OurAuckland sits down with Stephen Town to talk about his and the council's performance over the last year.
Stephen, you’ve just wrapped up your performance objectives for the last financial year. Those were a particularly comprehensive set of objectives that included more hard and stretch targets than ever before – how do you think we went?
That’s correct; those performance objectives really gave us some firm goals to work towards. That’s not a criticism of where we’ve come from but a symbol of our maturity as an organisation.
On the whole, we have met or exceeded almost all of the objectives the Governing Body set for me and the organisation last year. Those that haven’t quite hit their targets were either areas that need a bit more work or were purposely ambitious.
I’m really pleased with our overall performance as an organisation.
Employee engagement is important in any organisation, large or small, what do you think has driven the four percentage point increase?
We concentrated on talking to staff about our organisational strategy and making it clear for everyone to understand and connect with. This included ensuring we have good leaders who were well-supported and could focus on working with their teams. We’re aiming for a further four percentage point increase next year (to 55 per cent).
We’ve also seen a marked increase in our inclusion index (eight index points) which I’m really proud of. This reflects the value we place on diversity and fairness, regardless of age, gender, seniority, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
Looking after ratepayers’ and Aucklanders’ interests and getting value for money is a constant discussion when it comes to public organisations. How have we fared in the area of effective financial management?
As well as looking at our operating costs and ensuring that we maintained our financial credit ratings, this focus area related to how we manage salaries and wages, travel and consultant’s fees.
We know how important prudent and transparent spending is to Aucklanders and that they’re particularly interested in how we spend on travel and staff costs.
We made some important changes to our travel guidelines over the last 12 months to ensure we’re only travelling when it’s necessary and that we’re choosing the best-priced options when we do travel. With today’s technology we can also use Skype and teleconferencing for ‘virtual’ meetings and planning ahead allows us to get better value. The result was around 31 per cent less spent on staff and elected member travel.
Auckland Council is a large organisation that requires careful management to keep staff numbers in check. How are we doing on that front?
The Governing Body recognised that we have some areas that needed to grow in order to deliver quality services to our growing population in Tamaki Makaurau. This has resulted in more staff on the front line in our regulatory and community services and facilities areas but through some careful management of our business units, we’ve kept staff numbers well under target. We now have 6120 full-time equivalent employees working for Auckland and our salary and wages spend is around $25 million less than budget.
There are two measures that weren’t quite met – what’s the story there?
Those were measures around core operating costs and are quite technical accounting measures. The reason we’ve not met our targets is due to being over-ambitious in setting revenue goals for some of our business units, like parks and consents.
Focus area three was all about performance, service and customer experience. There are plenty of positive results in here but what’s happening with customer satisfaction?
Our customer experience index dropped from 68 per cent to 61 per cent and that’s not ok. Healthy Waters, Animal Management and Alcohol Licensing are all doing well but we saw a drop in satisfaction with our Waste Solutions, Building and Resource Consents, Noise Control, Bylaws and Food Licensing functions.
These are areas that keep our region moving and impact on Aucklanders’ everyday lives. If we get it wrong by not delivering a quality service or not responding in good time, people will be understandably dissatisfied. We will be focussing on this area as a priority for improvement over the next 6-12 months.
So what’s next Stephen?
We’ve reflected on last year’s objectives and used our measures to set ourselves some solid targets for next year. I’ve been working on my new performance objectives with the mayor and councillors and they’re due to set them later this week.
We have taken the opportunity to fine-tune some of the objectives to make sure we’re really testing ourselves and measuring the things that matter most to Aucklanders.
We are also getting ready to deliver some of Auckland’s biggest and most exciting projects. This includes the 36th America’s Cup and the major infrastructure programme (which is already underway) across the Downtown and waterfront areas; and we’ve got the rollout of major water quality improvement programmes and natural environment initiatives as a result of direct investment through targeted rates.
We’ve got another busy year ahead and we’re well-placed to get on and get the work done.
Read the Auckland Council CEO Performance Objectives for 2017/2018 here.
