eade the case study and answer the questions that follow: HRM Practices of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government The Context The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is the UK government department responsible for housing, planning and building, community development and local government. The overall strategic aim of the department is to help create great places to live and work right across the country and to back communities to come together and thrive. Although its roots are long-standing, the department in its current guise was established in 2006. Over the past 18 months, in particular following the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, it has seen a major shift in strategic emphasis and activity, illustrated in part by the addition of Housing to its title. Many employees have been involved very directly in meeting the departments strategic goal of securing effective support for those affected by the disaster, delivering the changes this tragedy demands and ensuring (all) people are safe and feel safe within their homes. New plans for housing were announced in the Budgets in 2017 and 2018, with proposals developed through a series of Green and White papers, which are summarised in the current departmental objective of supporting the delivery of a million homes by the end of 2020 and half a million more by the end of 2022 (300,000 net additional homes a year on average). This has also driven growth in employee numbers. There are now over 2,000 full time equivalents in the core department. Collectively it oversees around 17bn of spend, of which around 7bn is local government finance, with a wide range of policy-focused activities and roles. The department prides itself on a heavy evidence-based policy focus and describes itself as having an outward-facing and collaborative culture. / in May 2018, breaks down into seven overall objectives, including: delivering the homes the country needs, delivering a sustainable future for local government, creating stronger communities, supporting a smooth exit from the European Union, and last but not least, to maintain MHCLG as a great place to work. Like all the other goals, this last one breaks down into a further series of people and equality objectives, as well as being linked to a published performance metric. In this case it is the 66 per cent Civil Service People Survey overall engagement score drawn from survey undertaken in 2018, up two per cent from 2017 and is the sixth successive year-onyear increase. The HR/People Management Strategy and Process MCHLGs first People Plan was intended to last for two years after being developed in 2016. It was refreshed and updated after Grenfell for its second year, and then a new People Plan was developed and introduced covering the next two years from 2018 2020. The HR/People Management Strategy and Content The overall goal of the People Plan in 2018 remains much as it was in 2016: to ensure that the department has skilled, talented, diverse and high-performing people, who are proud to work for MHCLG and are supported and trusted by empowering and inclusive leaders. All of the policies and work and initiatives to support this are organised into five constituent priorities or pillars, each in turn with at least three priority initiatives and activities. The pillars were selected as being most important in supporting and contributing to the business performance of the department driving forward our ambition on key people issues, for example diversity and inclusion and for ensuring that we have a tailored, excellent, clearly signalled, support and development offer, which will attract and retain talent, and is amongst the best across the Civil Service. Figure 1: The Five Strategic Pillars at MHCLG However, according to Christine Hewitt, the Director of People Capability and Change at the time the Plan was drawn up, there was a significant shift in emphasis between People Plan 1 and People Plan 2, which partly took account of progress made, but also heavily reflected the shift in the strategy, focus and ambition of the newly re-christened Ministry. The Shift in Focus by the summer of 2017 there had been a major shift in the department strategy, not just in considering the implications of Brexit, but primarily towards a greater focus on housing. The new People Plan refers to housing very firmly established as a key priority for the Government, with increased budget and resources and a higher profile and leadership role for the Department across Whitehall, as well as, of course, the work to respond to the issues arising from the Grenfell Tower tragedy. This shift meant that new skills and new staff were urgently required to support growth. Over 700 new staff have subsequently been recruited over the past 12 months under the new Plan, with the Ministry reaching over 2,000 people in the current financial year 2018/19. The development of scientific expertise, risk management skills, and commercial capability and capacity are all critical to discharging the Ministrys expanded financial and governance responsibilities, with many of these functions having direct parallels in the often higher-paying private sector. As this second People Plan was being developed, a parallel extensive consultation exercise took place to define the principles which would underpin the new Ministrys purpose and the values and behaviours required to put those principles into practice. Each of the principles are now aligned with the strategic priorities in the People Plan, illustrating how important this plan is to putting them into practice. Becoming More Strategic and Agile With improvements in some of the core activities, such as a comprehensive learning offer achieved under the first Plan, our interviewees described how the second Plan has enabled the HR function to build on its success and deliver a much clearer focus on talent management and career development. They felt that the HR function can only be credible on its strategic agenda and input if the HR operational building blocks, such as the new resourcing hub, are functioning well. Although the themes and contents have evolved the second Plan keeps five pillars which our interviewees felt to be the right number, both to encompass the variety of HR activities while also still focusing and prioritising its work. There is also an attempt to balance the ambitious big bets in the People Plan with a continuing focus on improving the operational activities of HR, which were not mentioned in PP1 apart from recruitment. The second Plan crucially maintained the same positive tone, clarity and sense of accountability and momentum that the first Plan introduced. The new Plan also reflects the growing need to be flexible and agile in a fast-moving governmental and social context, with the health and wellbeing strand of work for example, subject regular review and development. It also attempts to give better guidance and drive better support being provided to managers and staff so as to best utilise the building blocks put in place under the first Plan. Cross-cutting themes are also more clearly drawn out and managed across the pillars in the second plan, for example in terms of Diversity and inclusion underpinning all activities, as well as being a strategic activity in its own right. Implementation and Delivery in Practice As our interviewees expressed it well, lots of plans sit on the shelf and our literature review for this research project has highlighted the commonly experienced problems of strategic implementation. So how does MHCLG attempt to ensure that the People Plan becomes an experienced reality in the organisation? Beyond the leadership strengths mentioned above, measurement and monitoring is one answer. The department was described by our interviewees as being driven by data and evidence and the People Plan reflects this emphasis with quarterly People KPIs reported HR needs to be evidence based in this department. Each pillar has an aggregate RAG rating of performance which comprises of a number of subsidiary measures and is reported on quarterly on a red, amber or green performance rating scorecard, along with additional explanatory commentary. Thus for example, pillar one of the 2016 2018 strategy, recruitment, comprises of 16 measures, including number of new starters, average applicants per advert and labour turnover. And nine of these showed improvement in the second quarter of the current year, driving up the overall index rating. Much of the data used for this is drawn from the SAP HR system. Where areas show a dip or downward trend, for example the proportion of staff having career conversations, they become a focus for subsequent analysis, discussion and actions. However, even more important according to the interviewees, is the strong culture of consultation, communication and senior management commitment in the department. There are weekly meetings of the executive team and of a wider leadership team of all of the Senior Civil Servants for example, and leaders meet far more often than seems typical in other departments. This was seen as being key to avoiding any serious policy/practice, say/do gap emerging with the implementation and delivery of the People Plans goals. This high contact/high communications leadership culture was seen as being relatively unusual in other parts of government, although our interviewees felt that this also reflected the nature of the department as a comparatively small (by Whitehall standards) primarily policy focused unit. It might be much harder to achieve in a bigger or more geographically dispersed organisation. The success and lessons learned during People Plan 1 underlined the need to focus on developing talent pipelines across and up through the department, including a focus on developing professions in line with the Civil Service Workforce Strategy. However, as well as the emphasis on providing professional career paths right across the Civil Service, our interviewees stressed that they are also developing the broader flexible knowledge and agility needed in a small department like this. Indeed, our interviewees described a shift under these Plans in their resourcing strategy towards an approach of recruiting very capable but also flexible and adaptable people and developing and moulding them to the Department. This sits alongside the increased recruitment of the specialist skills identified post Grenfell, including commercial, scientific, risk etc, where upskilling current employees would not always meet the urgent or particular need. Future Developments and Changes The departments leaders are still getting used to reviewing the metrics underpinning the delivery of the new pillars in People Plan 2 and so it is early days to speculate as to how the Plan will need to evolve in the future. Improved analytics capability so as to improve the evidence-base for and impact of actions of the Plans aims is the first area the interviewees highlighted, and the HR function has recently hired an analyst to focus on this. Our interviewees anticipate that as with this second plan, the next one will also be an evolution so as to keep a focus on the current priorities and core building blocks of HR activity, but also adapting to environmental and government changes. As well as improving key aspects of the recruitment process, there has been a focus on raising the quality of recruits. Leadership development work was described as a painting the Forth Road Bridge type of activity that has seen significant improvement but needs to continue to be delivered effectively and adapt with time.

Question 4 (25 Marks) Leadership development work was described as a painting the Forth Road Bridge type of activity that has seen significant improvement but needs to continue to be delivered effectively and adapt with time. Examine the purpose of undertaking a training needs analysis at three critical levels, to ensure that leadership development initiatives produce the expected Return on Investment at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government