Corporate report

UKHSA Advisory Board: emerging people strategy

Updated 3 November 2022

Title of paper: Emerging People Strategy
Date: Thursday 29 September 2022
Sponsor: Jac Gardner, Chief People Officer

Purpose of the paper

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the emerging people strategy for the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). As a new organisation, and one with such a key dependency on the skills and expertise of its people to deliver our remit, it is imperative that we develop a people strategy that builds the right culture and enables us to attract and retain the very best talent.

Recommendation

The Advisory Board is asked to comment on the emerging people strategy for UKHSA, specifically on the six areas of strategic focus proposed to address the current issues and opportunities and help us achieve our people ambition.

The people strategy is currently under development and being socialised across stakeholder groups, so views and comments from the Board will be factored into the final drafting.

Organisational context

The development of both our culture and our talent is integral to our identity and role in ensuring health security for the nation. This means recruiting, developing, and retaining the highest-calibre people, building capability, and empowering our teams to collaborate and work well together in order to enhance our reputation as world-leading experts.

Shaping and sizing our organisation structure to deliver our remit is a key priority in 2022. We are reducing our workforce from just over 11,000 at March 2022 to 6,700 by March 2023 in accordance with our coronavirus (COVID-19) ramp down plans.

Over three-quarters of our workforce are delivering front-line services to the public with and through our partners in local authorities, the NHS, international agencies and working across government. Our expertise spans across clinical, health protection, science, laboratory and data analytics and surveillance skill sets, as well as having a key role in shaping policy.

Around 57% of our workforce is based outside of London, with the 43% based in London being inclusive of our regional health protection team and a laboratory site. We will progressively use people data and insights to inform our decision making and action plans to engage and develop our workforce. An initial infographic on our workforce is included in Appendix A.

UKHSA was formed in October 2021 by a 3-way merger of the health protection workforce of Public Health England (PHE), NHS Test and Trace, and the Joint Biosecurity Centre and in October, the Vaccine Task Force will transfer into UKHSA.

Creating a unified and cohesive organisation is an ongoing process; we have varying processes and terms and conditions of employment, and we are working to clarify accountabilities and our organisation structure.

To develop our culture, we are listening and learning together, hearing and acting upon the diverse voices and opinions of colleagues across UKHSA to develop a common sense of identity and effective and collaborative ways of working. We introduced our values of Impactful, Insightful and Inclusive earlier this year as the foundation on which we will build our culture.

Current status

As a new organisation, we continue to transition to our permanent structure and establish the roles, resources, systems and processes we need. Whilst the majority of UKHSA’s contingent labour is focussed on COVID-19 and is therefore being significantly reduced this financial year, many other roles filled by contingent labour are providing essential core functions so are being replaced by civil servants as we right-size the organisation and move to a better value for money permanent workforce.

UKHSA has had to retain a large contingent labour presence for longer than anticipated due to factors such as:

• the need to retain key skills to deliver organisational priorities against the backdrop of largescale organisational change
• the extreme difficulty of recruiting to posts which could only be advertised as temporary due to funding uncertainty
• the late budget settlement received, impairing effective longer term organisational workforce planning; and an ongoing need to bring in specialist technical skills not readily available within the Civil Service (such as in technology and data sub-specialisms)

We currently need to fill around 37% (1,500) of roles in order to replace contingent labour with civil servant employees and achieve our planned resource levels to the end of March 2023.

Being competitive in the market for the best talent is key; we have a fantastic opportunity to develop an employee value proposition that enables us to attract and recruit the right people, and engage, reward and retain our colleagues. To achieve this one of our immediate areas of focus is on developing a fit for purpose and affordable pay framework that is competitive and fair in attracting and rewarding the skills and expertise we need, and enables recognition of progression and performance.

Our leaders and line managers play a crucial role; they need to feel informed and able to empower their teams. They need to be clear on their accountabilities and our expectations of them and are supported to lead their teams effectively.

Our colleagues are passionate about what they do but the immense efforts of our workforce over the last 2 years and the change we are undergoing has left many feeling fatigued; we want them to feel valued, supported and energised, working in a culture that encourages everyone to contribute their best.

Career paths and professional development and progression for our people are so important for creating a new generation of specialists and professionals without whom national health security may be weakened, enabling us to share best practice and enhance global capacity and expertise. Our colleagues should be able to own and develop their career within UKHSA, as we develop the future skills and capabilities we need and are renowned for.

The HR team plays a key role as an enabling function in leading the implementation of the people strategy and in delivering what our customers need. For our HR processes to be more value adding they need to be simple, technology enabled and customer focused and the function itself needs to be sized and skilled accordingly and equipped to deliver the services and expertise needed.

Key strategic objectives

Six key objectives have been identified to reflect the organisation’s ambition in relation to its people.

A resilient organisation

We have a right-sized organisation that is designed to deliver our core services but with the flexibility to respond to health security incidents. We have clear accountabilities and we collaborate purposefully with each other, our key stakeholders and our partners

Attract and retain our talent

Talented people are excited to join us and contribute to our mission. We have an exciting employee value proposition, with the right reward structures, policies and development opportunities in place to ensure a great employee experience.

Leaders who excel

Our leaders and managers are informed and engaged in our business priorities and feel confident to empower their teams to deliver. They collaborate across the organisation to ensure the best outcomes and hold themselves and each other accountable for success

A values-led organisation

We have a culture where we encourage and support everyone to be at their best. We are performance focused and values led – impactful, insightful and inclusive.

Growing our expertise

The knowledge and skills of each and every one of our colleagues is critical to UKHSA; they help us to be world-leading in what we do. We provide personal and professional development and career paths across all disciplines and accessible to all, and we have active engagement with our external partners to build health science capabilities for the future.

Enhancing HR value

Our HR processes and services are efficient, technology enabled and customer focused. We add value through our leadership and advice on key people priorities and support the organisation through effective change.

We are making progress against our more immediate terms priorities:

A resilient organisation: we are on plan to achieve our rampdown of temporary or contingent labour, having reduced from 11,000 FTE to 6,800 at end August. Recruitment to roles remains an issue; we have a recruitment improvement plan in place and track recruitment weekly. Additionally, by the end of this year, we will have developed our blueprint for a core/flex operating model, ensuring we have the future capability and frameworks to flex and respond.

Leaders who excel: we have a UKHSA-wide change programme, sponsored by the Chief Executive, which is focused on clarifying organisational accountability, reviewing the size and shape of our leadership structure, and embedding governance and ways of working. Our new governance processes are already in place, accountabilities clarified and our leadership structure is proposed to be in place by the end of the year.

Enhancing HR value: we recently invested in a new enterprise resource planning system – Money and People Services (MaPS). The implementation of the HR module of this system through 2022 and 2023 will transform the way we store, access and process information about our people. It will change our ways of working to allow employee and manager self-serve, ensure our people processes are simple and efficient, and provide organisation-wide people data to help inform decision making. Changes to the structure of the HR team to be more customer aligned, operationally efficient and providing expert services are proposed and will be in place by end of the year.

Spotlight on Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)

‘We are Inclusive’ is a core component of UKHSA’s values, so our D&I approach is already well-developed and starting to demonstrate both internal engagement and external recognition.

UKHSA champions a data/evidence, delivery led approach with a focus on inclusion for all, attracting and championing diversity of talent from all backgrounds and welcoming alternative perspectives to inform decision making and make a difference for the benefit of the communities we serve.

Organisationally, this approach is critical to the successful delivery of UKHSA’s remit and core activities, particularly those pertaining to health equity.

We identified 12 D&I priority actions for 2022 to 2023 including:

• piloting 4 positive action campaigns in recruitment and/or development

• internally re-launching the government led Life Chances scheme with a focus on prison leavers

• continuing to develop our staff D&I networks

• undertaking the Civil Service Internal Assurance Framework and Benchmark Standard

Each action taken contributes to our UKHSA values, our People Group ambition to be an employer of choice and an organisation where people thrive and, ultimately supports UKHSAs work relating to health equity.

Key achievements include a full suite of diversity networks, each backed by their own Diversity Champion at ExCo level. Network membership has increased by over 10% since March 2022 and between them, the networks have published 51 blogs, 29 news items and communicated 82 events on the internal website. These covered campaigns including National Inclusion week, Black History Month, International Day of People with Disabilities, International Day of Women and Girls, LGBT+ History month, Carers Week and South Asian Heritage Month.

All UKHSA senior civil servants have a D&I objective, underpinned by a clear set of D&I standards. To demonstrate accountability and leadership, each ExCo member has published their personal D&I objectives on our internal website, UKHSA Pulse.

Achieved Carer Confident Level 2 (Accomplished) status, with Carers Passport, Line Manager Toolkit, Carers Charter all launched on UKHSA Pulse in June as part of Carers Week activity.

Extensive training provision: inclusive recruitment training has been piloted and rolled out to approximately 400 staff, 3 Let’s Talk About Race sessions have been delivered, and an in person ‘train the trainer’ D&I event delivered to staff at Rosalind Franklin Lab.

Launched an interactive Power BI D&I Dashboard across the business to chart progress against our 4 D&I key performance indicators and can be used to support Equality Impact Assessments.

Summary on people strategy implementation

The people strategy will continue to evolve over the next couple of months as various stakeholder groups are engaged on its content and the key deliverables. An implementation plan is under development, see Appendix C, setting out some of the immediate deliverables within this budget year, and the longer-term actions and projects that we will deliver in order to help us achieve our people ambitions over the next 3 years. The plan will be finalised by end October, shared with the People and Culture Committee and an update available to the Advisory Board thereafter.

Key performance indicators will be developed to ensure we are tracking progress, measuring and celebrating success as we continue to develop UKHSA as an employer of choice.

Jac Gardner, Chief People Officer, September 2022

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C