Whilst there is much to admire about Sir Philip Green's business empire, his pronouncements about Government procurement lacked understanding and imagination.

 

In these difficult economic times I’ve been thinking a lot about procurement.  Good procurement achieves the best possible result for the lowest price.  But imagine this conversation between a client and a sports surface contractor…

The benefit simplification plans outlined by Iain Duncan-Smith last week indicate that the Coalition Government will move towards a top up mechanism for benefit payments.

The Tax Payers Alliance recently criticised the treatment of bonuses by the Home Office, which had set aside 8.6% of its pay bill for such payments but was planning to use only 4.4%.

It is possible the UK is about to witness the decline and fall of the 20th Century's monolithic, centralised state institutions. But trying to read the early actions of the coalition government is difficult and it's too soon to tell how the new world of public service, created by the government's actions, will look.

The words ‘Big Society’ don’t mean a great deal to some people.  Some commentators wonder whether a big society will damage fairness, others whether our culture of risk aversion will smother it, if it’s a covert route to oversize cuts or whether our highly complex public sector will be impossible to alter anyway.  

When organisations refer to their "shared services" projects, they are not all talking about identical solutions. Different experiences and variations in savings will reflect the nature of changes being made and the approach to implementation.

Over the last decade, it's become increasingly clear the transactional side of Human Resources and the Payroll service are two sides of the same coin.

The HR team helps managers source and deploy people into effective roles on the right employment terms. The Payroll team implement those terms accurately and in accordance with tax legislation.

Completing the cycle, the Payroll Team provide invaluable workforce and cost information which cab support strategy, planning and policy review.

Both teams help manage the workforce and support the reduction of associated risks while removing burdens from front line management, allowing them to focus on operations and team leadership.

In the article "The Other", SystematicHR described the highly structured environment payroll inhabits and the contrast with the "flexibility" which managers and HR departments so highly value. Working with both teams regularly, Attractor recognises the description and accepts there are elements of truth in the common stereotypes.

There is something else which, until recently at least, distiguished the two departments.

In the UK, organisations have traditionally been happy to outsource payroll transactions to a commercial partner. They recognise the work needs technical skills but can be labour intensive. They consider it safer to pass risks to a specialist body who guarantees compliance and, hopefully, generates economies of scale.

Some perceive the reluctance of organisations to outsource HR as protectionism or empire-building by the management team. HR is often considered more central to business operations, making it less attractive to outsource. Fears often arise over "losing control" of key issues on staff appointments and difficult people management issues. With HR supporting action by senior and line managers, it isn't possible to  transfer "compliance risk" in the same way.

With the government proposing a cap on public sector pay, it can't be helpful to see reports that, according to reward consultancy MM&K, the pay for private sector Chief Executives has continued to grow while share prices have dropped.