Why Rupert McNeil, the civil service’s chief people officer, is embracing scientific thinking
It’s almost impossible to walk the halls of the Cabinet Office without imagining the sound of Malcolm Tucker’s put-downs echoing through the corridors. But even if Rupert McNeil has witnessed such dark political arts at close quarters, it’s his job – as chief people officer of the civil service – to help consign sitcom caricatures of Whitehall to the past.
With oversight of 3,500 HR professionals covering a workforce of almost 420,000, he holds one of the most influential, and finely balanced, HR positions in the UK. Nine months into the job, after previous HR director roles at Barclays and Aviva, not only is he tackling everything from diversity to performance management, he’s also entered a partnership with the CIPD to improve access to qualifications, accreditation and research. People Management visited him to find out what else is on his agenda.
What are your impressions of HR capability in the civil service, and what factors will affect it in future?
It’s been humbling to see the HR capability here, the collective intellect at every level. The huge range of things people in the civil service do is really impressive, and of course they’re also taking part in transformations at the same time as they do their day jobs.
We’re in a fascinating period for HR. Every organisation has three enablers: money, technology and people. The first always used to get all the attention. Technology has had more focus in recent years, and now it has moved on to people. We have increasingly sophisticated leaders who understand what they need from HR professionals, and that raises the bar for all of us. At the same time, we have more demanding employees, too, when it comes to the transactional parts of HR: people can go on their banking app and check their balance instantly, but it’s not universally the case that you can do something equivalent with your salary or pension.
You have talked about moving social mobility further up the diversity agenda. Isn’t that a thankless task?
Not if you’re really clear about what you’re defining. We’re looking carefully at how we measure social mobility. We’ve just done a survey on this topic with senior civil servants where we got a very high response rate – almost 70 per cent. Now we have to think about what we do with that information.
As with anything in diversity, I believe social mobility is about rigorous, industrial processes. Our main catalyst has been looking at the civil service Fast Stream – our marquee graduate scheme. We’ve done a really thorough report and we are putting all the recommendations into action, which included asking why the assessment centre was only in London. We’ve opened one this year in Newcastle and that will be the first part of a broader footprint across the UK. With potential applicants with what you might class as lower socioeconomic backgrounds, there’s a sense that they would like to work in the civil service but feel they won’t have the opportunity.
We need to show them they can do it, which means giving them role models, getting out on the campuses and changing some of the ways we do assessment to be less of a deterrent.
Performance management is always a huge public sector sticking point. Will you do away with appraisals?
To me, the essence of great HR professionals is humane rigour – it’s about being commercial, rational and objective about taking decisions, and compassionate about how they’re carried out; being good about optimising how people interact with each other. That’s very interesting in the context of the performance management debate, where maybe there’s been a bit too much focus on process rather than the quality of conversations that happen between individuals.
We’re very evidence-based, so we’re doing a lot of work to see how things should evolve. It’s a personal view, but I think every organisation needs some form of performance management process in the same way every state needs a tax system. But it’s about what that looks like and how you recognise good performers and help those who aren’t performing so well. It’s much better to do that with more frequent, regular conversations than a process that happens twice a year in a rather mechanistic way.
Equally, the system has to be multi-dimensional, recognising ‘hows’ as well as ‘whats’ – values, behaviours and so on. And it has got to demonstrate that it is fair. I’m looking at the principles we need to apply and the mechanisms to support that. The trials are going really well. The great thing about the civil service is that you can do this in a meaningful way, and do great evidence-based work in HR.
How will the skills you need from HR professionals change in future?
As HR professionals, we are there to be custodians of organisational values and how people are treated. It’s about engineering and optimising the processes around people – how you select, encourage and motivate them, for example, and doing that in a humane and sophisticated way. Take an example. I’m a great believer that one of the core HR functions is what gets called casework: the call a line manager makes to HR. Today, things that would once have been dealt with by someone raising a grievance are being channelled into mediation. To me, that is a great example of the HR profession saying something isn’t working and finding a better way. We need to be able to think that way more often.
✶ Find out more about the civil service’s new initiative with the CIPD at bit.ly/CSCIPD