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Meet June Withey, one of our HR Managers, who has been with Northamptonshire Police for almost five years.
“I have overall responsibility for all workforce planning activities for Northamptonshire Police and Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service. This basically means having the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time and for the right cost. I oversee all recruitment, transactional HR activities, HR systems, and management information. My team manage the entire employee lifecycle, from application right through to leavers. I also look after requests for external secondments and career breaks, as well as advising when we run a promotion process to ensure we have minimal supervisory gaps.
“All HR data flows through my team. From ad hoc requests for sickness reports, to annual data returns for the Home Office. We also maintain all of the Force’s establishment numbers in conjunction with finance – to ensure we keep track of all roles within both organisations.
“No two days are ever the same! Typically, my day contains a lot of queries around recruitment and assessing if a candidate is suitable for a role or providing guidance and information to others. Most often, this is after escalation and requires final approval or decision making. Some days, these decisions are not easy – but they are the right thing to do.
“I lead and motivate my team, while encouraging their development. Regular 1-2-1s with my staff highlight any issues we might have or any requests for development. Providing a strategic overview of workforce modelling to senior leaders in the Force forms a large part of my day to day too.
“When I joined the Force as a Management Information Analyst, I became interested in the planning element of workforce planning and the intricacies of how one decision has an impact on the wider organisation. I found it very interesting and used to assist in building the long-term plans, working with the training team on when to have intakes of police officers throughout the year. When my line manager left to work on a separate project, an opportunity arose for a temporary promotion into the manager role. As I found that world interesting and had already been assisting with the modelling, I applied and was successful.
“At first, it was a massively steep learning curve, and I found the switch from operational to strategic quite tough at first – and still do sometimes. However, with the help and guidance of the senior leadership team and my colleagues, I managed to pick it up. When the opportunity came for the role to be made permanent, I jumped at the chance.
“Policing is like no place I have ever worked. There are so many different rules and regulations which makes you question yourself more.
“One of the main skills I have learned since doing this role is having a higher level of patience! I have worked in both the public and private sector and found that the hoops and approval chains you must go through in the public sector are much slower. The funding agreements all take time, and all for the right reasons. However, you do have to sometimes wait for decisions to be made so you can move on to the next piece of work.
“The best part of my role is how different it is day to day, and the impact it has. There is never a dull moment, and each day is a new and exciting challenge. I also like to see the progression within my own team, watching people grow and develop always gives me a sense of achievement.
“In my working life at the police, I am quite proud of achieving Uplift – the increase in police officer numbers required by the Home Office. We were given some tight targets to meet, and not meeting them would have meant financial penalties. However, working together with the wider teams, we were able to meet the extra funding target. It was not without its challenges, but a positive outcome.
“Being nominated to meet Home Secretary Suella Braverman really had an impact as it was recognition for all the work we had done around Uplift. For nearly four years, Uplift was a major part of my working life – so having that nomination really made me realise that all the hard work that had gone into it was being seen by others. Sometimes, it is hard to see that the day to day has such an impact.
“Recently, I am proud of the Say and Stay campaign. Where there is real hope that if we can just stop one person from leaving through our actions, by listening to them and offering the right support, then we would have achieved something. Similarly, the Post Retirement Re-joiner Scheme roll out has meant that we have retained some great skills in force with officers that otherwise would have retired.
“Some parts of my role are difficult, such as decisions I must make that have a negative impact on people. Telling people, they can’t be recruited, or that we are having to let them go is tough – but I understand why these decisions have to be made. Every decision has an effect but when that effect is someone not having or losing their job, it is never easy.
Suzanne McMinn, June’s supervisor said: “June has been instrumental in implementing several different projects across the Force which has contributed to making significant changes to recruitment and retention arrangements.
“A good example of the work that she has rolled out, is the Say and Stay campaign which seeks to support retention across the Force and has been well received and is already making a difference to individuals and improvements to how we proactively deal with people’s concerns. June has championed the project and has been influential in making this be a success across force.”
To find out more about a role in HR and to view all our current vacancies, please use the link below.