Welcome to the ARMA Secondments Project!

Co-Convenor of the ARMA Secondments Project, Mark Taylor investigates what secondments are and introduces us to the Secondments Project…

Hello and welcome to this first of many blogs discussing issues around secondments that is the temporary transfer of a member of staff from one department to another, within the same organisation or across organisations. Secondments are a feature of our employment landscape and, for many, an excellent way of staff development, allowing people to gain new skills and experience not necessarily immediately available in their current role or environment.

This type of developmental secondment is reasonably well known in our sector but according to McKenzie (2003) there are four other types. A strategic secondment is normally used a temporary transfer of skills from the private to the public or voluntary sector to solve an issue that the host organisation does not have the resource to do. This transfer could be seen as an altruistic exercise and might be mirrored in our sector as a transfer from a large or particularly well-resourced funder or from a HEI of similar standing.

The other types of secondment McKenzie discusses maybe less frequent within HEIs although I would love to know if anyone reading this blog has experience of the following. Secondments have been used for conflict resolution, to ‘diffuse a problem between existing staff members”. They have also been used as a tool during times of recession or pan-organisation difficulty either in terms of keeping key members of staff long term (‘loaning’ them out when the organisation may need to temporarily slim down knowing the staff member will return later; the golden handshake secondment) or the transitional secondment, used during a more permanent downsizing, helping an individual move on.

Secondments are a feature of the modern workplace. However, practises that underwrite them in terms of HR culture, legal agreements and administration, learning needs and objectives, and even ‘secondee availability’ vary enormously across the sector. I have worked at NIHR CCF for almost a decade and organised three secondments from three different organisations. Each had unique lessons, but the one overarching lesson was this; is it possible to standardise the processes and paperwork across the sector, a Lambert style set of agreements and the associated cultural change?

Having discussed this with colleagues at ARMA it seemed there was an appetite to explore this, and I am pleased to say the ARMA Working Group on Secondments formally met for the first time November last year. The members biogs are to be found on this page as well as the terms of reference for this group. Over the next few months, we hope to engage with ARMA members as well as a broader group of stakeholders to look into key issues with external secondments i.e. transfers between two separate organisations.

Members of the working group will be blogging (so please leave comments!) and we hope to be sending out a survey soon. It is possible we may hold a small number of workshops too. Please bookmark this webpage to see our progress and lessons learned. In the meantime, may I wish one and all of us a very happy Easter!

Mark A Taylor

Head of Strategic Partnership, NIHR CCF.

If you would like to find out more about the ARMA Secondments Project, click here.