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Assessing Organisational Health and Capability

 

The main measures and standards the department uses to assess organisational health and capability are:

  • a two-yearly climate survey to assess how staff feel about working in the department; we are aiming to maintain our upper-quartile result for engagement this year
  • the Performance Management System (which rates individual performance and behaviours against role expectations and which maintains a line of sight between individual performance, organisation outcomes, and government priorities)
  • the annual SSC Human Resource Capability Survey (this measures organisational performance against the public service benchmarks in critical areas such as staff retention and turnover, remuneration levels, and leave utilisation).
  • human resource metrics that gather data from exit interviews and analyse recruitment and retention rates according to gender, length of service and level within the organisation.

We seek to maintain a climate at DPMC which is considered by staff to be challenging and satisfying and which makes them proud to work here. The 2010 climate-survey findings will be evaluated by age, gender and ethnicity to support workforce planning and to ensure we are meeting the needs of our diverse workforce.

Developing and enhancing staff and management capability is a priority for DPMC and is critical to the success of meeting organisational objectives in a resource-constrained environment. The department will roll out in 2010 a Learning and Development Plan based on discussions between managers and staff. This will be monitored to ensure it reflects future capability requirements needed to deliver effectively on the Government’s priorities.

Our information-management focus in 2010/11 is on efficiency improvements in the flow of information and the development of a sustainable technology platform. We are assessing new applications that will support us in achieving a more collaborative working environment with external agencies. Completion of the planned disaster-recovery capability will provide DPMC with more assurance that its network can operate effectively in an adverse-event scenario.

DPMC will continue to investigate options for shared services and outsourcing of corporate functions in the central agencies and more broadly across the public service, in particular drawing on the Better Administrative and Support Services (BASS) programme to identify opportunities for achieving efficiencies.