The City of Rockingham in Western Australia has embarked on a process of workplace change that has achieved improved effectiveness and efficiencies in the delivery of services to the community. Council’s process of change has empowered employees to control and manage service delivery by utilising integrated Best Practice principles.
The City now has a workforce that has clearly established outcomes and uses continuous improvement initiatives. It is responsible and accountable, is aware of costs, recognises quality inputs, clearly establishes business goals, and uses quality management principles.
During the process, Rockingham Council has completed the following.
- Restructured the organisation into purchaser and provider functions
- Developed team structures, team dynamics training and team incentive packages
- Developed service agreements , activity based costing and performance indicators
- Worked at continuous improvement
- Developed devolution principles and a corporate policy and procedure manual
- Developed a productivity measurement and gain share model.
- Undergone process analysis
The organisation has developed and introduced a performance reporting system based totally on meeting outputs measured against performance benchmarks in both the provider areas and the purchaser area. Additionally, improvement tools have been provided to each team during the continuous improvement process, enabling each team to constructively and analytically improve productivity.
As the project was a change and improvement process for the whole organisation it involved Council, community and other government utilities. It has improved the quality, quantity, timeliness and cost of the services provided to residents.
Throughout the process of change, the wellbeing of the employee was constantly considered.
To gauge employee satisfaction and development, staff surveys are now common practice at Rockingham. As an Organisational Key Performance Indicator, surveys were conducted on three occasions, allowing employees to priorities issues they consider to be important.
These surveys assisted Council to provide a climate indicator in terms of employee satisfaction.The staff surveys will also assist in the identification and assessment of the current organisational culture, and provide the organisation with some comparative results on which to gauge the health of the organisation.
For further information contact Rod Fielding, Executive Officer Business Development, telephone (08) 9528 0333.
