2023 Organisational Sustainability Review
A message from our CEO
Mildura Rural City Council has reimagined its organisational structure and is building a dynamic new executive management team who will lead the organisation towards our vision of making this the most liveable, people-friendly community in Australia.
In October 2022 we commenced this process and engaged an independent consulting firm to audit our organisation’s management structure. The review included comprehensive employee surveys, one-on-one interviews, detailed benchmarking and analysed the local government sector more broadly.
The findings revealed MRCC faced five main challenges – a lack of responsiveness to changes in the external environment, an elongated structure with inconsistent and cumbersome reporting lines, siloed operations, unsustainable workload pressures in the management team and the decentralisation of some functions such as project management and strategy development.
The final report recommended several key changes to better support an effective, efficient and sustainable organisation, ready to respond to challenges and opportunities now and into the future.
We are pleased to present to you our new Organisational Structure and look forward to working with our community, local businesses and state and federal stakeholders to ensure this new customer-centric model reaps rewards for our municipality now and into the future.
Martin Hawson
CEO
The Findings
The key findings highlighted issue limiting our ability to provide optimum services for our community. These were:
RESPONSIVENESS – Opportunities exist to increase Council’s responsiveness to its external operating environment and better leverage economic output to drive growth in the region.
AN ELONGATED STRUCTURE - The organisational structure is excessively hierarchical, contributing to cumbersome and inconsistent reporting lines and chains of command.
SILOED OPERATIONS – In some areas of the organisation, there are siloed ways of working which limit the transfer of knowledge and collaboration between teams and departments.
WORDLOAD MANAGEMENT – There is opportunity to address workload pressures of staff and better manager teams’ capacity to effectively deliver on desired outcomes.
DECENTRALISATION – Specific decentralised functions, such as project management and strategy development, require centrally-led support to ensure consistency and effectiveness.
The data also showed that compared to other Councils of comparable size and revenue, our structure had one of the highest staff-to-manager ratios, second only in the state to the City of Greater Geelong. This was noted as a key contributing factor to or ability to be more responsible and to unsustainable workload pressures across our management.
Recommendations
6 key recommendations that will support us to be a more effective, efficient and sustainable organisation:
The Consultation and Feedback Process
- October 2022 – Consultants were appointed and began the desktop review of the organisation.
- November 2022 - Consultation with Staff, Councillors and external stakeholders was concluded. The draft report and findings presented to Councillors and to the Executive Leadership Team.
- December 2022 – The Executive Leadership Team worked to refine the proposed structure and identified key staff who would be impacted by the changes. Councillors were also briefed on the initial findings.
- January 2023 – One-on-one meetings were held with the directly impacted staff. This was followed up with a group presentation. Consultation with all staff at Level 4 of the organisation occurred towards the end of January.
- February 2023 – Final consultation with all staff commenced on 2 February with feedback opening at this time. Consultation included face-to-face sessions, online presentations, hardcopy reports being made available and individual meetings being scheduled. The Australian Services Union (ASU) and Australian Nursing & Midwifery Federation (ANMF) were also advised of the proposed changes during this period and were invited to give feedback.
The Budget Implications
The transition to the new structure took over several months, commencing with the General Manager recruitment processes in March 2023.
By aligning the changes with other key budget initiatives and offsets we have achieved the new structure with a positive budget impact.