HR in the police must be “transformational” or it will not survive in this economic climate, according to Martin Tiplady, director of HR at the Metropolitan Police.
Tiplady told HR delegates at the CIPD Police Forum in Chesham to examine whether they were adding value to the work of the police. “We have got to take a good, long, hard look at what we do and how we do it and ask whether we’ve got it entirely right. We need to reposition ourselves as a cheaper and more effective strategic offering. In too many areas of policing, some offerings of staffing and administration are unsustainable and irrelevant and lag behind the rest of the world,” he said.
He pointed out that the HR-to-workforce staff ratio in some police services was too low, varying from an inefficient 1:40 at worst to 1:130 at best. He compared these ratios with the average private-sector figure of 1:85 and added: “The majority of people in this room are quite a distance from that.”
Tiplady spoke of his concern for the future of the HR profession. “We cannot just be custodians of systems. If we’re to survive, we need good, common-sense solutions to practical issues. HR requires speed and pragmatism and good workforce planning,” he said.
He challenged the audience on whether they were driving change in their organisations. “The sad fact is the majority of HR is not. HR does implementation such as redundancy well, but it’s not ‘added value’. If we don’t upgrade what we do and how we do it we might be budgeted out.”
The future of HR lay with “transforming” the business, he added. “It’s about changing the way our managers work and it’s about understanding the business and facilitating change programmes, workforce planning and forecasting. If HR is to survive, it needs to get wiser to the business and we need to start using our muscle to drive organisational reform.”
Tiplady argued that HR was often seen as peripheral and rule-bound. “Regrettably, much of HR and the public sector are about those things and it creates this notion of expensive overheads,” he added.