Case studies

Wakefield

Located at the heart of England, Wakefield Metropolitan District Council (WMDC) covers 350 square kilometres and is home to 315,000 people in a diverse range of city, urban and rural communities. The council provides a range of diverse services working interdependently for local citizens, from waste services to social care, schools to planning services. At present, Wakefield is facing some tough challenges. The council requires total savings of £67 million over the next 4 years and needs to reduce the headcount of senior managers by 28%. The localism bill and 'Big Society' plan are further accelerating the pace of change. The issues arising from changes in organisation structure and financial circumstances are compounded by the organisation's size (over 14,000 employees). To meet these challenges, fundamental changes are required in the size and shape of the council and Wakefield needed a suitable tool for carrying out organisation design and HR analytics.

Concentra offered to pilot OrgVue with the council. Using OrgVue, WMDC was able to gain valuable insights into their workforce. For example, detailed sickness records of all WMDC employees were loaded onto OrgVue in as little as 30 minutes and, when this data was analysed according to reason for sickness, dermatological conditions were identified as anomalously high in certain parts of the organisation. Based on this pattern, the HR team was able to identify a crucial health and safety issue, which was addressed simply by making sure all employees in those particular parts of the organisation wore gloves at work.

Questions which used to take 3.5 days to answer can now be answered in 10 minutes using OrgVue, which enables me to answer questions I didn't even realise I had. It's like seeing my organisation in 3D rather than 2D

Helen Grantham, Service Director for People and Customers at WMDC

Wakefield continues to work with OrgVue on a daily basis. They are rolling out access to line managers across the organisation to support self-service reporting, are actively modelling future organisation scenarios and are performing workforce planning within the tool. Wakefield is also doing process design for a new business unit using OrgVue.