know that over the next three months 300 members of staff at my organisation will go and that includes one in four of my HR department. As employers we have to be honest with them about this but provide them with a sense of security no matter how short. We told them about job losses straight away and as a result staff engagement levels have never dropped below 60%."

He added: "Once a week we have a 'stand up' session where we talk about our immediate plans and raise concerns. So at a time when most employees have a good reason not to be motivated, they are because they know exactly what they are there to do."

White went on to explain his belief that in the public sector 80% of what an employee does is check someone else's work, and he added: "This is not supporting employees. You have to be a doer.

"The way to motivate is by making your staff feel they are part of a team," he continued. "At Westminster we still have a monthly 'Above and Beyond' award for staff who have done something more than their own job to support the team around them."

White's presentation got a rousing response from delegates when he said the secret to good HR is not high budget initiatives, but employing the 'FAB' approach of "fairness, acknowledgement and befriending" in the workplace.

Figure it out

51% of public-sector employers are planning to implement a recruitment freeze this year

16% of private-sector employers are planning a recruitment freeze this year

68% of public-sector employers are planning to reduce the number of recruits they hire

32% in the private-sector are planning to reduce the number of new recruits

Source: CIPD.