workforce design

(also known as Bring your child's teacher to work day)

I've just spent two days at the New Types of Worker conference in Glasgow "Excellent Out Of Adversity". The keynote speakers were excellent – in fact everyone was excellent!

The Health and Care Sector Skills Councils had invited the head of one of the other sector skills councils: Jack Matthews of the Improve Food & Drink Skills Council. Not only was he very passionate, not only was he very funny, but he made a lot of very important points, entirely relevant to the enormous combined workforce in health and social care (over 2 million).

At last there is clear blue water between the UK political parties in the run up to the General Election - over taxation.
And the parties are acting true to traditional form - Labour wants to raise taxes, and Conservatives want to lower them.
But the picture isn't quite so straightforward.  The Tax selected, National Insurance, is actually a tax on the poor, taxing those on low and middle income at a higher rate than those on high income.

Promoted to the level of their incompetence! How common is this? Actually, it's quite a natural process. Someone who has been competent in a role often finds themselves promoted. There will come a point, unless they are conscious, continuous learners, where they will end up in a role for which they aren't competent, and labour laws and the way management work mean that once promoted someone can't be demoted again.

At Ask! restaurant in Durham, where we went on Saturday night with friends, the toilets are more discreet than most.
There are individual cubicles: perfect for  capacity planning. This means that, if you think that women will require more cubicles than men, you can allocate more cubicles to women. And they have done exactly this, four allocated women versus two allocated to men.

Senior Management and Director pay in public service seems to have gone up and up recently. Are we really attracting better talent, or is it a game of "who can have the most expensive Chief Exec"? Public Servants used to be motivated to serve the public. The rewards are (still) there - job security, first class training, holidays, hours, gold-plated pension, an honour from the queen. Salaries weren't quite as good as the private sector, but the overall package was probably about the same Attitudes are changing. But which came first?

Let's be realistic: this crunch won't last for ever. And when it ends, consumers will need new products. We're going to need innovation in financial services (after all, we can't reuse the failed products of last year and preceding decades). New delivery services (keeping food miles down, recognising more purchasing on the internet, even home delivery services from a trip down the high street so you can go on spending!).

They say another key difference between clinicians and managers is that managers are only interested in what will make money, whereas clinicians are only interested in delivering the highest quality. I don't know if you've studied Lean methodology in any detail? It's a series of techniques for improving the delivery of services and products, and NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement has released a number of guides of its Productive series, Productive Ward, etc. This is about getting people to question the way we do things round here, to see if there's a better way.