Future “condensed” civil service to offer better T&Cs

Monday 08 November 2021

The civil service in Jersey will be smaller in future but employees will have better terms and conditions, the Government has said.

Giving details of the Government’s ‘People Strategy’ and ‘FlexPositive’ programme, senior officials told Scrutiny on Friday that the long-term aim was to ‘condense’ the workforce but offer more attractive T&Cs.

This would give the Government a better chance of competing against the private sector for key skills, such as cyber-IT, in the labour market,’ they said.

Directors also said that flexible working - allowing employees to choose when and where they worked - would become the default position, again in an attempt to compete with industry.

The Government’s head of HR, Mark Grimley, who is Group Director of People and Corporate Services, said that reducing the number of full-time and permanent contracts would be a long-term initiative, allowing any reduction in headcount to be “managed” and not have any negative impact on services.

Pictured: Chief Minister John Le Fondré and Education Minister Scott Wickenden were joined by senior civil servants at the Scrutiny Panel hearing.

“We need to move away from permanent and fixed-term contracts,” he told the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel. “We need to start looking at the types of work which are coming through so we can optimise the workforce. 

“That may mean a smaller workforce but we are competing in a market where salaries, particularly in key areas like cyber-IT, [and] our salary levels don’t allow for that at the moment. 

“We could move towards a more condensed workforce but with more competitive terms and conditions.“

He added: “FlexPositive allows us to manage vacancies differently because we have more part-time workers and ad hoc project workers, and it also allows us to look at condensing the workforce over a longer-term period, and manage that down, and still deliver the same quality of services.”

Giving more details of this initiative, Mr Grimley said: “Part of our strategy around talent management is creating opportunities for people in the community to come back into work or through apprenticeships, and part of the attraction strategy is to shift our policy of being a nine-to-five employer [with] fixed and permanent contracts into contracts that offer more.

“We want to address the gender-pay gap, and the way we structure our contracts and our work at the moment sometimes precludes flexible working, so that people can’t progress through their careers in different ways. 

“So it is much more than allowing work-life balance; it is a genuine employer offer which says ‘we will start from a position of flexible working, so the law requires us to consider a request for flexible working’. 

“We are flipping that so that that will become our default mode, as part of a strategic decision for our competitive advantage.” 

Explaining more about FlexPositive, Interim Chief Executive Officer Paul Martin said: “One of the positive developments of the pandemic is that, in a situation of duress, we have identified new ways for many colleagues to be able to work.

“The FlexPositive programme, as I see it, is [identifying] what has the experience of our staff teams been in working flexibly and how can we ensure that, as we move out of the pandemic, that those new and innovative ways of working are embedded in our employment practices.”