The City of Melville has been recognised for excellence in human resource management at the inaugural Australian Institute of Management WA (AIM WA) WestBusiness Pinnacle Awards.
A collaborative initiative between the West Australian’s Business section and the AIM WA, the Pinnacle Awards were created to recognise excellence in business leadership across the state.
Western Australia Premier Colin Barnett, Governor Malcolm McCusker and more than 600 other guests attended a prestigious awards event at Crown Perth in November 2013, with 117 companies aiming for Pinnacle awards in various categories including Aboriginal leadership development, philanthropy, customer service, green initiatives, human resource management, innovation, marketing and regional small business.
As one of the larger local governments in WA, the City of Melville’s people-focused strategy and strong record of excellence in workforce management saw the City win the award for Human Resource Management Excellence.
City of Melville Mayor Russell Aubrey said the Pinnacle Award was fantastic recognition of the City’s commitment to making a great work environment and building organisational capacity.
“This award recognises the leadership shown across the whole organisation to help achieve staff satisfaction and to continuously improve our culture and the personal development of individuals through our ‘People’ approach.
“With an annual turnover of $95 million, managing the workforce well and looking after our people is critical to ensuring the continued delivery of over 200 products and services to our 100,000+ residents and 9000 businesses across Melville.
“We are proud that with a workforce of over 700 we have been able to maintain a high staff retention rate and a great staff satisfaction rate over several years.”
The City’s long standing People Strategy is fully integrated into corporate divisional and service area business plans as well as the City’s Workforce Plan, and is defined in a specific framework with a core strategy to ‘create a great place to work and build organisational capacity’.
Numerous actions support the City’s strategy, with programs that have been developed in five key outcome areas:
- Employee satisfaction and wellbeing
- Employee performance, recognition and reward
- Workforce planning, learning and development
- Leadership skills and behaviours that enhance and public image
- Involvement and communication.
The City’s Pinnacle award application focused on two key initiatives – Learning and Development System Improvements and the Cultural Optimisation Program.
Key actions for Learning and Development have included the establishment of a Trainers Network Team (TNT) with over 20 staff completing a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment and now providing in-house training to their peers and supporting a stronger learning culture, the development of a corporate competency system, an Annual Training Needs Analysis for the whole organisation based on online competency survey responses and identification of training gaps, and the enhancement of flexible internal and external learning approaches which included in-house development of an Online Workplace Learning System (OWL).
The City has also focused on cultural optimisation and in 2010 undertook its first cultural survey. From those results Council decided to start a culture optimisation program for the Executive and Operational Management Team, and over time this has cascaded through the organisation resulting in some significant organisational change.
Judges for the Pinnacle award had many strong entries to consider from organisations such as the Bethanie Group, WA Football Commission, the City of Joondalup and iiNet. The judges awarded the Pinnacle to the City of Melville after determining it had a ‘well-integrated approach to people development’.
As part of the award, the City of Melville elected to donate $10,000 to the charity Melville Cares, who do important work in the community with seniors and people with disabilities.
