Drive For Change Website
Drive for Change is an approach and web-based toolkit for public service managers and trade union representatives to use with employees, providing a mixture of diagnostics, guidance and activities to support closer dialogue and joint working to take forward change or redesign of services.
In 2003 the Public Services Forum commissioned the Work Foundation to audit trade union and employee involvement in public service reform. The Work Foundation found that employee engagement and involvement was key to successful public service improvement. However, while the audit identified excellent examples where workforce involvement in change had made a real difference to delivery, in general, commitment to engagement was patchy, and evaluation of its effectiveness was almost non-existent. The Work Foundation's central recommendation was that a toolkit for employers and unions be developed to equip organisations to benchmark performance on engagement, identify areas for action and implement those actions.
Drive for Change is sponsored by the Public Services Forum, which brings together Government, employer and trade union representatives to work jointly on workforce issues that impact on public services. The approach and toolkit were developed with the assistance of the Partnership Institute, overseen by a project steering group led by TUC and Cabinet Office and involving Local Government Employers, Department of Health, HM Prison Service and UNISON. The approach has been trialled in four pilots, involving HM Prison Holloway, Birmingham City Council, Sheffield City Council and Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Trust.
Active employee engagement enables employers to harness their knowledge and experience to innovate in developing long-term solutions for customer needs. A workforce involved from the outset, that has helped build the case for reform, will be much more committed to delivery of agreed changes.
Drive for Change provides win:win solutions, delivering services more attuned to users' needs at the same time as empowering employees, giving them more job satisfaction and a better work-life balance and working environment.
The approach has been piloted in four organisations - Holloway Prison, Sheffield City Council, Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Trust and Birmingham City Council. While it is too early fully to evaluate their success, all the pilots can point to tangible examples of progress. For example, at Holloway Prison, incidences of self-harm have been reduced by two thirds; in designing a new mental health facility, Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Trust mocked up a room to show what the new building would look like - feedback from employees, service users and carers resulted in over 100 changes to the layout.
Users stand to benefit from services that are better focused around their needs, providing them with more involvement in the design of the services they receive, and more choice in how and when they access them.
Employee engagement brings with it employee empowerment, enabling staff to play an active and creative role in improving the services they are responsible for delivering, in turn resulting in greater job satisfaction and more flexibility / a better work-life balance.
Better relationships with managers can enable trade union representatives to deal more quickly and effectively with routine matters, leaving more time to tackle the issues that really matter. Drive for Change may also help representatives to develop their skills and serve their members' needs more closely, in turn strengthening support for the union and enabling it to input more to shaping the organisation.
Service changes that are co-designed with employees and implemented with their full support will ensure the best possible use of resources - both because employees' energies will be focused on delivering the agreed change, and because the changes will target services effectively to meet customers' needs.
No. The toolkit, and the diagnostic questionnaire within it, are available for use free of charge. However you may incur costs if you decide to bring in external facilitation to help build the relationship between managers and union representatives.
Cabinet Office and TUC will work closely with individual sectors to promote Drive for Change at local level. Planned work includes encouraging trade and regional press to run articles on the toolkit; identifying one or more senior level individuals in each sector to champion Drive for Change with their peers; running regional 'roadshows' for practitioners; offering training modules in Drive for Change for union officials, and working with the bodies that provide support for improvement in public sector organisations.
But we cannot do it alone. Drive for Change needs active support from national and regional representative organisations, and commitment from individual organisations to try it out and share their experiences.
Drive for Change is not about experts telling you what to do. It is about learning from peers, from real life experiences of employee engagement in your sector and others. It certainly requires commitment, and time, on all sides, but the results will help your organisation to be much more effective.
Leadership is certainly key in encouraging alignment of all the forces in an organisation. But the Drive for Change toolkit is designed to equip managers and trade union representatives in all organisations, and with varying degrees of experience of employee engagement and empowerment, with the skills and techniques they need to improve dialogue and joint working. It is about making employee engagement a part of the day job.
You need to focus on your common aim - high quality, effective public services that meet your customers' needs - and agree in principle that joint working will help to achieve that aim. You may find that external facilitation helps to kickstart the process of developing a dialogue, and to overcome barriers along the way.
TUC and Cabinet Office will continue to monitor and evaluate progress in the pilot organisations - and encourage other organisations taking up the approach to do the same - with a view to sharing best practice and further improving the toolkit. Subject to interest, we plan to establish a community of practice that would meet twice a year to report on experience and recommend how this should be shared more widely. Contact us through website feedback if your organisation would be interested in joining a community of practice.