Leadership and culture change
Strong leadership and a positive culture are key to improving outcomes for residents. Feedback from the 2024 LGA Peer Challenge highlighted issues such as siloed working, weak collaboration, and the need to rebuild trust, clarity and accountability across the organisation.
We are addressing this by building a more open, inclusive and high-performing culture, where staff feel valued, supported and able to do their best work. This includes improving development opportunities, modernising ways of working, and making better use of the skills within our workforce.
Our co-produced People Strategy sets out how we will strengthen leadership, support wellbeing, and create clear career pathways. Recent progress includes stabilising senior leadership and developing shared values to guide how we work.
Together, this will help us become a more joined-up, resilient organisation, better able to meet the needs of our communities and deliver lasting improvement.
Programmes and projects
We have an overarching programme called the workforce programme. Underneath this sits the following projects:
- Workforce one (WF1) – Service Design and TOM
- A programme of service redesign will be developed, building on the target operating model and design principles, and informed by cross-council input. This includes rapid reviews of corporate services.
- Service redesign for some services (such as children's services) has already started or is about to begin. This work will support wider transformation across services.
- Workforce two (WF2) – HR improvement projects
- A strategic review of wider terms and conditions will be completed to ensure they are competitive with similar organisations, helping us retain staff while continuing to offer staff benefits (such as Vivup) and manage costs.
- We will also significantly reduce reliance on interim and agency staff in high-demand services through targeted action, workforce planning and succession planning.
- Workforce three (WF3) – Organisational Development (OD) and Culture
- Developing the next steps following the mini academy, with a clear approach to training for transformation, improvement and professional development including; data apprenticeships, business analysis, data science, digital, process and service redesign, programme and project management, and social care.
- Developing a whole career development offer for everyone, with a clear approach to managing talent, planning for future roles, and aligning workforce planning with business needs.
We have delivered:
Our People Strategy (2025–29) has been approved, including our new values. Staff feedback from the survey continues to shape our delivery of this strategy and support culture change.
Leadership development programmes are being rolled out, with senior leaders completing training in April 2026 and wider manager development continuing through 2026/27.
By June 2026, values and behaviours will be embedded into staff objectives through the performance review process.
Savings explained
Saving opportunities for this programme will be delivered through the service design and TOM project (approximately £3.054m total).