By Paul Trumble, Manager Organisational Development, City of Charles Sturt, SA
Paul Trumble has been employed as Manager Organisational Development at the City of Charles Sturt for more than seven years. This position requires him to manage Council’s cultural change program, training and development, a staff attraction and retention strategy, recruitment and selection, Occupational Health and Safety and employee relations.
In an ever increasingly competitive job market, councils are finding it more and more difficult to attract and retain quality staff. Our research shows that people make decisions, regarding where they choose to work or whether they are prepared to stay with a particular organisation based on four main issues:
- career development opportunities
- work/life balance, including a genuine commitment to
creating flexible conditions - a supportive organisational culture
- attractive and flexible remuneration packages.
Therefore, providing staff with career development opportunities has never been more important. As such, at the City of Charles Sturt, we are striving to become an organisation that is recognised as one that provides exciting learning and development opportunities.
In addition to traditional programs regarding leadership, legislative compliance, information technology and job specific training, we have offered a number of other initiatives. These have included opportunities to participate in the Royal Society for the Blind’s Young Business Leaders Program, an inhouse Future Leaders Program and an innovative Customer Service Behavioural Program.
The Future Leaders Program in particular received very positive feedback from the 13 participants who attended six, two day workshops on leadership. They undertook a work related project and were given access to a mentor. They also participated in a Development Centre, where participants were exposed to a range of scenarios and given direct feedback in relation to their leadership performance. In addition, eight of the participants obtained a promotion before the 12 month program was completed.
Currently we are working on a comprehensive capability/competency framework, against which we can assess staff to determine future training priorities and development needs, enable better workforce planning by management, and allow individual staff to identify future requirements to better fulfil their own career ambitions. With well over 400 staff, this will be quite a challenge!
However, if we are to retain and attract quality staff, we have recognised that we not only need to provide training in the skills that enable Council to achieve its goals, but we also need to provide development programs that meet the personal goals and aspirations of our staff.
Looking to the future, for learning and development to be effective, programs need to be challenging, innovative, fun and relevant to people’s professional and personal goals. They also need to be delivered in a way that is convenient to staff and meet different learning styles.
As an example, Charles Sturt has recently changed its approach to some of its compliance awareness training to include online training methods. Staff can complete this regular training requirement at a time and place that is convenient to them.
We aim to adopt a blended learning approach in the future to meet our people’s development needs.
In an environment where there is increasing pressure on minimising council rate rises, perhaps the greatest future challenge for councils is the need to commit significant resources to ensure that quality training is delivered, and that competence in newly learned skills is coached into performance.
Councils that get this balance right are the ones most likely to attract and retain the best people.
