Part three - Key strategies and charter report: Developing our people and infrastructure
Developing our people
Becoming an employer of choice
Inland Revenue continues to develop initiatives that centre on attracting and retaining people who focus on delivering high-quality services.
An engaged workforce
In our second Gallup engagement survey, conducted in December 2006, we improved our overall engagement score from 3.65 to 3.75 out of 5. This is a statistically significant improvement, particularly given the changes we were going through in the preceding months. There was a significant improvement in recognition, which had been an area of focus for 2006. We continue to rate highly in the areas of providing opportunities to learn and grow and providing our people with the right tools to carry out their roles.
We still need to establish more clarity around job expectations and provide our people with the opportunities to do what they do best - as well as maintaining the improved focus on recognition.
Pay and Employment Equity Review
We are reviewing the way we perform on pay and employment equity as part of the government's five-year action plan. The review includes employees, management and unions.
It focuses on areas where there is a significant difference in women's and men's experiences relating to pay and employment. We are focusing on these priority areas to ensure change can occur where needed. We surveyed over 2,000 people and expect results and recommendations in October 2007.
Attracting and recruiting employees
We have been improving our recruitment processes and employment brand by introducing new business tools and coordinating advertising through one agency. We have also started to review our external suppliers and preferred suppliers.
We have also introduced a workforce planning approach and software to understand and plan for recruitment and capability gaps, and to test the effects of changes, eg the introduction of e-business. The first organisation-level report by workforce planning shows we are focusing our initiatives in the right areas. We now need to complete the design and implementation to continue to build our people capability.
Relationships with the unions who represent our people
We are committed to building positive and constructive working relationships with the unions who represent our people. During the year we worked to reach settlement on new collective agreements with the Public Service Association (PSA) (representing approximately 3,300 people), and Taxpro (representing approximately 700 people). We are working with the PSA to agree on a new partnership for quality agreement consistent with the Partnership for Quality Agreement 2007 between the Government and the PSA.
Both unions contributed to initiatives for the development and implementation of the Working for Families Tax Credits changes, the implementation of KiwiSaver, and organisational changes made to implement the new Investigations structure and the new operating model.
Excellent state servants
We are developing broad frameworks to help us plan for future capability and competencies so we can deliver high-quality services to New Zealanders. These frameworks include:
- leadership
- competencies
- capability and learning.
Building our leadership
Inland Revenue continues to have a strong focus on leadership, at individual and organisational level.
We designed and introduced our in-house leadership programme in 2002 and 227 managers have taken part. We are currently reviewing the programme and we will introduce a refreshed programme in 2007-08.
We also reviewed the Team Leader Development programme this year and piloted it in a new format in October 2006. The course includes Inland Revenue-specific content and leadership material, delivered by an external facilitator. More than 100 team leaders will have the opportunity to attend this programme in 2007.
Developing our competency framework
We want to identify competencies required for future needs and ensure these are linked into our general capability development and outcome frameworks. To do this, we have introduced the Lominger competency framework, including a range of resources and tools for our managers to use in developing their people.
The Lominger framework enables us to maintain a common language for leadership development and improving our performance management processes. When combined with a focus on career development tools, it helps ensure Inland Revenue is well equipped to meet our future business needs.
Developing our capability and learning
We have updated our tax technical training product range to reflect new legislation, policy and case law. We reviewed our technical competencies and training frameworks to ensure they reflect the new operating model and help our people to identify and access appropriate training, formal qualifications and professional memberships. We have continued with our review of technical training for people whose roles involve using judgement in interpreting legislation.
Delivering and monitoring our training
Over the last year, most of our people have taken part in training through our e-learning environment eg health and safety training. Online learning is helping us to improve our efficiency in delivering and monitoring training. It has enabled us to deliver rapid and innovative training to support the introduction of services such as KiwiSaver.
Trusted state servants
We recognise the need to maintain the trust that customers have in our administration of the tax system and social policy programmes.
Our two guiding standards are our Code of Conduct and our Charter. Our Code of Conduct sets out our integrity standards and is a statement of our expectations for how our people should behave as employees of Inland Revenue and the public service. We are reviewing our Code of Conduct to align it with the principles of the revised New Zealand Public Service Code of Conduct. The review will be completed in November 2007. Our employees' commitment to high standards of integrity are the foundations for our successful service delivery. We are reviewing our Charter, which will also help to maintain customer confidence in our administration.
We use our training programme on integrity and ethics, Judge for Yourself and our Code of Conduct training to focus our people on their obligations.
EEO statistics[22]
During the year we continued to work on initiatives that contribute to diversity and EEO outcomes. In addition to the pay and employment equity review, we created an Inland Revenue "diversity calendar", continued to support and implement Maori Language Week initiatives, and included a greater diversity focus to team leader training.
Figure 26 -
EEO statistics by ethnicity
[ Larger version of image | Long description ]
Figure 27 -
EEO statistics by gender
| Percentage of staff | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004-05 | 2005-06 | 2006-07 | |
| Women | 64% | 66% | 66% |
| Men | 36% | 34% | 34% |
| People with disabilities | 3% | 3% | 3% |
Figure 28 -
Percentage of managers who are women
[ Larger version of image | Long description ]
22 Key people statistics can be found in the additional information section.
Date published: 23 Oct 2007
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