Hello PPMA friends

Our blog post this week comes from Steve Davies, who as well as being Head of London Regional Employers’ Organisation at London Councils, is PPMA Vice President Regions and Hon. Treasurer & Secretary. Steve has responsibility for the PPMA regional network and below he explains more about how our regions work:

“The PPMA regions are the lifeblood of the PPMA. They provide the opportunity for our members to meet, share, exchange and learn from each other and their organisations.

The aim within each region is to provide a meeting whether real or virtual on a variety of HR and OD subject matters that our members can hear about the latest issues, research, or showcase of work happening in the HR/OD world.

We have 5 broad regional groupings covering the Midlands & Wales; the North of England including north east and west and Yorkshire and Humberside; Northern Ireland; South East including London and east England; South West covering Somerset, Cornwall and Devon. We also have a special Shires network which focusses on HR/OD issues in shire county councils. In total we have over 500 PPMA members from more than 180 organisations and these are spread across all our regions.

The regional meetings provide an opportunity for HR/OD colleagues to network and ‘work out loud’. What do I mean by work out loud. This is a concept developed by John Stepper and adapted by other HR/OD and change management professionals. This is about investing in networking relationships by sharing work and experiences.

There are 5 key elements in this concept/approach.

Making your work Visible: being able to share your work in a way that others can understand what you have done or want to do, how you did it or plan to do it, what was/is involved in terms of time, resource, cost and what are the expected or were the actual outputs or outcomes.

Growth mindset: One of the main reasons for openly sharing your work is to find ways to improve it. Sharing your work with other people can provide useful feedback, connections, or other things that will make your work better.

Generosity: By openly sharing your work or asking for help to improve it you are more likely to engage other people and they will voluntarily help you.

Relationships: As you work out loud over time, you’ll be interacting with a broader range of people. The further you develop relationships with people in your network, the more likely it will be that you’ll collaborate with them and that they’ll be willing help you in other ways.

Purposeful discovery: Finally, you need to make your contributing and connecting purposeful in order to be effective. Be clear with yourself about what you are seeking to achieve in terms of recognition, learning, connections, etc.

Of course, you don’t need to be as structured as this to network effectively. By just attending (even virtually during or after) our regional meetings, PPMA members get the opportunity to learn more about the world of HR/OD and make informal connections with other HR/OD professionals. Often, just being able to talk to someone else and share thoughts or views about a subject matter that has just been showcased can provide an opportunity to learn and share, or simply take solace from the fact that someone else is in the same boat as you, or not as far advanced as you, in terms of what they or their organisations are doing.

You can tell that I’m an advocate of face to face meetings, as opposed to virtual meetings but that doesn’t mean I don’t also recognise the power of social media and networking using technology, and John Stepper’s ‘work out loud’ network approach is designed with social media in mind. However, I believe that networking is helped tremendously by sharing a subject or issue, which is then explored, questioned by a group initially in a meeting together and our regional meetings provide the ideal forum for this.

At the end of the day, the regional meetings provide this opportunity for networking and it is up to you how much or little you choose to learn or take from them, but it is rare that you don’t take some learning away from the experience.”

Good luck with your networking and please fully use the opportunity that regional meetings give you – to find out more contact admin@ppma.org.uk

Steve Davies, Vice President Regions and Hon. Treasurer & Secretary.

Hello PPMA colleagues and friends

You’ll remember that we were really looking forward to our Northern HR Summit at the end of October. Well its been a fortnight since over 100 HR and OD colleagues – some PPMA members, some non-members (at least yet!), sponsors and speakers got together to reflect on some of the key challenges facing our organisations.

Our Vice President, Karen Grave spoke at the session on 21^st Century Public Servant and she was delighted by the absolutely fantastic welcome from our colleagues in the North and particularly our PPMA members at Leeds City Council. It was very clear that Lorraine Hallam, Chief Officer – People at Leeds City Council and her incredible team put a huge amount of work in bringing the Northern HR Briefing back to the region. The event was slightly different from our typical regional event and we were determined that we opened this out to colleagues in Blue Light, Health, Universities and even the Private Sector. We wanted to make this a really interactive event and that was very much in the spirit of our key themes around collaboration.

A number of PPMA Policy Board members attended. Our President Caroline Nugent was there, as was Steve Davies, our Honorary Treasurer, Joanne Hyde, our PPMA North West Chair, Justine Brooksbank our former Yorkshire and Humber Chair and Sam Anthony our East of England Chair.

Steve and his fellow board colleagues attended as delegates, which was a slightly different format for us. He and the board agreed that Perry Timms proved an excellent, vibrant and energetic host during both days of the forum. On Monday afternoon, Councillors James Lewis and Alison Lowe from Leeds City Council opened the event outlining the challenges that councils face and emphasising the need to be more commercial in our thinking and to collaborate and work together with partner organisations to continue delivering  services to our communities. Their contribution as elected representatives was really fantastic and demonstrated to our HR & OD colleagues that their role in transforming services is absolutely critical.

Tom Riordan, Leeds City chief executive also spoke to us. He spoke about the impressive work Leeds has been doing with partner organisations to reduce the number of homeless in the City. They have no homeless in hotels or B&B accommodation and the focus on outcomes which has delivered real change to people’s lives. They use the same strong collaborative partner based approach with the focus on outcomes to reduce the number of children in care to the lowest proportionate ratios in the country. The emphasis is on individual need as opposed to systems based on thresholds. In a similar vein they also consider the worst domestic violence cases each week with 10 key partner organisations, again with outcomes being the key driver. All this great improvement in outcomes for people in difficult situations would not be possible without the strong collaborative partnership approach – giving people the opportunity to hear about work going on elsewhere is so important in sharing best practice across public service.

Perry Timms and Nicole Ferguson from Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust opened day 2, by providing an energetic and informative session about the importance of collaborative working and how an appreciation of social and group dynamics can improve collaborative working and outputs/outcomes among partner organisations who need to work effectively together to provide services to our communities.

Lorraine Hallam, observed that the structure of the event, which was split over Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, allowed us great flexibility in breakout sessions. Our delegates got to hear from existing PPMA sponsors and as mentioned above, Perry Timms, Nicole Ferguson, plus colleagues from Collaborate Out Loud. We were able to combine existing PPMA strategic themes with really practical and focused work on Collaboration techniques using Crowds, Squads and Pairs.

We know that events like Northern HR Summit give us all the space to explore key issues and take a huge amount of learning back to our organisations.

Take a look at the highlights from the 2 days in our video:

In summing up the Northern HR Summit, our President Caroline Nugent said how absolutely thrilled she and the board members are with the success of this event. We are all so pleased that delegates got the opportunity to really learn and experience the concepts of Crowds, Squads and Pairs and think about marrying the best of those, with key PPMA themes around Health and Social Care Integration, Future Workforce and Digital to think through how we can best integrate the design and delivery of a broad range of services across our Northern Communities.

Finally Karen explained that coming to Leeds was a very deliberate part of our strategy to make the PPMA presence felt nationally. She also told us of the commitment to doing a run up event to our National Conference 2018, which is being held in Newcastle-Gateshead on Thursday 19^th and Friday 20^th April. Based on this event, we are increasingly excited about 2018 and we have agreed that we will support an annual Northern HR Briefing – we look forward to seeing you at both events!

Hello PPMA colleagues and friends

This week’s blog post is an update on our 2 day PPMA Policy Board meeting,held last week. Long-time PPMA members will know that PPMA Policy Board always takes the opportunity to make one of the quarterly board meetings a 2 day event to give us a longer opportunity to get together and look at how well we are doing against our business plan and to start thinking through some of the emerging themes that our members need to be aware of.

I’ve been reflecting on the event and cannot believe how quickly the first few months of my Presidential term has gone! In many respects it’s been a whirlwind but I’m very pleased about the progress we have been making. Board meetings are always important events in any President’s year – it’s an opportunity to make sure we are on track with our key themes for the year, but also to think strategically about our business plan and make sure that we are comfortable it is fit for purpose. I thoroughly enjoyed the 2 day event. Taking that amount of time out of the office is a big commitment, but it’s time very well spent. You might remember that a previous Past President, Angela O’Connor said at this year’s conference, that one of the key things leaders need to do is to take time out to reflect, talk, share and discuss. I’m a great advocate of this anyway, but doing this role as well as may day job has made me value thinking space all the more.

We covered a lot last week. I’ve spoken before about the relationships we are building with other partners – we continue to make great progress here. That will continue and I’m grateful for the support of my colleagues in this important endeavour. To give you a taster of what we covered last week, we:

• finalised a new sponsor structure which will make our sponsorship opportunities more transparent and we’re going to be launching this for new sponsors in time for 2018 conference
• agreed which Board members are going to sponsor our research topics
• talked about the progress we’re making on phase 2 website development, which are planned to go live at the end of October
• had a lot of discussion about how best to run our national and regional events, especially as we’re talking to HPMA, Civil Service and CIPD about opening up these events to all of our respective members.

On a final note for this blog, I wanted to give you a heads up that we will be launching conference 2018 booking and our 2018 Awards in October.  We’re doing this a bit earlier this year based on feedback we had from you last year. For a range of reasons last year was very very busy and we want to give you a little bit more planning time this year, particularly around getting award submissions ready.

As ever, I encourage you to keep up to speed with our weekly blogs and the website.  f you have any thoughts, comments or would like to share the great work you are doing you can contact us on president@ppma.org.uk, vicepresident@ppma.org.uk and admin@ppma.org.uk.