Hvidovre Municipality has a new management and employee foundation. It sets a clear common direction for where the municipality is going and acts as a lever to put citizens at the centre and optimize cross-sectoral collaboration. The starting point is New Synthesis.
We must live up to citizens' expectations
Like many other municipalities, Hvidovre Municipality is experiencing changing citizen expectations and more complex tasks.
"If we are to future-proof the ability to provide welfare and services to citizens and businesses, we must build a shared understanding of how we as a municipality can BOTH deliver secure operations, co-creation and innovation, be flexible and do more for less," says Nich Bendtsen, Municipal Director and elaborates.
"Both the citizens and the municipality need us to look at the citizen's life, needs and challenges as a whole and think in contexts across life and professional areas. This ultimately leads to better results - both humanly and financially."
Hvidovre Municipality initiated a process to change the mindset and focus of its employees. Developing a new organizational structure and a new management and employee foundation played a crucial role in this process.
New center structure strengthens cross-collaboration
One of the challenges in Hvidovre was that the traditional structure with specialist departments did not sufficiently support cross-disciplinary collaboration and co-creation with citizens.
To address this challenge, a new center structure was created, removing the functional departments and coordinating the municipal disciplines in a managers' forum that leads the 13 new cross-functional centers.
New management and employee foundation
The new center structure led to a need to talk about leadership. How should we manage and run our municipality going forward? How do we ensure cross-cutting collaboration? And how do we put citizens at the center? This was the starting point for a comprehensive process that ended with a new management and employee foundation.
"Managers and employees in Hvidovre Municipalitynow have a common foundation that sets the direction for how they will work - and not least collaborate - in the municipality going forward," says Rasmus Engelbrecht, partner and consultant at LEAD.
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Employees at all levels have been heard
300 people - from teaching assistants to directors - have been involved in defining the new management and employee base.
"Hvidovre Municipality has taken the broad involvement in the management and employee foundation very seriously. This is good, because the management chain includes both managers and employees, and the alignment of expectations about roles and tasks goes both ways. It has been a bit of a pain in the ass to keep track of and collect all the comments that have been made. People have been both extremely frustrated and super enthusiastic along the way, and the trick was to come up with something that everyone can understand," says Rasmus Engelbrecht.
Hvidovre Municipality succeeded in defining a common foundation that addresses four themes that are crucial for solving core tasks and that all employees must focus on in the future:
Roles and expectations for all employees in the municipality are also described in the new management and employee foundation. See an example here:
