“The only person who likes change is a baby with a wet nappy.” That quote from Mark Twain (yes, really) is critical to remember when embarking on any change programme, according to HR director and transformational change specialist Fiona Irvine. “One of the challenges with change is most people don’t like it,” she told delegates at the SPDS Annual Conference. “We have to bear that in mind when we are going through the transformation journey. It’s hard to get people on the bus with you, but it’s really important.”

Irvine shared her story of leading a transformational change programme for the London Borough of Hillingdon, including restructuring the HR team and using service-redesign and zero-based budgeting to develop a roadmap for delivering £54m in savings over three years.

The challenge

The London Borough of Hillingdon is London’s second largest borough, with £1bn in revenue and offering around 800 services. It employs about 2,400 permanent staff and 500 through agencies. Under new leadership, the council was facing significant budget challenges, with reserves only likely to last between 12 and 18 months. The organisation had a traditional command and control culture and the challenge, common in most local councils, of balancing political decisions against budget.

When Irvine joined in 2022 as an HR consultant with Grant Thornton (later coming on board as interim head of HR and then transformation and business change lead), she found a “slow” culture in need of a shake-up. With a background in the private sector, it was her first experience of working in a local council.

Transforming the HR function

Irvine’s first job was to fix HR. The function had 36 members of staff, more than 17 different and unintegrated HR systems, a complex payroll and no HR strategy. HR was not at the top table, had limited budget and was experiencing high levels of failure demand. Recruitment was “completely out of control”, with a large number of vacancies and up to 180 days time-to-hire in some cases. Not surprisingly, said Irvine, “the team was totally broken”.

With seven weeks to turn things around, Irvine first focused on TLC for the current team. She interviewed every team member to fully understand their role, competence and motivations, diving deep into what the team actually did to identify the gaps. She simultaneously conducted an end-to-end review with all stakeholders, finding out what they were getting from the HR team and what they wanted.

The findings informed the actions. While six members of the HR team exited, it was mutually agreed and they were given outplacement support. “What worked was communications and being transparent,” Irvine said. “I went overboard on communications, but that’s what moved the team forward.”

She then recruited into the gaps and focused on getting the basics right. Every policy was reviewed and updated, every process reviewed and mapped with a focus on systems integration. Line managers received training on people skills and a credible engagement survey was introduced. The senior HR team created an HR strategy and a business partner model was introduced, focused on specialist recruitment support. “We educated the business on what good HR looks like,” Irvine added.

The work has delivered a “step change” in internal perception of HR and annualised savings of £250,000. “We had a very happy HR team and we significantly improved recruitment and attrition,” said Irvine. “We basically eliminated reliance on recruitment agencies.”

On reflecting what didn’t go so well, she said that hiring an HR leader from outside of the public sector turned out to be a mistake. “They didn’t have the maturity to deal with things like the elected members,” she said. “You have to have a certain degree of maturity and pragmatism and not take yourself too seriously in that environment, so it’s not for everyone from the private sector.” She added that this individual started unwinding some of the strategic decisions, which had a negative impact:  “If you create an HR strategy and structure, you need to leave it alone for a couple of years or trust goes out the window.”

Service redesign

The next stage of the transformation journey was service redesign. “We took a human-centred design approach to problem solving, putting residents, staff and users at the heart of the process to design and deliver services,” said Irvine. “We were trying to design services that were fit for purpose, modern and future-proof.”

Human-centred design ensures services are accessible and inclusive for everyone. It goes hand-in-hand with agile delivery, Irvine explained, given budgets were tight and teams were stretched. “The agile approach allowed us to fail and learn fast,” Irvine added. Taking a cross-functional approach was key, with representatives from the service area, transformation, HR, data, digital and communication teams.

The team followed the Government Digital Service Methodology: discovery (understanding the context and problems to solve); alpha (testing options by prototyping); beta (building and refining options); live (continuously improving).

Irvine shared a powerful case study of transforming fostering services at the Borough, taking a highly collaborative approach to develop and rollout the best fostering carer offer in London, essentially turning fostering into a viable career through enhanced remuneration and support. When the new offer was launched, foster carer applications went up 250% and the council is already achieving £22,000 savings a week through just two placements. (You can read more here.)

Zero-based budgeting

Irvine shared how the council embarked on a zero-based budgeting exercise across the organisation, with 80 colleagues coming out of their day jobs to work on the plans. “Zero-based budgeting is not for the faint hearted,” she acknowledged. “But it is great for getting people together: it breaks down silos and helps explore the root causes and identify cross-cutting initiatives.” She cited one example of an insight being “ridiculous” procurement processes, with different parts of the council getting different prices from the same suppliers.

She advised that “it’s worth grabbing the small ideas and running with them”. “There were lots of small initiatives, something as simple as looking at our assets. We weren’t thinking about the best use. As a result, we’ve changed some of the children’s residential settings, and the council are starting to look at running their own adult care provisions using our own buildings.”

On lessons learned, she flagged the need to manage expectations: “Zero-based budgeting doesn’t mean any more budget!” She also said it was hard for people to understand the financial realities facing the council, and that defending manifesto pledges when other areas were reaching crisis point was challenging. “You have to park it,” she advised. “It is what it is: get on with what you can influence.” The process is time consuming and it’s important to get external support in running it.

Time for HR to step up

“Now, more than ever, HR has a key role to play in supporting their local authorities with transformation,” Irvine concluded. She advised that all HR professionals in local authorities could benefit from developing transformational change skills. “Change in local authorities is inevitable,” she added. “HR is best-placed to work with chief executives to drive that transformation.”

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Blog by Katie Jacobs, an award-winning freelance journalist, writer and editor, who specialises in writing about the world of work.

She was previously Editor of HR Magazine and Senior Stakeholder Lead at the CIPD.