To provide value for money, making best use of our resources and expertise to deliver services that are attuned to what matters most to voters.

This goal provides a focus to activities that support the organisation and ensure we have the appropriate skilled people and resources. The aim is to deliver services that are efficient, effective and economical. 

Key achievements

To support our organisation, we:

  • ran a programme of testing, upgrading and benchmarking against appropriate standards to protect our digital infrastructure against cyber threats
  • developed our working practices to reflect the expectations on a modern employer and ensured our digital systems support these changes
  • upgraded the information technology systems that support our regulatory and electoral administration functions
  • continued working closely with the National Cyber Security Centre to improve how we monitor our networks and platforms
  • launched a new website to meet users’ needs more effectively and provide information in easy-to-use and more accessible ways
  • implemented new online procurement, project management and governance systems to make our processes more efficient and transparent
  • developed a new people strategy to support the best use of our resources
  • enhanced our skills base through a comprehensive learning and development programme and investment in specialised technical resources
  • worked with the Scottish and Welsh parliaments to develop an operational model that allows us to report and account to them
  • provided guidance and tools to staff to help us improve our quality assurance processes

Performance measures

Measure Performance

Learn practical lessons from current home and remote working practices and design future accommodation accordingly 

 Ongoing1  

Identify options, costs and benefits of e-procurement and implement a new system accordingly

 Not achieved2

Stakeholder and staff satisfaction with IT tools

 Ongoing3

Maintain high staff engagement scores in the annual staff survey and ensure indicators such as staff turnover are at appropriate levels

Staff engagement score: 72%
(2018-19: 65%.Civil Service average: 62%)

Staff turnover: 13.19%
(2018-19: 31.97%)

Monitor significant variances on all budgets and, where appropriate, reduce these variances over the five years of our Corporate Plan

 Not achieved4

Supporting the organisation

In this last year, we have continued to transform the way we work through significant investments in our digital infrastructure, to improve its resilience and support flexible working practices. We have also continued working with the National Cyber Security Centre to improve how we monitor our networks and platforms, which helped with our focus on cyber security during the 2019 polls.

Our new website provides a better service to our stakeholders. As our main communication channel, it was important for us to improve functionality and accessibility, to communicate our work in better ways.

We have introduced other new digital tools to help us run our organisation. This includes an online procurement system, to make it easier for suppliers to participate in our tenders, and a planning system that enables us to report on our progress against our corporate goals and monitor risk more efficiently. Our new governance system gives us a more effective way to communicate with the Commission Board to give clear oversight of our performance.

Our new people strategy includes actions to facilitate a culture where employees are able to perform their roles more effectively. We started this work by reviewing our performance management and development processes. We have moved away from evaluating and ranking employee performance at set times in the year and changed to a continuous approach, managed through objectives. This addresses feedback from our 2018 staff survey and better fits with our culture.

We focussed on initiatives to address staff turnover. This included changing our recruitment practices to presume all roles would be permanent, unless there is a strong case to justify a fixed-term contract. We also supported staff to re-locate to our other offices, where this fitted their circumstances and our business needs.

We continued supporting staff groups that we set up to address particular areas, such as the staff engagement group, to ensure our employees have input into corporate policies and programmes. We also have groups dedicated to supporting staff with bullying, harassment and mental health issues and we have maintained strong links with our trade union, the Public and Commercial Services Union.

We invested more in learning and development and ensured staff were aware of training opportunities. We also appointed a provider to deliver a leadership and management development programme for all managers, which will run throughout 2020.

The Scottish and Welsh parliaments have been considering legislation that would ensure we are accountable to them for our work on devolved elections. We have always reported voluntarily to both parliaments for our policy work on devolved issues, but the new legislation will mean our formal accountability arrangements match those we have with the UK Parliament.