Enhancing our culture to deliver change

Our Acting CEO, Kaarina Phyland talks about how transforming the City’s culture was the first step to ongoing organisational change. ?

Recently I wrote about the detailed and considered work the City of Greater Geelong is undertaking to achieve our strategic priorities, by redesigning our organisation with our people.

But as we all know “culture eats strategy for breakfast”!?Culture is the air we breathe in an organisation, permeating everything.?The best strategic thinking in the world won’t get us anywhere without ensuring the people, at all levels of an organisation who will deliver that strategy, are considered the most important key ingredient.

There’s no denying that the City of Greater Geelong has had many challenges with its culture over the years.

Culture is a continuous journey and is never something that is ‘fixed’. When I?joined the organisation, we took things back to basics, doing the legwork to get our employees’ feedback, input and thoughts on the organisational culture at the City.

We spoke to close to 1000 employees, who spoke frankly and honestly. They told us that they were passionate about their work and our organisational purpose of ‘working together for a thriving community’. But they also let us know that they were being held back by barriers to getting things done, unclear expectations, poor performance was being overlooked and not held to account and our directorates were operating like silos.??

The fearless feedback from our people led to the creation of our Working Better Together cultural aspirations: a set of principles which formed the basis of the culture we all wanted.

With the Working Better Together aspirations in place as our roadmap, we set out to create this culture, investing in our leaders through ongoing development sessions and training, and working closely with our union representatives to build a collaborative working relationship to take action on the priority pockets of problematic culture. That work continues today.

We have taken an early intervention and prevention focus not waiting for issues to escalate, implemented better, more robust, internal confidential systems to manage complaints and issues, and invested in communicating internally, connecting our employees to each other and to our senior leadership.

This work was put to the test in the most difficult way possible when the first lockdowns hit - our office-based teams moved to sudden remote work, and hundreds of our employees were impacted by service closures.

We renewed our focus on supporting our employees and community, investing in innovative new measures such as retraining and redeploying impacted employees to other areas of the business, including to new Welfare Contact Officer roles, where our own employees were trained to provide a regular point of contact and support to all our people as they dealt with isolation and changing work circumstances.

We continue to see this work pay off. Despite the challenges, the disruptions, and the impacts to everyone’s personal and professional lives, again and again, through surveys and engagements, our people have given us overwhelmingly positive feedback on our efforts. They’ve told us the City sees employee safety as a priority, they feel supported, see the connection between their work and the direction of our senior leaders, and that they feel part of ‘one team’.

Culture requires continuous focus and effort and our work at the City will never be ‘done’.?We are continuing ‘working better together’ through building great leaders and creating the environment for our employees to be their best. We serve a remarkable community in Geelong – and our people are our greatest asset. Without them, our organisation would stop!

Has your organisation experienced a similar cultural journey? How did you approach it?