The Value of Audit & Educational Opportunities as Outcomes

With audits and workshops being delivered across 3 states and the large number of clients we supported for the month of September, we realised a couple of things:

• the value of a good audit. This is by no means a new learning, but having a third party, second set of eyes look over things invariably extends way past its initial intent and is often the best way to know what we’re not doing as effectively as we could, and where we’ve got opportunities to improve & learn.
• the opportunity for learnings can be so much greater when we focus our efforts of client workshops not so much on content, but on the key concepts that we know will start discussion.

I know I harp on it a lot, but education is everything! We improve our operational outcomes by reassessing and learning from what came before. Basically, we learn from our mistakes... and we implement change. One of my main goals is to figure out what success looks like for our customers. So often that comes from having a good old look around while I am doing an audit, finding the opportunities for improvement, but also identifying what goes into a bespoke training package for that client. Investment in hands on training is one of the gaps that I often come across in the industry and the best education that we can deliver to the resource recovery sector is that which is specific to each client's needs.??

As a case in point, following a recent audit I was lucky enough to deliver workshops to a large metropolitan council, where technical officers, gatehouse staff, management and team members both old and new shared in robust discussion of what they wanted to achieve from training that related specifically to waste levy.

The conversation took us down a rabbit hole of efficiency improvement opportunities for Council and reinforced the priority of key learnings of the audit. Interestingly, it also helped us at Resource Hub identify some learnings that we feel other councils could take from this LGA.?

With education in mind, I’m off on a plane again, this time to Adelaide, where we’ve mixed up our workshop delivery for another client, to be a combination of 1-on-1 and group training, remote and face-to-face, both in the corporate office and in the gate house. This supports flexibility needed with challenges of illness, staff availability, and my own availability.?

While this job hasn’t come from an audit, I will be undertaking an audit while I'm there. Based on what I have already seen, the expectation is that the audit will identify a number of opportunities to improve efficiencies and the amount of effort that it takes to deliver things - and the first place that we’ll start with is just some general day to day training to make life easier.?

Workshops are just one result of audit, of course - there will be a range of other recommendations – and sometimes we really like to highlight the stuff that people can self-serve. Things they can share among the team can be really easy wins by taking care of small incremental changes.??

We’d love to hear from you about the great learning experiences that you and your teams have had, related to your waste operations and your facilities.

?Chat soon,

Lacey