 Rwy'n dechrau i'r unig. Fy hoffi'r hynny, ddyddai'n ei ffrindio'r ffrindio'r cyhoeddfeydd ar yr awdurdod yr oedd y byddai. Fy hoffi'r ffrindio'r byddai'r byddai'n gwirio'r cyhoeddfeydd yn ffrindio'r cyhoeddfeydd y byddai. Roeddwn i'r cymdeithasol ysgolwyr Sally Ann Hart ac fe gyda'r cyhoeddfeydd. Rwy'n rhoi'n ddim yn ei gweithio'r cyhoeddfeydd i'r cymryd ac yn cyfrofi'r cyhoeddfeydd. gymaint iawn ychydig yn ôl yn cymennu. Mae'n du'r ddod wnaeth yn gweithio i gwybod a bod ni'n ddigwydd i'n gwybod. Os bydda'r defnyddio'n amser, ddim yn y cwm Llywodraeth Salianne Hart, ac fyddwn i'n dweud ar y Llywodraeth MilŽbwrn. Mae Ymddag ymlaen i'r iawn ymdag yn Llywodraeth Anne Bradden. Ddod yn yfun, mae'n lilwodraeth Anne Bradden a rwy'n dweud o'r dweud ar y Llywodraeth yn Llywodraeth MilŽbwrn. Yr cyfeir yma. I am Cwmser Mark Owl, as you've already introduced me, and I represent the U-Papwith and Caxon Ward. Cwmser John Williams. Good morning, Chair. I represent Fendin and Folbourne. I'm also the lead Cabinet Member for Resources. Cwmser Peter Fane. Cwmser William Jackson Wood. Peter Fane Shelford Ward. Thank you. And Cwmser William Jackson Wood. Good morning, William Jackson Wood, from also the Shelford Ward. Thank you. I can confirm that the meeting is current. We have the Head of Transformation, HR and Corporate Services, Jeff Memory with us in person today. Good morning, Members. And we have Helen Cornwall, HR Service Manager. Good morning, Members. And also we have Ian Senior representing Democratic Services today. Good morning. Are there any other officers online joining us today? And can I invite Cwmser Heather Williams to introduce herself today? Good morning, Chair. Good morning, Members. Heather Williams, I represent the Wardens Ward. Thank you. So we come to item one on our agenda, which is Apologies for Absence. Ian, can I ask if there are any other Apologies for Absence today, please? Yes, we have Apologies from Councillor Sinita Hans Raj and from Councillor Richard Stobart. Councillor Peter Fane is subring for Councillor Stobart. Thank you. Item two on the agenda is Declarations of Interest. Do any Members here have interest to declare in relation to any item of business on this agenda? And if an interest subsequently becomes apparent later in the meeting, please would you raise it at that point. Thank you. Moving on to item three, the minutes of the previous meeting. This was held on the 28th of June. Do any Members wish to make any amendments to these meetings? Councillor Bradman. Thank you, Chair. I just observe on page five at point four and elsewhere, the policy is referred to the hybrid policy. And I think it should be hybrid working policy because many things can be hybrid, but we're talking about working specifically here. So I think that should be noted. Thank you. Any other comments on the minutes? I have just a small one on paragraph five. It's the penultimate line. There's an extra word. It says officers advised that the data was came from standard reporting. I think it said that the data came from. So I just need to admit there was. So can I take approval for these minutes by Affirmation Members? Agreed. Agreed. Thank you. Item four on our agenda is the staff health and well being survey. This is an information item regarding actions taken and areas requiring further action. As a committee we are being asked to note the report and Jeff I understand that you'll be presenting this item. Thank you, Chair. Yes, this report details the results of the staff welfare survey. There were two surveys undertaken. The first was in August 22 and the second survey was after the initial three month trial of the four day week. The survey is quite detailed and for a number of areas compares how people were feeling in the council with a data set that's measured across both local authority and private sector employers so that we can identify not only how people are feeling, but how that relates to how people are feeling generally in the country in relation to their work. The two surveys show a significant improvement in the welfare of staff across the two surveys. Although it has identified that some areas of improvement were greater for some groups of people than others. So the HR team has been looking at how we can address those areas where the improvement hasn't perhaps been so great. The really positive thing though is that across almost every single area we've seen some improvement. The survey was undertaken by a private company and the results were anonymous. Although we were able to get group results, we as a council didn't get any individual results. So people were free to express any concerns and be honest about how they were feeling. I think that's reflected in the results that we've got here. Overall it's a really detailed survey and we're able to break the information down into a lot of different cross sections. So as I think members will have noticed by reading the report, it includes not only gender, but the amount of time, for example, that people have been working here, whether the members of staff have a disability, whether they're working full time or part time, and enable some quite detailed analysis. We're continuing to work on those areas where we can see that more effort's needed, but overall I'm very positive about the results. I think either Helen or myself will be happy to answer any questions that members might have. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Geoff. Members, do we have any questions? Councillor Anna Bradman. Thank you. I'll have one for Helen if I think probably. It relates to the measure intention to leave, and if we just look at right at the very beginning, for example, on page 14, we're looking at 2022 versus 2023, and the intention to leave in 2022 is scored as minus two with some pink colouration on the charts, and in 2023 the intention to leave is scored as plus nine, but it's green, and that seems slightly counterintuitive. So could you just explain what that marker actually means, please, or maybe how it's calculated? Yes, thank you. So the way that the survey is demonstrated is a score below or above a median score. But because this organisation is independent and they survey a number of different organisations, what they do is benchmark it on a median of all organisations. So, therefore, a dark green colour indicates a positive result, so that the scores are above where a median score might be in terms of an intention to leave. A light green indicates a typical result. The pinky kind of colour, light red, indicates that maybe there's some area of caution there, and the dark red kind of indicates that that might be a risk factor that needs some more, you know, looking into to see what might happen. So where you've got a negative score, that means it's that many points below the median score, and where you've got a positive score, it means there's that many points above the median. Thank you very much, that's helpful, because I think the numbers are a bit confusing. Thank you. Can I just invite councillor Dr Richard Williams to introduce himself and just join the meeting? Thank you. Thank you, chair. Apologies for that. Councillor Richard Williams, Representative Whittlesford, not normally a member of the committee, but I've come along today. Sorry, I didn't quite catch that last bit. I said I'm not normally a member of the committee, but I've come along today. I've noted. Thank you. Councillor Mark Howell, do you have a question? Thank you very much indeed. I've got good work in the report. Page 16 is the one I'm going to concentrate on. I don't know whose answer. I'm a little surprised that we've still got teams to have lots of reds in the 2023 with 44 respondents, especially on engagement. Could somebody comment upon that, please? Is that one for you, Geoff? Is the finance service one? I think what this represents is the finance team has been under a considerable amount of pressure over the past couple of years of working really hard to get our accounts up to date. Certainly, we're working very hard with them to ensure that they are engaged in the process, and we've produced a guide to go out to all managers, which helps them make sure that they're engaging with their staff. We've introduced team charters, which means that the managers will meet with their colleagues in the team and work out how they best operate. But that is an area that we're continuing to focus on. I have had discussions with the head of finance about the best way of addressing this in his area. We're making sure that whenever we plan any health and wellbeing sessions, we focus on the finance team. Anything that I need to add to that? I think the only other thing to add is there is an ongoing review in that area, which is ongoing. I think that's obviously an additional cause of pressure on the team at the moment, and that's hoping to be concluded relatively shortly. Hopefully that will help. Can I ask another one? Thank you very much. On page 24, you have the length of service and the respondents by their length of service. It seems like to me that the longer you stay, the worse things are getting. But I mean, I'm just being thin. Mainly in the three to six years period. But also others. I'm so sorry. I missed to read that, and that's my apologies there. I can see what I've done there. So sorry about that. I retract that question. Did you say you're retracting that question? Okay, thank you. I just wanted to go back if it's okay to pick up on your first question about the finance service. I'm just wondering if there might be a way for the information to come back to committee on how that's progressing rather than leaving it for another... Yes, certainly. I mean, we'll be undertaking further work with the finance team, and we'll be testing the results of that work. And we'll be very happy to bring that back to this committee once we have those results. Thank you. Councillor Peter Pan. Thank you, Chair. My question relates to paragraph 14 on page 11 in relation to encouraging colleagues to work from the office on a more regular basis, partly so as to reduce the loneliness that some reported in the 2022 survey. Clearly, there are some other factors on which this is reported that could be affected by that. And the emptiness of the office has been, of course, the subject of public comment, including a photograph in the Times on Saturday. But I noticed that at the bottom of this, the reduction in loneliness and so on has been addressed partly by twice weekly vlogs, new teams channels, and team meetings, which could, of course, be either on teams or in person. I just wondered to what extent colleagues are more inclined to work in the office now and whether that is having the impact that was hoped for. Yes, we are here. The number of people in the office will vary depending on the day, the time of year, the work that's being undertaken. But certainly we are seeing more people coming into the office more regularly. I think the average number is around 40, which is a lot lower than it used to be prior to the COVID pandemic, but is more than we sometimes get in the office. What we've been saying to people is that you should come into the office in the most effective way to work, and anyway, there should be team meetings at least once every two weeks, so not just somebody coming into the office once every two weeks, but the whole team coming in once every two weeks to work together with other people coming in more regularly. I know that members of the leadership team are coming into the office to make sure there's at least one of us in every single day, and I know most teams are ensuring that they've got people in the office to cover most days. I remember, but I referred earlier on to the team charters. That's an important part of the way that we're working at the moment, because teams have talked amongst themselves about how they can be most effective. Apart from saying that you have to have those teams meetings, you have to make sure that you're coming into the office regularly, and particularly where we've got a new starter, ensuring that you've got people coming into the office regularly to meet with that new starter to help acclimatise them. We are still giving teams quite a lot of flexibility. We are seeing an improvement in how people are feeling about that, but it is something that we're keeping under review. If we're finding out that that back isn't improving as much as we like, we'll review that and issue more detailed instructions to staff. Again, it's part of the toolkit that we've been sending out to managers, that managing in a hybrid working environment is different to working in the way that you used to work for, and actually managers have had to spend more of their time ensuring that they're doing checking in with people that aren't in the office to ensure that they've got that connection. You mentioned teams that certainly are an invaluable asset, and most of our officers have now also got the ability to contact each other via teams, and we're asking managers to ensure that they're doing that regularly, but we are keeping it under review. If I may, Chair, just to comment that the reference to team meetings doesn't necessarily mean teams meeting. Thank you. Are there any other questions from members of the committee before I come to Councillor Heather Williams? Councillor Bretman. Thank you. I just wanted to look at the data from disabled staff, and very noticeable concerns in 2022, but certainly the report at paragraphs seven and eight I'd clarified that. I really wanted to thank the officers for achieving such a big improvement in 2023, and I wondered whether you could explain if there was a particular thing that you think has made this such a big improvement, age 19 in the grove. I think it's difficult to specify completely what it is because obviously there's a number of different interacting aspects to this, but some of the things that we've introduced relatively recently are the disability passport policy and the work that we've done towards the disability confident accreditation. So I'd like to think that these are having an impact plus obviously the flexibility and the four-day week are things that have positive reactions to all of our staff, so they will include this demographic. Councillor Heather Williams, do you have a question? Thank you, Chair. It's in relation to page 11 and the response to Councillor Peter Fane's question about people being asked to work in a way that's most effective for them, but of course that's quite subjective when you say the word effective and also thinking of the interactions with other people that what works for one person won't work for another and particularly on the element of loneliness. If we use a Myers-Briggs analogy, if you are introverted, then working at home is going to be lovely, you're going to have peace and quiet, et cetera, unless you've got a child running around like I do. If you're introverted, that lack of human contact, that lack of people to get your energy from and interact with is really actually very draining and can have very adverse effects. So I'm wondering, has there been any sort of analysis of our staff as a whole? Do we know what people's preferences are, their natural preferences? Did we do any profiling of our staff at any point so that we could then make reasonable assessments as to what is for the majority? And just on having somebody from each team in the office a day, that is not my experience. And that's on several days when I've come into the building. So how has this been monitored and what can be done in the monitoring of this to ensure that there is a member of back room staff for each department in this council every day to support the contact centre? Thank you, Chair. Is that more for you, Jeff? Yeah, I'll start to move that. Thank you. In terms of have we done an analysis about whether people are introverts or extroverts? No. But we have started doing something called Emma genetics, which looks at how people operate to take in information. There's something similar to that because some people, as you say, are very social. Some people are a lot less social. Some people look like to look at the big picture. Some people need to know the detail. So it's a little bit more detailed than that. It's not spread out across the whole of the organisation yet, but that's something that we are rolling out. In terms of the team chart, is what we're asking services to do is to talk about how they operate best. But of course if people, we're not saying people aren't allowed to come into the office. Those people that get their energy from other people, we're very happy for those to come into the office every day if that works best for them. In fact, one of the reasons that we moved all of our people onto the first floor was to ensure that we had the opportunity for people to have relatively easy contact with lots of colleagues. In terms of monitoring who's in the office on any one day, we do monitor the badges when people come in. But that isn't analysed at the moment to analyse centrally to make sure that there's somebody in from every team. The managers are the ones that are expected to manage that. I'm sure you're right, there have probably been occasions when there isn't somebody in from every team in the office, but I haven't had a lot of reports from the contact centre that they're having difficulty getting through to people. But I'm very happy to talk with my colleagues of the corporate management team and get some more information on how they're ensuring people to come into the office and feed that back to this committee. But we haven't done a centralised analysis of that at the moment. Did you have another question? Yes, thank you. So you said about the badges. Obviously the hybrid working policy requires people to come in one day in a fortnight, if memory serves me well. So how are we ensuring that that's complied with as a council? And I would say we did have an issue, one planning committee not so long ago where we couldn't start because we didn't have a planner in the building to support us. So I'm saying these things are happening. The policy is that there are team meetings once every fortnight. Not that people only have to come in once every fortnight. How often they come in will be decided as part of that team charter. I'll make a note of the fact that there was no planner in the building. It's unusual, there's normally a number of planners in my experience. I think Stephen Kelly himself is normally in four times a week. But I'll raise that with Stephen. Are there any other questions members? Councillor Brandon. Thank you. It was just an observation really. And that was what has impressed me about the approach right from the very beginning when COVID struck for hybrid working was that management made it absolutely clear that members of staff could have as much autonomy as they needed to work as they felt was most effective. And I think that showed a remarkable degree of trust in our staff. And I think our staff have showed how worthy they were of that trust. And I think what we have seen is that broadly speaking perhaps not every element but broadly speaking this data shows an extraordinary degree of happiness, satisfaction, comfort, reassurance with people. Of course there will be individuals and I'm sure their teams are aware of them. But I'm really impressed by the results that have come back from this anonymous survey in 2023. I'm really encouraged. I think it endorses the chief executive's decision to say to people take anything you need home, take any equipment you need, work as you wish. And then we've gradually learned about how to bring people back into the office in a way that works for them. So I think it's very encouraging and I'd like to commend this work. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to make another comment really. I'm looking forward to seeing how things progress. There are so many variables in the world today compared to the world a couple of years ago. It's very different. The part-time working that I think was interesting for me as well and I'd like to thank officers for thinking about how we can ensure that the benefits are delivered equally. So yes, thank you very much for the report. Sorry, Councillor Mark Ham. It's not so much a question, but the methodology that they've used now in these two are we going to be changing that because once you change it, it's very different to do comparisons in the future. So we're going to stick to this methodology now. We are. Thank you very much. That continuity is important. And mindfully, obviously, there were questions put in about four-day week because that wasn't there before. So yes, thank you very much. Members were invited to note this report, so noted. Look forward to the next one. Thank you. OK, members, we're moving on now to item number five on the agenda. This is the HR recruitment, retention and absence data. And that covers June and July of this year. Again, we're being asked to note the report. And again, Jeff, I believe you'll be starting to take all that. I'll be Helen. I was Helen. Apologies, my script is different. There's a bridge in the gate. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. So as you can see from the report, there's some positives. And we're starting to record more recruitment data. So we're starting to see some positive results from those in terms of number of applications. We've also started the two surveys in terms of asking questions of those people who have interviewed with us but were unsuccessful and also those people who are in their induction period with us. We are hoping to go on a soft launch for our recruitment module. So again, that will provide us with some richer data in terms of recruitment. And so we're quite positive about the results of those. In terms of the absence stats, certainly the statistics remain consistent within an acceptable range and below our regional benchmarking. And we continue to monitor the detail and reasons and take appropriate interventions and steps where necessary. Thank you. Members, do we have any questions on the report? Yes, Councillor Richard Williams, did you have a question or comment? I did, Chair. I'm just slightly surprised that you haven't gone to Members first. I'm just checking I've got the right report. But yeah, okay. I did have a few points on this one. Just in terms of page two. So we have the statement about the... So page two of the... I've actually got the online version, sorry, I haven't got the papers, but page two of the item report, there is the paragraph in the report to Cabinet of May 2023. And there's at the bottom of that a saving of $550,000, which relates to these nine posts, which has been repeated a few times. Now, it's already been confirmed to me in correspondence with officers that that $550,000 is actually an extrapolated figure. Had these posts been filled by agencies that for a year, it would have cost this much more versus the staff cost. But my broader question is, that's a very difficult figure to use because it just focuses on these 23 posts. So you might fill all of those 23 posts and then you could claim some huge saving, probably of over a million pounds. But if another 23 posts have become vacant and you're employing agency staff to fill those posts, actually you've not really saved anything because you're spending agency costs on other things. And that's why it's not in these papers, but again through correspondence with officers, the amount of actual money that this council has spent on agency staff in January, February, March this year and April, May, June this year, it's actually higher than it was in 2022. And that's the only thing that really matters is the amount of money we're actually spending. So I think if we could just have some clarification really of that point, that okay, it's fine to focus on these 23 posts, but the fact that they're filled doesn't necessarily mean a saving because if another 23 posts, as I say, become vacant and we're filling them with agency staff, we've not actually saved anything. And then just one other question chairs around. I appreciate, I'm taking a bit of time. That's just a clarification question. When it comes to chart number six, in this report and the calculation of the cost, if I understand the report correctly, of absence days lost by cost, has the way that that figure has been calculated changed to account for the fact that if staff are working four days rather than five days, the proportionate loss of productivity from a sickness day is actually much higher on a four-day week than it is for a five-day week because obviously the salary now is being paid over 30 hours rather than 37. So does that figure reflect a change in the way it's calculated to account for the fact, as I say, that the lost day in a four-day week is much more lost productivity than a lost day in a five-day week if we're to believe, which is a whole other story, but let's just say we do for the minute that actually the four-day week results in the same productivity in four days as five days. Thank you, chair. So it sounds to me like there were two things being asked for clarification on there. I'm not quite sure if I'm coming to Jeff or John or John or Jeff first, John. Well, I have the first question. Thank you. And, you know, as Jeff and I say, there's good and bad agency costs. For temporary posts, and I think we've given an example of the work that we've been doing with the Ukrainian visitors, we will fill them with temporary staff. And there is, and within the budget, there is a budget for those temporary staff. Where you're dealing with more permanent posts, especially ones in planning, because in the budget, you will budget to fill them on a permanent basis. So you would expect to fill those staff, you know, those staff would be paid whatever the going rate is in the council. And it's those posts that are the ones that we're concerned about because we're not filling those posts. We're having to employ agency staff, which we would not have budgeted for because we would have budgeted for them to be filled as permanent posts. So the half a million pound saving is the fact that it's those permanent posts that we are filling instead of having to employ agency staff to fill them, which would have meant us having to find another half a million pounds that we hadn't budgeted for. The temporary posts and the agency staff that Councillor Richard Williams is talking about are people that we have budgeted for. So, you know, you can't take one from the other. The fact is that if we hadn't fulfilled those permanent posts, we would still have filled the temporary posts with agency staff, but if we hadn't fulfilled those permanent posts, we would have had to have bought in agency staff that would have cost us over the year an extra half a million pounds on our budget, and that's what we have saved so far. Thank you. Jeff, did you want to respond to the second question? A bit more clarification on what Councillor Williams was asking. There are effectively three categories of posts that we're having to keep track of. One of them is where there was a post that was vacant and being filled by agency originally, but now is the same post, but is now filled permanently, and there are nine of those posts. We also need to keep track of posts where when the first report was written, there was a role and it was vacant and filled by agency, but those posts are now no longer exist. We've been running a transformation programme, and also some of the efficiencies that have come out of preparing for the four-day week means that on a couple of occasions, managers have been able to dispense with those posts and either split the work across other areas. There are two of those posts, and as Councillor Williams says, there's also new posts that weren't vacant when we did the original piece of work, and there are two of those posts. If we were to only count the savings on those nine posts, I think that the savings are about 590,000, so they'd be higher, but we have got these two new posts that have come online, which reduces that level of savings down to about 550,000. We are accounting for them. I'm sure there'll be some other scenarios that come up before the end of the process that we'll have to account for as well, but so far those are the three scenarios that we've encountered. In terms of the second question about the sickness absence days, Helen, is that something that you can respond to? I'm happy to respond, but I don't have the information to hand in terms of how that's calculated, so I'll go back and clarify that point. Thank you. Are there any questions from members on the report before I come to Councillor Heather Williams' comments? Just on these nine posts, the hard fill posts, obviously the organisation is intending to cut the amount of officers by 20%, is that something like that? There's going to be over the next few years, so we're looking to reduce, not via redundancies, but by phasing people out, is my understanding, although inevitably staff will be made redundant if you want to get rid of that many. These nine fill posts, so they post that will carry on past that period, or are they short term and will be making these people redundant? There is no target for reductions. We are looking to be efficient and we're doing service reviews, and while we do service reviews, we will be looking at services and we will be looking to see where the post can be reduced, but there isn't a target of 20%, a fixed target at all. The service review for planning has been running for some time, and most of these are posts in planning. It's difficult to say, because I can't predict exactly what will come, but I don't believe there's any intention to reduce the number of planners, certainly in the planning department. Members were obviously being asked to note this report. Did you have another question? Yes, just that in the budget papers that have been forecast, it is about 20% saving on salary. Any other questions? Members? Our role is to note this report. Can I take it that we've noted this report? Agreed. Again, I'd like to thank officers for pulling the report together. I'm particularly interested, going back to the sick days, when we look at how staff are being and health is affected by the new ways of working, and the model of that as well. So, thank you very much. So, we just move on, Members, to the date of our next meeting, which is Thursday 9 November. Can I just confirm the start time of that meeting? Is it 10 o'clock? 10 o'clock? So it's back to Thursday, Thursday 9 November, at 10 o'clock. Thank you.