With all the ministries and monuments, the palaces and landmarks that fall within Westminster, it would be surprising if a bit of the gloss of central London didn’t rub off on Westminster City Council.

Graham White, the council’s director of HR, certainly believes there is something special about this local authority at the heart of the capital. There is evident pride in the ebullient Ulsterman as we survey the cityscape from his seventeenth-floor office. The London Eye, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben are all visible.

But White is well aware he was not brought here to enjoy the view – or to dwell on the past. In Westminster’s case that includes the sale of council homes in the 1980s to change the authority’s political map, a controversial scheme that was subsequently declared illegal. The council also pioneered one of the UK’s first major HR outsourcing contracts in 1998. When White came to the authority in January last year, one of his first big tasks was to launch a cross-council pay review. He knew it was likely to be a tricky issue. “Pay is very emotive. It strikes at the heart of the fundamental employer-employee relationship,” he says. “I knew that if the review was going to work we had to get the engagement right.”

The question was how to do so when the council’s 5,000-strong workforce was spread across numerous offices and sites.

White’s mind began to turn to the power of Web 2.0 as a means of reaching them. In his previous job as head of HR and organisational development for Surrey County Council, he had become increasingly interested in the use of such applications. Though definitions of Web 2.0 vary, the term generally refers to applications featuring user-generated content – so anything from Wikipedia to Facebook.

Using technology in this way offered relative accessibility, White decided. “Most of our office-based staff have computers at work, many of them have computers at home, and all of our libraries have computers,” he says.
 
After working on the project with Westminster’s in-house communications team, the council unveiled an online discussion forum that was accessible from within the council’s intranet.

The idea was that employees could respond to information from White’s HR team and initiate questions themselves through a series of intranet conversations that others could contribute to.

The system was designed so users could gain access to these discussion threads with three clicks from their desktop.

In visual terms, Westminster’s forum is little different from thousands of others. But because the ease of access gives people the chance to express their opinions more freely and conveniently than they would do in other circumstances, it has made a huge difference at the council, according to White.

“The big issue to me was saying to employees: ‘You are going to be hearing lots of opinions. We want to hear yours. Not only that but we want you to share among yourselves your views as well,’” he says.

While White also used more traditional tools such as cascaded briefings to managers, union meetings and “open-house” briefing sessions, he did not want to rely exclusively on measures that appeared to come down from on high. So when the forum opened, he was careful to emphasise that anyone could initiate a thread, not just members of the HR team.

“Sometimes I would start a thread. Other times I would monitor a discussion and see where it was going,” he says.

This was a good way of seeing employees’ concerns and allowed him to set the record straight if there was any confusion about an aspect of the pay structure that the council was proposing as part of the pay review.

What he found particularly gratifying was that if somebody didn’t understand an issue, their colleagues would explain on the forum without requiring input from HR. “It has much more impact and credibility when it is a colleague explaining this than when it is coming from the boss in HR,” he says.

Soon the forum gained momentum, with typical threads covering single subjects recording on average between 450 and 950 hits each – between 20 per cent and 50 per cent of the workforce.

The upshot was that “suddenly, we discovered we had this amazing tool to allow staff to share views and ideas,” White says. “There was a cascade of comments and a lot of it was very heartfelt.

“Underneath that, we started to see the mood of the organisation and its values: because people can express them when they’re allowed to use their own language in their own way,” he says.

In surveys carried out to measure the impact of the engagement process, between 70 per cent and 80 per cent of people said they were well informed about the pay review. And since the review finished, the forum has continued to serve as a platform for eliciting views on other issues.

On the day I visited White, there were threads on equality and mentoring, as well as ever-present threads such as “lost and found”. The most heartfelt contribution, though, came from someone lamenting the disappearance of a pint of milk earlier that morning.

Of course, letting employees have their “heartfelt” say is the kind of thing that many managers would welcome in theory and run screaming from in practice. Presumably there is some vetting of content?

“There is a degree of control over the use of the site, though it is not strict,” says White, although he says he knows of one council with a similar forum that allows discussions to take place unsupervised. “Obviously, we would not want any references that would be offensive.”

In fact, White says that only once since the forum was set up a year ago has a thread been closed – because comments were close to becoming offensive to a single identifiable individual.

“The real key is to create a level of confidence in staff to make them feel they can express their views maturely without feeling any retribution is likely,” he says.

Does having all this feedback induce the tendency to micro-manage? White, who tries to check the forums at least once a day, says it is a good way of keeping his finger on the pulse of the organisation but he recognises that “there are some very eloquent individuals” who have a disproportionate input.

With his strong advocacy for Web 2.0 applications, White does not intend to stop here. At Surrey County Council, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Facebook as a tool for employer branding and used YouTube to advertise jobs (for social workers, for example). There are no definite plans at Westminster yet, but he is considering using something similar here.

There is a flipside to such tools, however. Organisations can easily get caught out if disgruntled employees start broadcasting their discontent to the world via web pages and social networking sites. How would White react to such an incident?

“You have to take every case on its merits, but if we were to identify that a member of staff was unhappy and feeling that they had no alternative but to use external opportunities, I think we would need to chastise ourselves first and ask how we had got into this position,” he says.

“I would want to find out what was motivating this particular individual. Had they been recently demoted or disciplined? I would also want to know why no other staff were coming back and saying, ‘No, this is a good place to work.’ ”

We are at the end of the conversation and White pauses for a moment while we look once more at the view from his office. He talks about his enjoyment of working “at the heart of things”. It is obvious that this is no empty chatter, given that he commutes 500 miles every week from his family home outside Belfast to be here.

At the weekends White, a keen churchgoer and a trumpet, cornet and bass player, can often be found playing with his local Salvation Army band.

But his parting words about the forums show that, while he is keen to blow the trumpet of this initiative, he is keeping it in perspective. “It’s important that I don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the forums are representative of the whole organisation,” he says. “I see this as a barometer of opinion – but I have lots of those.”

A clear link between cost and performance
When Graham White arrived at Westminster a year ago, employee pay was not the only tricky issue he faced. The relationship with the council’s HR outsourcing provider, Vertex, was also a challenge, and the HR function itself seemed poorly perceived among employees.

Westminster was the first council to initiate widespread HR outsourcing in 1998, under a contract with Capita. But after Vertex, a Lancashire-based specialist provider of customer management outsourcing, replaced Capita in 2003, teething troubles appeared, with the upshot that the contract has now been renegotiated. White is reluctant to go into detail on issues that took place before he arrived at the council. But, he says, under the new contract, due to go live in April, he has aimed “to specifically link more of the cost of the service to performance”. Key performance indicators and service level agreements have been reduced and clarified.

“The provider now has almost half a million pounds at risk each year depending on the level of service,” he says. Vertex agrees that the contract is “partnership-based, with a balance of risk and reward”.

White also felt that the re-engineering of Westminster’s HR function in the 1990s – of which outsourcing was a part – had led to confusion among its customers. “HR had been through a tough time and came in for quite a degree of criticism,” he says. When staff sought advice, they essentially faced two HR functions – the outsourced and in-house teams.

“Now the door simply says HR and whoever you speak to, that person helps,” adds White.