UK police overtime, causes, effects and cure.

admin    General Discussion, Police, Public Sector     Accenture, CCJS, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Chief Constable, City of London Police, government, Home Office, HR, Intellicate, Norfolk Police, Northamptonshire Police, Northumbria Police, officers, overtime, police, public sector, Theresa May, UK police overtime

The police are first in line for sweeping cuts, in particular with regard to spiralling overtime costs. Out trot the usual calls for review teams, working parties, regulation overhaul and a host of other non-person causal effects creating a system that has been described as madness.

Police overtime is no different to any other kind of overtime, but in the public sector it can develop an institutional shell that becomes very resilient to normal business-like intervention. The first danger is drawing attention to something when you have no intention of doing anything about it. For example a joint report by the Chief Constable and Treasurer of the Northumbria Police Authority in February 2003 set out the procedure to reduce the overtime bill in accordance with National Guidelines. A modest Police Negotiation Board (PNB) target of 15% reduction with the usual exemptions and exclusions followed. Four years later the Northumbria police overtime stood at a little over £23M, or put another way during a ten year period it had increased by 549% – the biggest increase of any UK police force.

On average police overtime nationally has increased by 100% to stand at over £440M. This is in addition to other invested costs which has grown police resources during the same period by between 12%-30% depending how you do the counting. The report by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) makes some sense of the number crunching that goes on. It also highlights the disconnect between increasing resources by over half, while hiking overtime (a strategy when resources are insufficient) into the stratosphere.

So here we are again. Attention is focused on reducing the police overtime bill, the similar PNB 15% is being targeted as a respectable attempt to rein in costs, and as mentioned earlier a raft of factors (that have little or no impact on overtime anyway) need urgent review. So what will happen now? Given the police overtime is currently running at 48.3% we know it will total over £656M by 2016. If the same institutional shell of the past 10 years is allowed to harden further it will be much worse. Changing a few health and safety culture issues, notice periods on days-off changes and even shift patterns (an old favourite) will not dent this shell. We will see new forces enter the field as the operations frontline will extend all the way back to HR, perhaps even an e-HR, and beyond. Intelligence-led or otherwise all this will do is make police resources more reliant on process that only drive up costs.

Police overtime, like all overtime, is not a bad thing thing. It is bad when it spirals out of control; and happens when the scheduling horizon of staff resources is too short. I don’t mean 12 month rosters – that’s not planning that’s a pattern. Nothing more nothing less. When police deployment is being pushed around in spreadsheets – pencil behind the ear – in monthly chunks, or worse by a system no one understands, high staff costs are assured – and ripe for exploitation at any level.

Demand-led deployment? Already been done – Accenture and Home Office Circular 2002. Dedicated police resource managers – already recommended a decade ago. Variable shedule arrangements? already done to death but 12 hour shifts are popular. The latest initiative surrounding workforce modernization produced a useful 101 social science paper on research methods, and a web site shadow peppered with broken and outdated links from a time there may have been belief. In fact there is a rich seam of research that any “pan-handler” having the energy can sift through for any nugget of argument they want. Some are still talking about a 10 year plan – they don’t even have 10 months.

So what would be a sensible thing to do?. First a visit to the City of London Police, Norfolk and Northamptonshire Police and find out what they are doing. Three forces that not only kept overtime costs down to pre 10 year levels, but reduced them even lower. Second, when staff costs of a modest police unit of 35 sworn officers costs over £2M in assets a year, lets start treating this as a serious operations management skill not an admin function – and that does not preclude civilian staff delivering those skills. If you can scale the management skill so much the better. Finally extend the scheduling horizon at least 6 months ahead of the game, 9 months or longer even better – even fewer suprises! Coordination, communication and control delivered by those closest the problem I guarantee will transform the way you do business.

Alternatively we can all wait for a public debate about priorities and choices.

Efficiency and Effectiveness – What it is, and what it isn’t.

Richard Mills CEO    General Discussion     busniess, companies, efficiency, Employee Scheduling, Intellicate, job cuts, Schedule24 Workflow Management, scheduled work hours, shift, shift pattern, staff, work, workforce

A 2007 whitepaper about neglected management skills in the workplace, highlighted the lack of coordination, communication and control of staff in businesses operating extended or 24 hours working.  It was written at the height of “boom time” during which team leaders and line supervisors were unwittingly transformed from people to process managers, and management teams continued to pursue the fads and fashion surrounding talent management and 360-deg performance driven reward and retention programs.  However, basic workplace skills continued to be neglected. Three years on and things are somewhat different. The “piranha” is upon us and pundits are extolling “tough times” will be around for a long time to come.

Certainly most of us are aware expectations have been firmly pushed into the ”more demand for efficiencies in the workplace” debate. So what is efficiency? Well on its own nothing much. The ultimate state of efficiency is where no energy is expended. So closing everything down is about as efficient as it can get, but that doesn’t really help. We will however hear about efficiency ad nauseam and it will become synonymous with cost-cutting, which in turn will become welded to job cuts. For business to be both efficient and effective may well involve job cuts, but carrying out job cuts does not make a business efficient and effective. Often businesses continue just as inefficient and ineffective as before – just smaller.

Efficiency can only have meaning when associated with our effectiveness to achieve something – a business or management goal for example. It may be worth bearing in mind you can be effective yet inefficient, and efficient yet ineffective. Efficiency and effectiveness are siblings of reason. You need both.  A much over-used phrase of late is the statement ”We will do whatever it takes”.  A hallmark of someone who has bypassed the faculty of thought if ever there was one.

Efficiency measures the amount of time and cost required to achieve a goal; and effectiveness measures whether that goal has been reached. The best outcome is to achieve a given goal in less time and cost than by alternatives means. The hardest task for the drive for  more efficiency is not reducing cost, that is easy – anybody can do that. Defining goals  and recognizing at what point they have been reached is much harder.

Leaving aside whether goals are defined and agreement when they are reached, another  relationship exists that many will try to bend in the name of efficiency but only succeed to break . The cast-iron relationship forged  between staff-cost, staff-count, and staff-hours is complex and the consequences often underestimated. Without the means to manage all three contexts simultaneously few ever get it right.