Our performance as a regulator relies on us having talented people, effective processes and good governance.
This year our focus will be on how we truly develop as an organisation, investing in our people, skills and systems.
We want ORR to continue to be a great place to work with diverse people and perspectives.
In April we will publish our refreshed diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy, which focuses on ‘Representation, Ownership, Leadership and Engagement’.
We plan to carry out an audit of ORR culture, building on feedback from our people survey. This will give us deeper insight into organisational culture and behaviours across teams, to benchmark how well these are aligned with our goal of an inclusive and supportive workplace.
We will also deliver bystander training to give our people the tools to recognise and respond when witnessing bias or harassment.
Under our new approach to performance review, we will have a particular focus this year on talent management, to identify current and future skills gaps and enhance our leadership and management capabilities. Through the introduction of new data dashboards we will improve managers’ access to real-time information about their people, to inform better decision-making.
We will also do more around early careers. We will expand our intern programme this summer, running business days for young people from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds, in partnership with Access Aspiration (part of the Mayor’s Fund for London charity) and we will continue our successful multidiscipline apprenticeship programme.
This year will see the creation of a new three-year technology strategy, aiming to enhance existing services whilst harnessing new and emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The strategy will have a strong focus on upskilling our people to maximise the benefits of using new, more efficient administration tools. We will focus on making tools available that enable our people to work autonomously wherever they are.
Ensuring we maintain robust protection against cyber threats remains a high priority. Our new Cyber Security Plan draws together recommendations from audits and measures required by central government and this year we will deliver a new iterative programme of works to ensure we maintain our security maturity across the organisation and are able to meet the UK Government Security Standards by the required date of 2030.
In March 2024, we published our first Corporate Environmental Strategy, setting out a range of organisational and employee actions ORR can take to meet the Greening Government Commitments for 2021-2025, and throughout this year we will work on embedding and implementing the strategy’s action plan.
We will continue to communicate the value of effective and independent regulation to external stakeholders, and will ensure that our decisions are always based on robust and pragmatic legal advice.