Hello PPMA members and friends

Our post this week is from Past President Sue Evans, who talks about her time as PPMA President and the important role PPMA plays.

“It is great to have the opportunity to reflect on things as a Past President. The view from here is rosy I have to say and I am feeling confident and optimistic about the future of HR and OD and, most importantly, of the PPMA. I have been an active member for some years now and in that time I have met many people who are doing great things in difficult and uncertain times – and not just doing great things, but doing them well and driving change across the sector which will sustain public services into the future.

In organisations, agents for change don’t have it easy and the path to a positive outcome can be bumpy and a bit lonely at times. That is why PPMA is so vital, providing the professional back-up, encouragement and the benefit of others’ experience. I cannot count the times I have asked a question via the Shires Network and received immediate and practical help from colleagues grappling with the same issue. There is a generosity of spirit across PPMA which is unique and hugely necessary in today’s world.

Networking, building a community of practice and sources of trusted advice are key to successful leadership in HR and OD. Keeping abreast of current thinking and new ideas and challenging the status quo are the lifeblood of effective practice and the events, research and input from sponsors and our own practitioners help us to do all of this and take back useful ideas to benefit our own organisations. Learning from each other, from experts and from research helps us to be the best practitioners wherever we practice.

The programme of events for the coming year is impressive. Karen and the team are making tremendous headway with partnerships and the profile of the organisation. There is some exciting work in progress and I hope that you will join me in thanking them for the hard work they are doing and in continuing to support PPMA from wherever we are. Let’s value all that it brings to our professional lives and especially the friendship and support we gain from being part of it.

I am stepping back, but not out, and I hope that I can play a supporting role along the way to a bright future for HR and OD and for PPMA.”

Sue Evans

PPMA Past President and Director, Sevans Refreshing People Ltd

Hello PPMA members and friends

Our President, Caroline Nugent has been developing our strategic relationships further with Health. Together with our VP Karen Grave and Past President Sue Evans, the ‘Past, Present and Future’ Presidents, attended the HPMA Annual Awards dinner near Tower Bridge in June. It was a really great opportunity to support our sister organisation and hear about some of the fantastic work our colleagues in Health are doing.

A lovely feature of the night was the opportunity to meet with some former PPMA colleagues including Raffaela Goodby and Caroline commented on how great it was to see her receive an award for the great work going on at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals Trust. We also saw some of our own sponsors – Neyber and TMP. It just shows how closely health and broader public services work together.

We were also fortunate to see Stephen Moir, also a PPMA Past President on what was his last, HPMA event as Chief People Officer at NHS England. For those of you who may not know, Stephen has returned to Local Government as Executive Director of Resources at Edinburgh City Council. We are delighted to welcome him back to our PPMA community and looking forward to working with our colleagues in the SPDS organisation.

PPMA is in the process of developing joint HPMA & PPMA events across the country. We’ll keep you posted, so make sure you keep coming back to the website and our other social media channels, to keep up with what we’re doing.

Hello PPMA members and friends

Martin Rayson, PPMA past president and now HR Director at the Nursing and Midwifery Council, writes for us this week and he looks back on our Annual Seminar held in Birmingham in June. He believes that making individuals feel valued, is a major part of keeping our workforce engaged.

“As I was reflecting on the highly successful and thought provoking seminar held by the PPMA, one of the themes that struck me was the extent to which we recognise our workforce as a collection of very different individuals, each with their own needs and wants, driven by their particular circumstances and motivations.

Whether it is in terms of contract arrangements, the way we reward or the ways that we engage and communicate, we need to show greater flexibility, to tap into the individuality of our people. And expectations that we will show flexibility if we want to attract, keep, and motivate our talent are growing. Someone at the seminar told me of an employee who wanted their working life to consist of stints of working of around three years and then a year away from work, travelling. When you think about it, this is not an unreasonable response when faced with the possibility of having to work much longer than previous generations.

To be able to offer greater flexibility though, we need a level of insight into our staff that we do not currently have. Lucy Adams, ex Head of HR at the BBC and a keynote speaker, said many insightful things, but none more so than that those businesses who apply the same techniques for understanding their customers to understanding their staff enabling them to inspire loyalty. This means a complete departure from some of our traditional methods of getting a view of our workforces as individuals and almost certainly will mean abandoning the ‘one annual survey’. We need to find ways to better understand our people as individuals and then be able to differentiate our employment offer to reflect what they want from work.

There are, of course, practicalities in meeting everyone’s needs, but perhaps it is about making everyone feel valued as an individual. There are also idiosyncracies and I was amused by Lucy’s story of the person who said she could not possibly relocate to the North because she was a vegetarian. Her individual package might need to include a briefing on the fact that they grow vegetables north of Watford and there are even one or two vegetarian restaurants!”

Martin Rayson

PPMA Past President & HR Director – Nursing and Midwifery Council