Surrey Police

Surrey Police provides policing and law enforcement services for the county of Surrey which covers 11 boroughs, an area of 642 square miles and an estimated population of 1.1 million people.

Managing reorganisation to align staff with key priorities

As part of the restructuring programme Surrey Police created a smaller command structure that simplifies operations and reduces cost, and is organised by function instead of geography.

To help employees and managers through the complexities of the reorganisation and to ensure that operations continue as usual, the force has introduced an employee portal called peopleSolutions. OrgPlus Enterprise has been deployed within peopleSolutions for use by all employees and has improved user adoption of the portal by providing a valuable organisational communications resource. This has been seen as a major selling point for the service.

"The deployment of OrgPlus Enterprise has been a great success for us. People like using it," stated Zoe Latimer of the HR Business Team. "OrgPlus Enterprise enables employees of all levels to see exactly where they sit within the Surrey Police organisation, which in common with all police forces is very complex with multiple levels, reporting lines and grading structures."

Visualisation encourages accurate data

Before the People Solutions portal with OrgPlus Enterprise was launched, line managers and HR typically kept their own records by using spreadsheets and a variety of local tools to produce org charts.

By introducing OrgPlus Enterprise, which produces charts directly from peopleSolutions, any data inaccuracies can be easily seen and rectified. OrgPlus Enterprise is much quicker and easier to use and provides better, more accurate data. "OrgPlus Enterprise has helped us to improve the accuracy of our main HR database and it saves managers and supervisors time because they no longer need to maintain their own versions of org charts," continued Zoe Latimer.

All 5,000 staff at the police force have access to OrgPlus Enterprise for basic information, managers have access to additional data such as job grades. The HR planning team are able to use OrgPlus Enterprise for modelling and what if scenario planning.

Zoe Latimer explained, "The structure at Surrey Police is fairly complicated and it can be quite difficult for staff, particularly new joiners, to see exactly where they fit in to the organisation. OrgPlus Enterprise is invaluable for managers within particular teams who have a large span of control, such as our managers within the Targeted Patrol Teams. It is now easy for them to see who sits within their team, what their grade is and what other lines of command they are subject to. It is a truly complex structure and seeing this information visualised in a chart format makes it much easier to understand at a glance."

Looking to the future with OrgPlus Enterprise

"At the moment we use OrgPlus Enterprise purely as a charting tool to see where in the organisation people sit and their reporting lines. However, we can see that it has much more potential for the future. There is the potential that OrgPlus Enterprise can be used as a more general employee directory and also for succession planning and budgeting, which is something that we could consider for the future. It's about helping our officers to become as efficient as possible so that they can provide a better law enforcement and crime fighting service to our residents. On several levels OrgPlus Enterprise is helping us to do just that."