Our approach to people
Contents
Introduction from Chief Constable
3. Supportive Leadership and Wellbeing
6. Professional Development Review
8. Operational Effectiveness - Deployability
9. Recognition and Appreciation
We are committed to being an anti-discriminatory organisation. This means not only acting in a non-discriminatory way, but addressing systemic inequalities, disadvantage and discrimination.
Introduction from Chief Constable
Policing is delivered by people and I believe that putting our staff at the heart of all that we do is not only the right thing to do but also the best way in which to ensure that we are able to deliver great service to communities in Gloucestershire.
This is why we have set out our commitment within Our People Approach. It provides clear priorities for the work that we are doing to support, develop and recognise the contribution of all of our workforce.
As a Constabulary, we aspire to be an ‘Employer of Choice’ with strong values, innovation and a sense of pride and history. As an Employer of Choice, we want to
recruit, retain and develop colleagues encouraging people to join us from all communities, including those traditionally underrepresented within the Constabulary. Gloucestershire Constabulary is committed to being an anti-discriminatory organisation. This means not merely refraining from acting in a discriminatory way, but taking proactive steps to confront and remedy the effects of existing and systemic discrimination in all its forms within our organisation and in our work. We have a unique opportunity through the national uplift
programme and local growth of our workforce to really make a difference in reflecting the community that we serve and we are working hard through our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion (known as Better Together) to make a step change in representation across all staffing groups.
The welfare and wellbeing of our workforce has been an important area of focus for us over the past few years and will continue to be a central theme in all of our leadership approaches. We have a fantastic workforce and whether or not you are a frontline officer, a volunteer or a member of police staff – as members of our ‘One Policing Team’ everyone has a part to play and I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for everything that you do.
Rod Hansen QPM, MBA, BSc (Hons), Dip Appl Crim Chief Constable
1. Summary
The corporate strategy sets out our ‘one team’ approach, recognising the diverse people and roles that make up our Constabulary team and where every member is valued for their individual difference and contribution. Our ambition is to become an Employer of Choice, where our people are proud to come to work and where members of our community want to work for us. The ‘People are our greatest asset’ objective set out in the corporate strategy is underpinned by the three basecamps of, Supportive Leadership and Wellbeing and Standards Matter and Better Together.
Our People Approach centres around our core mission of keeping people safe from harm. We are continuously looking to develop ways in which we support our people to achieve this aim. That is why we have closely aligned our people approach to our new strategic objective ‘magnificent people’;
We want to:
- Accelerate our plans to recruit a more diverse workforce
- Help our workforce understand how we all gain by becoming Better Together
- Further embed Supportive Leadership & Wellbeing
- Develop the right skills and capabilities
- Promote opportunities for agile working.
The PCC has committed to increase our workforce during his term of office, this increase includes police officers, PCSOs, Volunteer PCSOs and Special Constables. Additional call handlers, police staff investigators and other staff, whose job is to provide excellent service to victims of crime, are also being recruited. This investment in people is all about providing a better service to the public, with a more comprehensive focus on the care of victims, leading to a faster and more effective response when dealing with crime.
Through the delivery of Our People Approach, we will:
- Invest in improving representation across our workforce working with our ethnically diverse communities and partners
- Continue to increase our digital capability with new people information systems that provide information about our workforce and provide leaders and managers with improved information on their teams and staffing
- Create a working environment that allows our work force to feel valued and heard as well as equipping them with the necessary skills to flourish in their particular fields
- Promote an environment where our people can come forward to express concerns in a safe and secure way without fear of repercussion
- Through our operational effectiveness work, maximise effective deployment of our people resources to meet the needs of the public
- Promote an agile working environment where our people have the tools to enable them to work effectively in different environments
- Continue to use our Ethics Board to highlight and address ethical considerations across all areas of our work
- Be a learning organisation, identifying where things go wrong or where we can do better and embed through reflective practice
- Continue to develop the Sabrina Centre to be a space where our people can take time to learn and grow– and through our learning and development approach ensure our people that we support professional and technical development
- Use our People Development Board to oversee, guide and direct development of our People Approach.
2. The Framework
We have set out a clear framework which shows how Our People Approach links together:
Our aim is to be an Employer of Choice. This recognises the position we hold as the fifth largest employer in Gloucestershire. We want people to choose to work for the Constabulary, we want people to share our mission to keep people safe from harm and to buy into and demonstrate our core values which are:
Integrity
We always act in line with the values of the police service and the Code of Ethics for the benefit of the public.
Impartiality
We show impartiality throughout all our dealings with colleagues, partners and members of the public. This is achieved by being unprejudiced, fair and objective.
Transparency
We are transparent in our actions, decisions and communications with both the people we work with and those we serve. This ensures that we are honest and open in our interactions and decision-making.
Public service
We are dedicated to work in the public interest, engaging and listening to their needs and concerns. We work to make sure that the public feel valued and engaged, which helps to build confidence in the police service.
We will deliver our aim of being an employer of choice through the three basecamps highlighted in our Corporate Strategy. They are:
3. Supportive Leadership and Wellbeing
Our most important asset is our people and we are committed to maintaining a leadership culture where all staff feel supported and valued and job satisfaction is high. We take the health and wellbeing of our staff seriously including becoming more trauma informed, building resilience and proactively providing early intervention and support.
By supporting our staff at all levels to thrive, they are able to deliver the very best service they are able to give and that our public expect and this will contribute to becoming an employer of choice.
The Leadership Academy’s programmes and initiatives will embed Supportive Leadership and Wellbeing, Standards Matter and Better Together throughout the organisation.
Listening to feedback from staff surveys, evaluations and feedback from leaders within the organisation, we will build our Leadership Academy offer to create clear pathways that articulate what leadership development opportunities exist at appropriate stages of an individual’s career.
Through the Leadership Academy we will focus on:
- Enhancing the existing leadership development offer. All activity will be mapped against four main strands: Supportive Leadership, Wellbeing, Inclusion and High Performance Expectations. This includes the introduction of the SL&WB Inclusion Module- a 2 day programme for all leaders on Supportive Leadership behaviours with a focus on improving inclusion in the workplace
- A full review of the current SL&WB programme will be undertaken to ensure the latest evidence base and theory supports the development of our leaders so they ensure our teams can be the best they can be
- Building a framework for Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
- Embedding coaching and mentoring across the organisation
- Enabling opportunities to support talent development which includes the rollout of Innovate: a modular personal development programme for those in under-represented groups to build their skills and confidence to apply for lateral moves or future leadership roles
The Sabrina Centre is a clear statement from Gloucestershire Constabulary and the OPCC that we care about the wellbeing of our people and their professional development and our modern agile programme will help them on that journey.
4. Standards Matter
Standards matter to us because we strive to be a Constabulary that inspires trust, confidence and pride among the communities we serve.
Our workforce must inherently possess the values, attitudes and awareness that drive highly inclusive, ethical behaviour in everything that we do including:
- Taking pride and care in the quality of service we provide including providing investigative excellence
- The standard and accuracy of our work including health and safety and the information we provide
- The way we manage threat, harm and risk
- Our appearance and the way we learn and celebrate success
- Setting out clear expectations for performance for individuals, teams and their departments linking individual contribution to our core mission of keeping people safe from harm.
5. Better Together
Gloucestershire Constabulary’s approach to diversity, equality and inclusion. We chose the phrase ‘Better Together’ as it recognises that effective, legitimate policing is enhanced through working closely with all of our communities, staff and volunteers seeking to understand, value and support difference.
Our approach will be underpinned by national advice and guidance such as the NPCC Vision 2025, relevant legislation such as the Public Sector Equality Duty (relating to the Equality Act 2010) and our understanding of local communities.
Our aspiration is for Gloucestershire Constabulary to be fully representative of the communities it serves. We are working hard to build a diverse workforce in which all individuals feel positively included and are able to flourish because we know that we are ‘Better Together’ as individuals, teams and with our communities.
Our three Base camps are fundamental foundations of our success and should be visible in everything we do.
We place such a degree of importance on our basecamps that each has a dedicated Approach, delivery plan and senior champion to ensure effective governance and progress.
To support the delivery of our basecamps, we have a number of enabling priority areas which focus on people and workforce development these are:
6. Professional Development Review
Our staff deserve leaders who demonstrate their commitment to supporting them including looking after their wellbeing. An important tool to help understand the aspirations and contributions of individual colleagues is the Professional Development Review. We are focusing on this as a key enabler for individuals and leaders moving forward.
We will:
- Launch an updated approach to individual Professional Development Reviews (PDRs) with accessible training and information to support individuals and leaders in getting the best from the PDR process
- Embed PDRs as a part of core people processes such as selection, performance management, promotion, pay progression standards and professional development planning
- Use PDRs as part of identifying high performance and support talent development and succession planning.
7. Workforce Development
Policing is delivered by people and we believe that it is important to develop our workforce to ensure that all individuals have the skills and knowledge they need to carry out their roles and reach their full potential. This means investing in the development of our people – across all teams of police officers, PCSOs, police staff and police volunteers.
Effective workforce planning will be at the heart of our workforce development approach. This means planning, to make sure that we have the right people with the right skills deployed in the right way to deliver outstanding service to the public. The right people will be those that share our values and we will recruit for values and train for competence.
An important part of developing and managing our workforce is ensuring that we are making best use of our workforce ensuring that we are operationally effective through the deployment of appropriate people resources across our organisation. The implementation of an updated Core HR System will further support our workforce development approach and effective workforce planning.
We will:
- Develop and refine our workforce planning approach (linked to our Force Management Statement) to ensure that we have a workforce with the right skills and abilities to deliver our policing services and meet demand. This will include the development of a skills management model across all specialisms and areas of the Constabulary with supporting data and analytics
- Deliver against our agreed recruitment plans
- Consider any proposals put forward by the National College of Policing, automatically introducing those that are mandatory and giving serious consideration to those that are not (consulting with third parties accordingly, prior to introduction).
- Through a positive and proactive relationship with the College of Policing, link our workforce planning to the developing National Learning & Development. Workforce Transformation and Professionalising Policing programmes
- Provide an improved recruitment and selection process, focusing on values based assessment and developing new more effective approaches to induction and on-boarding
- Embed our Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship and Degree Holder Entry Programmes for new officer recruits. Develop the PCSO apprenticeship and Detective direct entry schemes for evaluation
- Ensure that we have in place a robust and transparent approach to learning lessons when things go wrong and to identify and share good practice across the Constabulary.
8. Operational Effectiveness - Deployability
The ability to effectively deploy our people resources to our operational demand is critical to keep the public safe from harm. This means we need to be clear about the demand for our people resources and the constraints on those resources. An important part of this is to ensure that we are able to effectively balance the needs of individuals with the demands of operational deployment. As a result of increasing levels of absence and increased levels of adjusted duties officers, a specific piece of work is underway in this area.
We will:
- Review our approach to supporting and deploying limited and adjusted duties officers in line with operational demand
- Set out a clear policy for management of adjusted duties officers and medical redeployments
- Monitor and seek to understand issues impacting attendance across all of our workforce – link these to our supportive leadership and wellbeing programme and ensure that there are effective mechanisms in place to support leaders and staff when dealing with ill health and attendance
9. Recognition and Appreciation
Rewarding and recognising our staff for their contribution is an important part of ensuring our staff feel valued. We also recognise the particular challenges that increased cost of living and other expenses are having on many colleagues and through our wellbeing approaches will do all that we can to ensure staff are aware of the mechanisms of support available to them.
Pay arrangements are set out nationally for the police service and the Constabulary actively engages in national consultation frameworks to inform and help shape pay submissions as part of the NPCC Workforce Portfolio. Whilst national pay frameworks are outside of the remit of the Constabulary, where there is opportunity to locally recognise outstanding contribution through other reward mechanisms, we will actively seek to do so.
We will:
- Monitor our arrangements for pay and reward in respect of equality, diversity and inclusion, review if required and regularly report on how pay, reward and recognition mechanisms are being applied across all staffing groups
- Conduct a review of the bonus and honorarium arrangements
- Continue to develop and promote our wider staff benefits framework where we have the opportunity to do so – including schemes such as cycle to work, salary sacrifice scheme etc.
- Implement the national pay progression standard linked to PDRs
- Develop ways to recognise individuals and teams through events such as awards ceremonies.
10. Agile Working
Over recent months the Constabulary has adapted its working practices to meet the external demands placed on it. In line with our ambition to be an Employer of Choice, we will continue to develop opportunities for agile working for our people wherever possible. This means having the flexibility to work from a variety
of Constabulary workspaces or even home or other public spaces as needed and when appropriate. We recognise that agile working will mean different things to different job roles and we will endeavour to provide as much flexibility within the constrictions of roles. This will be enabled through providing appropriate technology such as mobile devices to frontline staff which will support them operating in an agile way from various locations. Opportunities for agile working for police staff will be encouraged where practicable. This will be continuously reviewed in response to the environments in which we operate.
We will:
- Set out a clear approach to agile working opportunities for our people
- Review and provide our staff with the digital technology and equipment to support their agile working in line with the requirements of their role
- Support our leaders and managers to manage an agile workforce
- Monitor the impact of agile working across our workforce
- Review emerging opportunities to enable agile working
11. Staff Engagement
Engaging and listening to our staff is an important theme underpinning Our People Approach. We use a number of means to engage with our staff to get the widest view of what our people are thinking and how they are feeling.
We use the feedback and information we receive from our staff as an important part of our evidence base to improve performance and enable organisational development. This allows us to shape our response and our plans in an informed way and to reflect the things that our staff tell us are important to them.
We will:
- Regularly monitor the morale of our workforce through a range of engagement mechanisms including surveys, focus groups and forums to ensure that everyone has a chance to contribute their ideas, feedback and concerns
- Create a culture where our people have trust that they can express their views and they will be listened to and acted upon where appropriate
- Monitor and seek to understand why colleagues choose to leave the Constabulary - taking on board their views and experiences to improve our organisation
- Undertake to understand the views and experiences of our people and take these into consideration when making decisions
- Use the data and feedback from our staff to inform our approach across our basecamps including our development programmes and policies
- Continue to work with staff associations (SA) and SA networks along with other advisory groups such as our Legitimacy Panel and Independent Advisory Group.
12. Governance
The Deputy Chief Constable is the strategic lead for People and oversees the work of the People Development Board and the delivery of Our People Approach. The People Development Board have a number of working groups and supporting delivery frameworks all of which can be viewed in the Corporate Governance Framework.
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