What We Do

The Public Services People Managers Association (PPMA) is the first choice association for people professionals across public services.

For more than 40 years we have been a collective voice for a highly qualified, passionate, committed and diverse public services Human Resources (HR) and Organisation Development (OD) community. We play a critical role in influencing key decision-makers and stakeholders involved in people management and workforce issues.

Why are we here?

Political, economic, financial and social challenge and change continue to make unprecedented demands on our public service workforce.  From public services policy reform, the opportunities digital offers to transform service design and deliver, the austerity agenda’s impact, and the rising expectation of customer expectations of public services, the context for HR and OD practitioners is highly complex and unique.  And demand for our contribution to our organisations is only rising.

It is a very challenging but rewarding time to be working across public services.  You can find our more about our vision and values and what we do on the rest of this page.

Our Vision

PPMA continuously strives to enhance, promote and raise the standards of people management and organisation development within public services. We provide a voice to represent the views and interests of the HR and OD community and we ensure that through membership of the Association, our community aspires, thrives and flourishes.

Our Values

We are a lively community – we encourage challenge, innovation, collaboration, continuing professional development and developing strong networks.  We have 7 core values:

  • We listen to all points of view
  • We talk to all stakeholders involved in workforce related matters
  • We activity promote the PPMA agenda – and make sure we are embedding the highest professional standards, conduct and practice
  • We provoke each other and our organisations to really think about workforce challenges
  • We influence national and local workforce agendas
  • We share best practice across our community, our sponsors and partners
  • We work hard to develop each other. Being the best we can be means our organisations can be the best they can too.

.PPMA Annual General Meeting 2022 / 2023PPMA Annual General Meeting 2022 /

PPMA AGM 2024

What We Do

The scope of any HR & OD professionals work is very broad.  So to maximise our contribution to the community, we focus on 4 core objectives. We:

  • Encourage good policy

Purposeful and good work is a huge driver for our community.  Delivering that across public services is driven by good and effective policy.  The impact of good policy can be inspiring, empowering and profoundly impactful – changing lives for the better.  Poor or confusing policy is a distraction no organisation can afford.  So, we both respond to consultations and work with a range of organisations to ensure that we proactively raise workforce issues that we know will be important in the short, medium and long term.

We contribute PPMA wide responses to government consultations and we also release statements on workforce matters.

  • Develop our talent

We invest in our community through our talent development programmes.  We’ve dedicated huge amounts of time over the years to developing aspiring, thriving and flourishing professionals at all stages in their careers.  We are enormously proud of what we do here and proud of all of our amazing graduates.  You can find out more here

  • Develop thought leadership

Our key Strategic themes drive our thought leadership and research programme.

  1. Leadership
  2. DEI
  3. People and recruitment
  4. Technology and transformation
  5. Talent development, learning and skills
  6. Wellbeing / employee support (benefits)

These themes are structured to be both future proof but flexible enough to accommodate new thinking and practice.

  • Sustain and nourish professional networks

We run national live events and regular webinars.  Our Annual Conference and PPMA Excellence in People Management Awards are our marquee events. We run fortnightly webinars which are also available on demand

You can find out more about our upcoming events here.