The City of Greater Geelong has implemented changes aimed at improving how the organisation serves the community while remaining financially sustainable.
The changes are the result of a two-and-a-half year research and design process by the City’s leadership team and internal subject experts, and are now in effect.
The process identified five key things the City needs to be good at to help achieve the strategic aim of being a high performing organisation: municipal planning, infrastructure management, customer and community experience, service delivery, and enterprise management.
As a result, the organisation’s structure has been redesigned around five evolved directorates that each directly align with one of the five key areas.
The directorates are:
- Planning and Design;
- Community Service Delivery;
- City Infrastructure;
- Customer, Community and Economy; and
- Strategy, Governance and Corporate.
Acting CEO Kaarina Phyland:
The new model will help the City address its financial pressures, while becoming more efficient and effective.
With a limited budget and a growing population to serve, we can’t deliver improvement by simply continuing to add more.
We need to hone in on the core services the community expects of us, and set ourselves up in a way that allows us to deliver those services in the most efficient manner.
The refocusing of our directorates represents us prioritising the five things we need to be great at to deliver on our organisation’s strategy.
With the right teams together with clearer focus, we’ll be working together over the coming years to improve the way we serve the community.
The changes have:
- Grouped employees and teams together in directorates that best align with their specific role or skillset;
- Ensured all directorates have a clear and distinct role, making the organisation easier for the community to navigate; and
- Reduced duplication to help improve efficiency and financial sustainability.
Mayor Trent Sullivan:
The CEO and executive leadership were given a mandate to help deliver on the Council’s strategic aim of being a ‘high performing Council and organisation’.
The City as an organisation needs to look to the future and structure in a way that will serve the needs of the community as our region continues to grow and change.
It’s also clear to everyone now that we, like many other councils and organisations, are under financial pressure.
We need the organisation to operate efficiently so that the Council can invest as much as possible back into community facilities and infrastructure such as sports fields and parks, cultural facilities, roads and footpaths.
The proposed changes were announced to staff early in April and were the subject of a four-week consultation period with impacted employees.
All feedback was considered and some changes to the initial proposal were made as a result.
The recent changes have resulted in 16 redundancies across the organisation, while three vacant roles have also been removed from the organisation’s structure.
