Reflections of the last 12 months

Below is a summary of the 2022/23 roadmap activities that have contributed to our progress

Goal 1: Diverse Workforce

• In 2022/23 we completed foundational work in the recruitment space including attraction, selection, onboarding and induction. This has included building our brand in the market and leveraging this along with targeted solutions to bring greater diversity into the organisation.
• We have commenced work with our people to understand experiences and barriers to development and career progression for Māori and Pacific peoples and have established a plan to work in partnership to effectively address these.
• Leadership conversations about talent development help identify opportunities across teams, business groups, the organisation and cross-agency. Raising visibility of the capability and aspirations of our people can increase representation for women, Māori, Pacific peoples and other ethnicities across leadership and more senior level roles. This year we have facilitated discussions with leaders throughout the organisation to improve our development (Whanake) conversations, and shared leadership resources.
• Our Active Listening programme continues to assist our people experience work with regular surveys on various topics, and new joining and candidate experience surveys were launched this year. Through regular pulse surveys, our people tell us they like our flexible, supportive and inclusive environment. More of our people are completing the surveys and more are feeling comfortable to choose to share their results with their leaders.
• We have refreshed our 12 people capabilities, to ensure that our behaviours are at the hearts of how we work together, and that we have reflected te ao Māori capability and stronger cultural capability throughout the guidance that supports individuals navigate the people capabilities. Work to launch and share these with relevant communications and context is still on-going.

Goal 2: Inclusive workplace

• We have recently updated our on-boarding tools through Ātea. Kimi Kaimahi (Recruitment) at Inland Revenue creates a positive candidate experience and provides hiring leaders with clarity across all aspects of the recruitment process. This also brings in refresher learning for hiring leaders about unconscious bias, to reinforce how this is mitigated in our recruitment processes.
• Our new organisational behaviours - Te Pou o te Tangata incorporates Māori values and concepts. They were designed with our people including our people-lead networks, with a focus on amplifying the voices of underrepresented communities. Our new induction is based around our behaviours and helps everyone understand what it means to be part of Inland Revenue, whatever their background or role within the organisation.
• Our property programme has continued to ensure that projects enhance our people’s wellbeing and have accessibility top of mind. A key achievement relates to the guidance for all future projects is inclusive of accessibility as a key consideration, and members of our Diversability People Network are included as part of all our Business Engagement Groups (BEG) for property projects.
• Our People Networks have continued to thrive and have established themselves as key stakeholders in many initiatives and people processes. Together we have delivered Network Role Guidance for members and leaders - to support the understanding of the role of people networks and how they can support development and capability growth of members outside of their day-to-day mahi. Our People Networks provide opportunities for people to learn about diverse groups through language weeks and celebrations and have contributed to significant initiatives, such as our new organisational behaviours and reaccreditation with the Rainbow Tick.

Goal 3: Leadership and accountability

• Our recruitment systems and processes have been refreshed this year to ensure leaders know how to create an inclusive experience for candidates. We have also improved our unconscious bias training to help leaders make inclusive decisions when supporting the development of their team and recruiting new people. We now offer additional short unconscious bias refresher training which can be used to reduce bias prior to hiring processes. 93% of our people leaders have completed unconscious bias training.
• We have continued embedding our flexible working policy and approach, encouraging solution focused conversations between leaders and their people. The last 12 months has seen leadership teams working through real life scenarios, and working together to promote consistency in decision-making and reflecting on what a principle-based approach means within their business group contexts. We continue to work with business groups to recognise and leverage the opportunities and challenges that come with hybrid working arrangements.
• We continue to strengthen what we do to protect our people from harm at work, promote positive ways to support wellbeing and resilience, and supporting recovery or accommodating illness when needed. We have diversified our mental health and wellbeing training for leaders. This gives them more specific and practical learning on supporting people with specific mental health struggles (anxiety, loss, grief, trauma). Our new health and safety reporting tool has been rolled out, which allows our frontline people to report when their wellbeing has been affected by a customer interaction. This enables leaders to better follow up and support their people. Leaders follow up with team members who report an incident potentially harmful to their psychological health.
• We have progressed work on our new leadership induction based on Te Pou o Te Tangata, and additional resources to support our Māori capability programme Te Arapiki. Both will be launched in the upcoming year.