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Launch of Better Practice Guides: Workforce Planning, Performance Management & Absence Management

Mural Hall, Parliament House
22 June 2006

Thank you Ms Halton and Dr Shergold for sharing your experiences and ideas on improving people management. It’s a critical focus for us all as leaders and managers in the APS. Like the actions highlighted by our speakers, the publications being launched today focus on practical steps and measures to:

attract the right people to meet the agency’s need;
establish an engaged and high performing workforce able to deliver business outcomes; and
counteract poor organisational practices which manifest as poor performance, underperformance and absenteeism.

The first guide is Building Business Capability Through Workforce Planning. It summarises the main concepts in workforce planning, and provides a range of tools to assist agencies to commence their workforce planning efforts.

It is about designing an approach that is integrated with business practices, tailored to the agency’s specific operating context and firmly focused on the delivery of business outcomes.

The second publication is Sharpening the Focus: Managing Performance in the APS. We know that we can all do better on performance management implementation. This guide looks at three areas central to making performance management work—workplace culture, performance management systems and supporting practices. We tend to focus on systems because they are tangible elements that we can get our hands on. While they are still important, they are not the whole story.

We also need to look at understanding the workplace culture and what it is that motivates employees, and doing everyday things better, like ongoing informal feedback are where practical gains can be made in improving performance.

Research by the Corporate Leadership Council has shown for example that employees are more likely to be motivated by fair and accurate informal feedback, internal communication, and working for a strong executive team than they are by:

the number of formal reviews they have;
the emphasis on specific outcomes of formal reviews, such as promotions or raises; and
where they rank against other staff.

And dealing with underperformance when it occurs is not something we all do that well in the public service.

Fostering an organisational culture where employees feel engaged and are committed impacts directly in reduced absence—and absence management is the focus for the remaining three publications.

These draw on work undertaken on absence by the ANAO; this highlighted the significant costs to agencies from unscheduled absence and the variations in absence rates between agencies. The work shows the potential for improvement and gains in productivity in this area.

Effective absence management requires a coordinated approach involving senior managers, human resource management, line management, employees and occupational health professionals.

It needs to emphasise preventing avoidable absence, while also providing support to those who are genuinely absent through circumstances such as illness and injury and aiding their return to work. And it is this sort of approach which is outlined in Fostering an Attendance Culture: A Guide for APS Agencies.

In this one we also establish a common definition of workplace absence across the APS—and a basis for reporting and being able to benchmark trends. Getting to a common definition has not been an easy task—given the different agency systems and leave provisions. But we have got to a common position after much consultation with agencies. And the Commission will be reporting on the results as part of its State of the Service Report work.

What we do at the organisational level, such as establishing a supportive culture and communicating clear policies and expectations on attendance are important to addressing absence. Also important, is supporting and developing managers who have responsibility to manage staff attendance and output on a daily basis.

The practical tool on attendance management we developed is aimed at helping managers in not only tackling problematic absences issues, but also taking preventative steps to avoid absence problems, and creating a culture where employees ‘turn up and tune in’—hence the title Turned Up and Tuned In.

I would encourage you to make use of this resource material—and more generally focus within your agencies on moving ahead with approaches which suit your particular needs and circumstances. The Commission will be running workshops around the publications in Canberra and in the regions which you may find useful in this process.

In closing, I would like to thank you all for your interest and support in the release of these publications. They have all been developed as a result of extensive consultation with agencies to ensure they provide real approaches which are relevant to the APS. The willingness of agencies to open and share their experiences is valuable in providing opportunities to learn from each other and improve our people management outcomes.

Thank you.

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