Richard Crouch

In the summer of 2006, when I took the head of HR job at Somerset County Council, I immediately inherited a very good HR service and a cracking team. However, the council had recently embarked on an agenda for whole organisation transformation and it was clear that the HR service itself needed to transform at the same pace, or risk falling out of step with the rest of the organisation. We embarked on a radical change agenda for HR in early 2007. Our approach in delivering HR had been upside down and we went about turning it the right way up. For example, we created a commonsense approach to performance management. We were relying too much on weighty procedures in dealing with performance issues.