Dear PPMA colleagues and friends

As we approach conference, our President Karen Grave shares her hopes and expectations for this year’s annual conference.

“Hi everyone, I’m so looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Birmingham. As ever in the run up to conference the team is both excited and anxious to make sure that we haven’t forgotten anything critical! Putting on annual conference is a huge undertaking and before I share my thoughts, I want to say an enormous thank you to Leatham, Kim, Grace and everyone else who makes it possible for us to put this event on. Our focus will be on making sure you have a fantastic conference experience!

I try to take stock of the progress we have made before each of our events. Last year in Newcastle was a real thrill and it was a very personal opportunity for me to return to the place I studied at Uni. This year, I’m looking forward to conference with the same enthusiasm but for a number of reasons:

• We’ve got a great theme ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ ,that always makes me smile just when I think about it. But there is a lot more to this than a happy slogan. We have a real opportunity to increase our learning about the impact of leadership, employee engagement, wellbeing and productivity on our workforce colleagues. I’m fascinated about this link because I think it we can collectively crack this with our colleagues, it will really help us harness all of the potential of our people. It’s good for them but more importantly it’s critical for the citizens we serve. Each year we see more and more external pressure on our ability to deliver services. Finances are a constant challenge. However in my view, there is an increasing and potentially more divisive threat. Our politics are increasingly fragile and it’s harder to see policy proposals being developed that help those of us in public services really address our most pressing challenges. So to overcome this, we need to take our destiny in our own hands – enabling and empowering our people isn’t just a nice to consider – it’s an imperative for all of us. I can’t wait to hear from John, Maria, Beverley, Jamil and Shonette and of course, all of our amazing fringe session speakers. We’re going to learn a lot.
• We’ll be welcoming existing and new members to conference. It’s fantastic to meet old friends again and find out what’s happened since we last met in Newcastle. But it’s always really brilliant to welcome new members to the PPMA family. We’ll be saying a big hello to all of them – but in particular, I’m really chuffed to welcome HR & OD colleagues from all Greater Manchester Local Authorities. They are going to add a fascinating dimension to our community and I hope we will learn a lot from their DevoManc experiences in particular.
• This is also our first national event since our restructure last year. We’ve come a long way since then and we now have appointments to all of our key posts. Our first Extended Board meeting at the end of March was so exciting. Our new Theme Leads and our Regional Chairs brought energy, new ideas and a commitment to our collective future that left me feeling really hopeful.  You will have the opportunity to meet Board colleagues over the 3 days, so please make sure you take the time to meet them. Every single Board member undertakes their role on a voluntary basis – that is a huge commitment but they do it because of a collective belief in the value of PPMA. If you are interested in getting involved in the running of the association please come and talk to one of us. Board members will have a different colour lanyard to conference attendees, so we will all be easy to spot!
• We’ll have plenty of exciting things to say about our membership offering too. I am very proud of the breadth and depth of our offering – it compares very well to other professional associations. Our ability to offering a compelling value proposition depends on the great support from our existing and new sponsors, the commitment of our Board members and all of your ongoing support. You should never underestimate the amount of work that goes into volunteering for Board roles, so I encourage all of you to take advantage of what we offer.
• And last but not least, we will be announcing the winners of our PPMA Excellence in People Management Awards programme. I love this part of Gala Dinner – it’s always brilliant to recognise the efforts of our winners and everyone who takes part. With the pressures of work, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there is a huge amount of innovative, creative and inspiring work being done day in and day out across public service HR & OD. Gala Dinner is our opportunity to reflect on that, enjoy good food and great company and kick back and have fun.

And talking about fun, we’re really looking forward to our Rock the Kasbah theme…….

I can’t wait to see you soon!”

Hello PPMA members and friends

The 2019 PPMA Apprentice of the Year competition was a fantastic event and showcased the amazing up and coming talent we are lucky enough to have in the public sector. We had an unprecedented number of applicants and the 16 brilliant finalists were invited to a 2 day event at Warwick Business School. The judging panel were unable to differentiate between 2 outstanding candidates, so the decision was made to select both as our winners…and we’d like to congratulate Daniel John representing South Gloucestershire Council and Kirsten Moore representing Central Bedfordshire Council.

Below, Kirsten Moore shares with us her experiences from the event and legacy she aims to leave behind:

“I went into the competition not knowing what to expect. I had already felt challenged by the application questions but was excited to see what the activities and assessments would bring. The two days took us back to basics, focusing on self-confidence and presentation skills, as well as working under pressure and group coordination. The judges, coaches and other apprentices created such a safe environment, allowing all of us to try new things and push ourselves. There was so much support from everyone that we forgot that it was a competition! The other apprentices had such interesting, and often moving, stories and great passion for the sector they are working in.

After an intense first day, I stopped just focusing on the competition and instead set personal goals for the experience, ensuring I took all I could from my time with PPMA – and I am so pleased I did, as I feel this is what might have helped me to become joint winner.

Presenting my personal legacy allowed me to reflect on how beneficial undertaking an apprenticeship has been for all areas of my life. Professionally, I am completing a transferable qualification, where I can help to direct my personal development and training opportunities, whilst working. Personally, the security and my enjoyment of the role now allows me to focus time on my legacy: fundraising for Parkinson’s UK, which is a cause very close to me.

It has been great to challenge myself and I have learnt so much about myself, personally and professionally. The biggest thing I am taking away from the competition is self-confidence and the courage to push myself forward more in my development. ”

Kirsten Moore, PPMA Joint Apprentice of the Year 2019

We hope that Kirsten has an amazing year and we look forward to celebrating with her and all of our other talent programme winners at this year’s PPMA Conference, which will be held at The Hilton Metropole Birmingham, on 14^th to 16^th May. If you’d like to join us, then book your place here.

Following on from a fab MJ/Green Park June roundtable (RT), Green Park put this LG focused report

together. Please share – and read – this important report here.

Key findings:

• Green Park’s Local Government Leadership Report 2018 reveals a chronic lack of ethnocultural diversity across the Public Sector
• Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) CEOs represent just 3 per cent of the heads of the UK’s Unitary Authorities, County Councils, District Councils, Metropolitan Boroughs and London Boroughs
• Across the Top 20 senior management positions in Local Government organisations, just 3.7 per cent are held by BAME leaders compared to 7.1 per cent in the FTSE 100
• Green Park’s Local Government Leadership 2018 report reveals women are still significantly underrepresented at senior management level in Local Government
• Despite women representing 51 per cent of working age population, they account for just 39 per cent of all senior positions across the UK’s Unitary Authorities, County Councils, Metropolitan Boroughs, London Boroughs and District Councils

The headlines remind us that. there is a long way to go before we see a more balanced representation of groups across our Leadership. This matters because the evidence shows that organisations perform better with more diversity. #thisisastrategicimperative. Looking forward to the follow up RT on 7 Nov.

For more details and to read the official press release please see below:

DIVERSITY CRISIS IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT LEADERSHIP

THE FICTION OF GENDER PARITY IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT LEADERSHIP 

Dear PPMA members and friends

Our blog post this week is the first in our ‘Let’s Talk’ series and today we’re focusing on Leadership and why the recent Fawcett reports findings are so troubling and what HR & OD needs to do in response.

It’s been another interesting summer for a range of reasons, not least the publication of a number of reports on the experience of women across the UK. The Fawcett report published ‘Sounds Familiar’ in April, which focused on the experience of younger women. Whilst Fawcett, in conjunction with other organisations, published their interim findings on ‘Does Local Government Work for Women?’. I’ve waited until the first week or so of responses are out of the way so we keep it fresh in the news, before I responded.

Bluntly put society and local government is not working for women in the same way as it is for our male colleagues, fathers, husbands, partners, uncles, etc. You’ll know from my inaugural speech to conference this year, that the suffragette movement inspired me as an 11 year old schoolgirl and continues to inspire me deeply. It has never occurred to me why women should have had such a struggle to obtain the vote and I continue to struggle with the idea that women do not have an equal experience to men in the workplace and society at large. As I put it so eloquently in the MJ recently, it’s 2017!!

Some of the report’s findings are deeply troubling:

•  33 percent of elected local councillors in England are women, an increase of just five percentage points since 1997.
• The percentage of women Members of Parliament has risen by more than 10 percentage points, from 18 to 29 percent, over the same period.
• 80% of councillors elected in any one year are incumbents. That leaves little room for change. Men were 1.6 times more likely to be long-term incumbent in the 2016 elections than women were.
• There are just 56 women council leaders in England – 17 percent of the total and just a three percentage point increase over the last ten years. There are only two women council leaders in Wales out of a total of 22 councils
• 59% of girls and young women aged 13-21 have faced some form of sexual harassment at school or college in the past year
•  One third of women have experienced sexual assault on campus
•  63% of women aged 18–24 have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work compared to an average of 52% amongst women of all ages.

And I could do on. Now, issues of equality don’t just affect women – we have to be honest about that. There are far more women working in HR and OD than men, but we all know that our male colleagues are as effective as their female colleagues. But the disparity in experience that women have is stark and we cannot avoid it. The constant stream of headlines and research mean that as your President, I must speak out about this issue.

Over the years I have heard from male colleagues about some of their less positive experiences of the workplace. But, there is no doubt that I have heard more negative stories from women at work. These range from women being excluded from decision making opportunities, to being demeaned at work, having less promotional opportunities and in some instances, women have reported being harassed and bullied. Obviously, as HR & OD professionals, we work incredibly hard on the ground to implement a range of interventions to try and address some of the issues involved.

Research, gender pay reporting, unconscious bias training, equalities legislation all keep us busy. Really understanding why the issues arise is key to us being able to successfully close the gaps in experience. Most recent Scandinavian research shows that Women are better suited to leadership than men. This is a positive finding, and reinforced similar reports, but other findings around gender pay gap reporting are showing really disappointing results. For example, 1 in 10 employers recently reported paying women less than men. Equalities legislation is identifying some terrible practice, but we can assume that costs and potential negative publicity when bringing employment tribunals mean that many more cases aren’t progressed.

From my perspective there are a number of ways of looking at this:

• Either legislation isn’t good enough and needs to change – although in many instances government legislations can cause blowback and we spend too much time dealing with that
•  Our training/development interventions aren’t hitting the spot
• We need to do a lot more to educate our young people to address these worrying findings so that they don’t persist into adulthood
• Job design and flexible working practices may be inadvertently preventing women from building careers that fulfil their capabilities
• The stereotypical approach to women being the main carers and being expected to take time out of full time work is resulting in a misunderstanding of women’s ambitions.

We can’t change these things overnight but I think there are some really fundamental issues to think about. I’ve been struck by the launch of the Guardian Women in Public Service project which we talked to you about last week. Jo Miller, SOLACE President and Chief Executive of Doncaster Council makes a pretty logical point. Women make up half the population and I’m sure that, as a woman, I feel as strongly about issues as any man I know – I’d go as far to say that I’m sure I feel more strongly about some issues too!! Jo said ‘if you don’t like something, change it’. We have the power, we need to act on it. The recent issues about high heels in the workplace says it all!

So, we should think about this through the lens of making sure that we focus on gender balance because we know that we will deliver more representative services. I’m going to be taking a very proactive role in the SOLACE Women in Leadership group and in The Guardian project as you would expect.

I’ll be updating your more about the scope of that work in the next few weeks. But in closing this update, I want to ask all of you to work tirelessly within your organisations to work with everyone in making sure we develop policies, opportunities and jobs that reflect those we serve. Wouldn’t it be lovely to say in five years’ time ‘do you remember when women were paid less than men for being a woman’ and no-one can!

Dear PPMA colleagues and friends

As you know our President, Caroline Nugent and PPMA Policy Board members have been working hard on our new branding and approach to marketing the great work PPMA does. As part of that work, we have decided that we want to make more use of our ‘Let’s talk, people’ strapline. We really like it and think it helps us develop some common branding.

We’re finalising our research programme and events calendar for the year and you will start to see these being branded with our new themes. They are quite broad, align with our key business plan objectives and priorities. So, here they are…….

• Let’s Talk: Leadership
• Let’s Talk: Transformation
• Let’s Talk: Developing our organisations
• Let’s Talk: Future Workforce
• Let’s Talk: Digital
• Let’s Talk: Wellbeing
• Let’s Talk: Evidence
• Let’s Talk: PPMA Global

You’ll notice that we’ve run a number of events recently with two of our Platinum sponsors under the Let’s Talk: Digital theme. Jobsgopublic and Matrix SCM have offered our members and colleagues from other public services their own perspective on this red hot issue. And of course our joint research with EduServ is absolutely focused on the digital agenda and we’ve a Webinar event coming up with them this week.

We think that using these themes gives us a bit of additional clarity and structure in terms of organising our offering to you. It also means that we have the flexibility to examine a number of issues within a theme. This is important because, as we know, it’s not always easy – or desirable – to fit our work into neat boxes and definitions. So for example, the issue of pay and reward will continue to capture our attention as HR professionals. We might choose to look at this under our Let’s Talk: Future Workforce theme, or indeed Let’s Talk: Developing our organisations.

We’ll be updating the website shortly to explain a bit more about each theme. Please do let us know what you think, we read all of your emails and comments and we’ll respond as quickly as we can.

Next week, Caroline will be launching a new series of blog posts on Let’s Talk: Leadership and VP Karen Grave, sets the scene for us.

“Both Caroline and I were delighted to attend the launch of the Women in Public Service project in London on July 24th. This critical project is led by Stacey-Rebecca Karlsson at The Guardian, who as you probably know, is a great friend to the PPMA and she is also a significant role model in the media world. Like many of us – male and female, Stacey has been perplexed by the findings of the recent Fawcett report and Caroline will have plenty to say on this next week.

We often think about the scarcity of women in senior leadership positions in terms of diversity. As HR professionals, we are absolutely duty bound to implement government legislation, but I think that we would all privately acknowledge that there are times that government policy doesn’t always deliver what it’s best intentions tried to do. I have started to wonder whether the best way of thinking about this is to think through the lens of leadership instead. And of course, by doing the right thing on the ground and not getting distracted by complex initiatives!

That view was reinforced by an inspiring introduction to the Women in Public Service project by Jo Miller, SOLACE President and Chief Executive of Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council. Jo’s view – and I think she is dead right – is that in the most basic analysis, women make up half the population. Focusing on gender balance then increases the likelihood that the decisions we make for our citizens will be better. I loved this and I think the focus on the outcomes we deliver for our citizens is the goal that we must not lose sight of.

Jo, through her utterly authentic approach to leadership – i.e., she’s really honest –has taken some flak for her dedication to developing women in leadership. The legitimate questions about representation of all groups – religious, ethnic, sexual orientation are, of course, important and protected by law. But, as we all know women do not have the monopoly on being gay, straight, white, black, brown, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish and so on. Jo’s onto something I think by framing this as an issue of service delivery and I hope this might be an effective way of ensuring we address the Fawcett findings.

In addition to Jo, we had input from Stacey, Caroline, Terry McDougall (SOLACE in Business), Deborah Cadman (newly announced Chief Executive of the West Midlands Combined Authority) and Selena Lansley (Head of Workforce, LGA). It was a fantastic, thought provoking evening and I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of this work.

I’m delighted to say that Caroline will be using our Let’s Talk: Leadership theme to introduce a series of blogs and events on Fawcett and the Women in Public Services project. Tune in next week for her inaugural blog on one of her key presidential priorities”.