Into another fast lane

Paul Gosling hears of a high flying woman's experience of secondment

South Ribble Borough Council has achieved something that many other employers might be envious of. Not only does it have a new assistant chief executive, but she comes to it salary-free.

For the next two years Carole Shaw is working full time for South Ribble, while being paid by Rank Xerox.

On the face of it, this is extreme generosity by Xerox. South Ribble is a clear winner - it has a high flying manager, bringing in private sector skills and overseeing a re-engineering of the council's structure and operation.

But Xerox, too, sees itself as a winner. "It allows us to better understand how a local authority works, from a business process approach," says John Hopwood, a group resources manager for Xerox. It reflects a new marketing emphasis by Xerox, which now promotes itself as "The Document Company", and emphasises its activities as being about document processing and management.

"We see documents as easing business and management processes, and being a product of business management processes," Mr Hopwood says. Which explains Xerox's need to better understand how and why local authorities generate their paper and electronic documents. The potential reward is a big slice of local authority business - most organisations spend 8 per cent of their budgets on documents, Xerox says.

The relationship between South Ribble and Xerox is no accident. The council's chief executive, Phil Halsall, had been impressed by Carole Shaw, who lives inside the authority's area, and by Xerox, which stresses employee involvement and self-managed work groups. Mr Halsall approached Ms Shaw and Xerox to sound out the possibility of a long-term secondment.

To avoid any suggestion of impropriety, or allegations that Ms Shaw was not up to the job, the final decision on employing her was taken by councillors, who interviewed her alongside four internal applicants for the post. The elected members were not told that she would be coming free of charge, and they appointed her on merit.

"Carole's job is to assist me in pushing forward new initiatives across the council, establishing an anti-poverty strategy, integrating and communicating with local communities, and managing people who work here," Mr Halsall says. "We will be using her ability to make things happen."

Ms Shaw says: "What I have been able to bring from the business world is a way of handling management, from the strategic management point of view, and management by results." She is delighted at the way things are going, and in her first two months she has got stuck into bids for the Single Regeneration Budget, and applying to make South Ribble a member of the "best value" trial scheme being piloted by the Government as an alternative to compulsory competitive tendering.

Although the South Ribble secondment was negotiated with Xerox without intermediaries, most staff loans are arranged by Business In The Community (BITC), which sets up between 500 and 800 full-time secondments a year. It also lays on "modular" secondments, often for just a few hours a week, enabling private-sector staff to tackle specific public or voluntary-sector tasks.

In the 1980s, when many large corporations were slimming down their operations, secondments often had a bad reputation. Senior staff heading towards retirement were often put out to grass within community groups, rather than given compulsory redundancy. Sometimes little effort was made to ensure that useful skill were transferred.

"Secondment has changed radically in recent years," says David Halley, an employee development consultant working with BITC. "It has moved from being something at the end of someone's career to a very flexible deal for developing managers at any level." It is often an integral part of a manager's career development plan, helping them to develop task-solving skills away from their usual environment.

Xerox is confident its secondment will work, but admits to a touch of nerves. "We have never done this before," Mr Hopwood says, "and we want to see if we can make it work for both parties. If it doesn't work we will pull the person out"n