The People Services Directorate leads the ICO's people agenda across the organisation, providing clarity, professional support, and direction.
We empower our people to thrive and achieve in an inclusive culture by:
- driving inclusive cultural change;
- enabling business outcomes;
- enhancing the employee experiences; and
- ensuring our processes, policies and procedures cultivate our values and high performance.
Pay and Performance
The Pay and Reward team ensure that our ICO pay, pensions and reward polices and practices are aligned to our strategic direction and goals, and that operational pay requirements are effectively processed. We develop, lead and implement all elements of our reward strategy as well as commissioning labour market benchmarking, managing the job evaluation process, maintaining accurate records and producing management information.
We work in collaboration with all staff at the ICO and their People Managers in support of their career progression, through the creation of simple and easy to follow processes. We provide expert advice to staff and managers in relation to pay, pensions and benefits. We work closely with internal and external partners to implement our pay policies and support pay negotiations with our recognised trade unions.
The HR Operations team are responsible for the delivery of day-to-day operational HR services. This is the core service upon which the wider People Services offer is built. Our shared service centre is responsible for the self-serve provision which is accessible to all staff as well as providing direct support to colleagues and people managers.
Organisational Development and Capability
The Organisational Design and Capability Department exists to ensure we develop the culture, capability and capacity required to achieve our organisational objectives. We play a key role in developing a learning culture and an environment in which everyone can be their best.
The team provides expertise in relation to culture, capability development, professional career frameworks, succession planning, leadership development, coaching and mentoring, organisational development, digital learning, team development and inclusion and wellbeing.
The Inclusion and Wellbeing Team promote inclusion and wellbeing organisation wide. We progress our wellbeing and EDI action plan and provide governance for staff networks. We ensure inclusion is considered in areas such as policy and leadership.
People and Strategy
The People Business Partnering team is responsible for shaping, implementing and continuously developing a customer focussed Business Partnering Service and operating model within the ICO.
People Business Partners are aligned to our senior stakeholders across the ICO, and work in partnership with them to implement the people strategy within their business areas. Acting as a critical business partner to that director or head of service, they will support the building of directorate capability, creation of local people plans, workforce planning and resourcing, and develop approaches that achieve our shared organisational objectives.
We use directorate people dashboards and other analytics to provide insight and inform collaborative decision making with our business leaders on relevant people management issues and work with them to assess potential strategies and solutions. We work in partnership with other HR colleagues in our centres of excellence to provide a link between leaders and the centres of excellence, working together to deliver our people strategy through the implementation of specialist people initiatives.
The wider People and Strategy team deliver a professional, proactive and effective service to all people managers. We empower, coach and upskill people managers with regular engagement to equip them with the knowledge, skills and tools to effectively manage their teams in line with our people policies and procedures and ICO values.
We provide a professional employee relations service within a unionised environment, which enables the business to explore and resolve employee relations cases in a manner that is solutions focussed and legally compliant. We are responsible for engaging with our recognised trade unions both within formal and informal meetings and leading our employee relations strategy. We develop and review our people policies and procedures in consultation with key stakeholders.
The Talent and Workforce Planning
The Talent and Workforce Planning teams have three distinct functions:
- recruiting talent;
- workforce planning; and
- early careers.
Our Talent Team are responsible for attracting sourcing, hiring, and retaining top talent, enabling the ICO to have the right people in place to meet business objectives.
Our Workforce Planning Team is responsible for developing and managing the workforce plan that ensures the ICO meets its strategic objectives.
We also support the ICO talent pipeline by developing and supporting early talent initiatives including apprenticeships, internships and graduate schemes.
We foster an ICO talent pipeline by developing and supporting early talent initiatives including apprenticeships, internships and graduate schemes. We provide advice and guidance on workforce planning to ensure the organisation meets its strategic objectives.