Capability Reviews: Progress and Next Steps - The Civil Service

• ‘Managing for improvement’: supporting middle management to engage front-linestaff and improving strategic HR.• ‘Learn how to learn’: building a departmental culture that encourages opennessand learning, both learning from what it does well and from addressingweaknesses and failures.Area for action 1: Build an effective leadership teamEach member of the executive team is now leading on one aspect of the changeprogramme and therefore operates as a leader of DWP as a whole, not just of theiragency or function. The executive team is now also assessed collectively for theirperformance bonus against the achievement of corporate objectives andcollaborative team working. The leadership team has engaged a board coach, andfeedback from staff suggests that such high-profile initiatives as the ‘Back to theFloor’ programme, in which each member of the executive team spent a weekworking in front-line offices, have been well received and have signalled that theleadership team is taking this initiative seriously. All members of the Senior CivilService (SCS) are now being asked to ‘return to the floor’ themselves. One memberof staff who took part in this programme is quoted as saying:‘There is nothing like sitting right next to staff and their customers to bringhome what an important job it is. How valuable it is, how hard it is and howrewarding it can be… [My] greater understanding of how people are workingand feeling will certainly help me as I do my job.’The review team now wants to see evidence of the executive team being trulyambitious about a future for DWP that makes the fullest use of its capabilities.The Department must find ways to convince staff of the value of and need for thischange, and demonstrate this by improved staff survey results for leadership.Area for action 2: Managing for improvementThe Capability Review found that too many front-line staff did not feel engaged inthe change process, nor did they feel their concerns were listened to or acted upon.In response to this, a lively communication document, DWP Journey, about changein the Department, now comes out regularly. Staff have also been given theopportunity to feed into a review of the Performance Development System, whichhas now been overhauled. A project, called iMatter, designed to engage staff in localdecision making and service improvement was piloted in Makerfield Benefit DeliveryCentre and has now been successfully rolled out to five other locations. Staff havealso been engaged through Lean masterclasses, two conferences for the SCS andan innovative operational managers conference.Good work has been done on building a customer proposition centred around the‘No wrong door’ concept, so that customers will always have their query dealt with,CAPABILITY REVIEWS: PROGRESS AND NEXT STEPS11