Harnessing people power

GGI’s new maturity matrix can help establish a strong, effective people committee. Peter Allanson believes every organisation needs one.

People committees can inspire a mix of emotions. Dread in the chief people officer feeling a relentless holding to account for the number of tribunals in hand, settled or won, and incipient boredom in non-executives as the HR team parade their successes (or not) at tribunals, staff recruited or retained, and training places filled. Or so it seems too often to be.

An effective board will spend its time looking forward, thinking the organisation into the future, and its specialist committees provide assurance about current performance while also looking to the future, exploring and developing, implementing and managing the section of strategy relevant to their subject.

People and culture offer all organisations their raison d'être and so present the biggest opportunities and risks to achieving purpose, mission and outcomes. People costs are a huge area of expenditure and high-calibre staff are essential if high-calibre service is to be the norm.

So why would you not have a dedicated board-level group exercising appropriate controls, demanding assurance and being responsible for a measure of accountability?

But an effective committee needs to be much more than an assurance mechanism if it is going to add true value to an organisation. Strategy and culture should be central to the work of a board and therefore of its committees – these are the unique contributions a board can make to the success of its organisation.

Strategy, development, culture

A people committee should be the top-level owner of workforce strategies and plans, also covering organisational development and culture. Culture should also embrace equality, diversity and inclusion matters, which should, of course, permeate the way the organisation operates and delivers its business and ensure it reflects the communities it serves. While there is an argument for this to be dealt with over the entire governance structure, in most organisations its development and delivery are too fragile to be left to their own devices. One day perhaps…

Membership and ownership of a people committee needs a bit of thought. Leaving it to the HR team overlooks the key interests of other members of the top team in people. In particular, the chief operating officer will not be able to operate and deliver unless the people strategies and their delivery are right for the organisation, and there may be specialist leaders who have similar interests – in NHS trusts the chief nurse and chief medical officer will also share short-, medium- and long-term interests in the workforce. It is clearly wise not to narrow the focus of the committee but to distribute its leadership more widely.

Committees allow the board to increase its bandwidth to embrace those matters that are important to it with non-executive oversight of key risk areas; membership should reflect how the organisation does its job through its people. It does not need a raft of non-executive HR specialists, though it should have appropriate expertise and committees should not hesitate to co-opt the skills they need to do their job.

GGI’s new maturity matrix

GGI’s new people committee maturity matrix is designed with the NHS in mind, but its key elements are relevant to most corporate situations as it covers purpose, strategy, risk and agenda planning, performance reporting, assurance and challenge, stakeholder relationships, becoming a learning organisation and organisational culture.

As with all GGI maturity matrices, it plots basic level achievement through to exemplar bodies from whom others can learn. There are some serious challenges in this matrix with some worthwhile challenges to rise to.

It takes courage to embrace becoming a learning organisation that’s known for the strength of positive relationships with communities — an organisation in which openness and opportunity are celebrated, and cultural development is continuous, drawing inspiration from both within and beyond.

A tool for progress

Organisations are encouraged to establish a broadly based and ambitious people committee dedicated to developing a workforce focused on delivery in a style befitting its culture, purpose, mission and values.

Progress towards that end can be measured using GGI’s new people committee maturity matrix, which allows organisations to plot their current achievement and helps them plan what they need to do to improve.