A force for engagement
The initial thing that strikes me about the chief people officer at the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) is the amount of recognition she has drawn for her work. Chief people officer is an almost title in HR terms in that it encompasses both internal and external liaisons. Being Angela, or a part of Angela’s team, nearly always ends in the receipt of an award. She has garnered an incredible list of recognition for the hard work she and her teams have put into HR and employee engagement. This has been consistent in whatever organisation she has worked. Angela is enthusiastic about the number of awards she, and her various teams, have won for two reasons.
First, almost all of the awards have been the result of a nomination by either her team or readers of various journals.
Second, Angela feels that winning awards for employee engagement forms an important part of employee engagement itself – being recognised for your achievements both internally and externally gives a team a sense of pride and enhances confidence. A theme that repeats itself throughout my interview with Angela is her focus upon what she feels is the key to being good at your job and being engaged in your job: believing in yourself. You can never have credibility in either a business or public environment unless you first believe in yourself.
Having held a variety of roles in the public and private sectors, Angela will have been with the NPIA for a year in November 2007. The NPIA is a new body, created to drive improvement within the police forces in England and Wales. Angela’s role within this is vast: designing, developing and implementing programmes to encourage development and leadership in all 250,000 police officers across 43 forces in England and Wales. She has been involved in the first-ever national people strategy for policing, including recruitment and dealing with terms and conditions. On top of this, she is also the head of the HR profession in the police. She describes this role as her “most challenging so far” given the complexity of the stakeholder group, culture and systems she has to deal with. The job description alone sounds challenging without even considering the political sensitivities associated with such a role.
Angela makes it a priority to fully understand the roles of those she works with before designing policies for them. The week before this interview saw Angela out on patrol with a police unit in Exeter. Seeing what police officers have to deal with on a daily basis helps her understand what the barriers to their job are.
The key to employee engagement, says Angela, is “treating people as grown-ups”. Letting people get on with their jobs, giving them the right tools to do so, paying them enough and offering them a good team to work with is the foundation for a happy workforce. Any strategy on top of this, she says, is an unnecessary bureaucracy that acts ultimately as a barrier. Angela feels people are generally focused on their job, their immediate team and their own line manager. So to try and engage them in a distant employer, in this case the conceptual notion of a technically non-existent national police force, is part of this unnecessary bureaucracy. She adds that HR people often spend time devising unnecessary forms and complicated strategies that actually achieve the opposite of their aim.
We discuss recent strike action and pay disputes in the public sector. Angela’s view is that, just because people strike, it does not make them any less engaged in their work. On the contrary, strike action demonstrates people want to do their job, they just don’t feel supported by their employer. Angela feels strongly that strikes can be avoided if employers communicate effectively with their staff. “People can take bad news, they understand it,” says Angela, “but they don’t like being lied to.” By not communicating all the information, organisations often leave themselves at the mercy of unions.
Angela is passionate about working in the public sector – about making a difference and keeping schools, public transport and the streets safe. She would never claim, however, that the public sector is in anyway ‘better’ than the private sector. She believes it is more important to learn from the good examples in both sectors. Companies such as Virgin and Marks & Spencer, she says, are great to benchmark against because of their engaged workforce and customer vision. Employees in these organisations are more likely to work harder for the customer – no matter how you define the word ‘customer’. This is what Angela strives for, and these are the examples she looks for in other organisations, both in the UK and internationally. She often approaches, and is approached, by international police forces and other agencies to share methods and ideas. This constant exchange of information is what enables her to carry out her job effectively.
Being passionate about what you do is the key. Angela believes people should take jobs because they want to. Tapping into this, allowing people to explore that passion and reach their potential is what keeps people engaged, and is what discourages them from approaching the competition.
On this note, Angela proudly shows me a picture of the HR team she worked with while at the London Borough of Hackney winning the LGC Management Award in the eighties, an award won despite the competition being extremely confident and derisive of the Hackney team. That they pulled together to win is certainly a tangible demonstration of her basic tenet that the right people can do anything if they receive the right encouragement.
