Stephen Moir, President, Public Sector People Managers' Association (PPMA) and Director of People and Policy – Cambridgeshire County Council

As public sector HR professionals, we are all too often immersed in advising managers and organisational leaders about how they should deliver their services. We could be discussing new approaches to performance management, remuneration, ensuring value for money and efficiency, being clear about what is strategic and what is operational and where the two areas meet, understanding who our key stakeholders are, being clear about alliances and threats in and outside our organisations – I could go on! Having been given this opportunity to reflect, I sat and mapped out the five key challenges or areas that I believe we need to address:
Leadership
Place shaping, community leadership and delivering services to empowered and engaged citizens requires a new order of leadership skill and capacity from public sector leaders, both political and managerial. Leading a place and the multi-million pound organisations that provide services to areas requires business acumen, the ability to connect with communities and, ultimately, the willingness to listen and respond to the needs of people as individuals – not something you always see in abundance within the upper echelons of public service. However, dreams of a public sector-wide university apart, HR needs to grip this challenge now and understand the changing context within which leaders need to operate and how best they can be prepared for this.

Pay and reward
Pay and reward remains the immediate battleground for HR in the short term. National negotiating machinery is increasingly out of touch with the needs of local employers, politically directed by ministers and, as a consequence, is more focused upon managing cost pressures and the broader economic position. Moving into a total reward environment where greater personalisation and choice exists for employees will not only be beneficial for employers, but will also make the challenge for HR in this area much more interesting. Wouldn't it be so much more engaging to bring this all together into a single debate, instead of having pay in one corner, pensions in another, benefits in a third and last, but by no means least, the poor old HR person in the fourth corner – trying to box clever against all three issues?

Equality and diversity
Increasingly, the need to ensure organisational approaches to diversity has a true focus upon communities, and community cohesion has meant that the role of HR in shaping, supporting and embedding good approaches to equality and diversity is under threat. Rather than grumble about this or blindly accept the Trevor Phillips view that there isn't a role for HR in diversity, public sector HR needs to rouse itself. We all need to recognise that diversity in terms of service access, design and delivery, policy development and employment opportunities are all areas that HR can contribute towards and should have a strong voice in delivering. After all, the diversity agenda has grown up from anti-discrimination employment law, and who better to take this forward than HR people who can see the bigger picture?

Talent management
Supply and demand; it's a relatively simple process isn't it? Talent spotting, talent development and, most importantly, the ability to deploy talent effectively for the future means that HR needs to provide resourcing and development solutions that are faster, more flexible, and technology-enabled. We also need to be thinking now about how to engage with the future public servants through new media, such as Web 2.0. A strong web-based presence, not just websites, is clearly something we should be grappling with now and becomes an increasing issue as we all try to attract Generation Y employees to our ageing workforce.

Service transformation and efficiency
Finally, the big challenge for HR in the future is to get involved with service transformation and modernisation, changing the very way in which public services are delivered. However, we can hardly do this without first looking to ourselves. When was the last time you looked at the cold hard benchmarking information and performance data in relation to your team and used this to drive further efficiencies out of the system, and when did you properly consider the need to transform your own function?

Now, off you go and look at the day job with a fresh pair of eyes and a clear line of sight to the bigger picture – the future's bright, the future's HR.