Level of involvement in service delivery

The employee survey found that 55% of APS employees are either directly involved in the delivery of services to the general public or manage employees who are. This is a similar result to last year (57%), but represented a drop from 2003 (61%). This may be due in part to the decline in the number of ongoing employees for the second successive year in Centrelink.

Employees directly involved in delivering services to the public are predominantly located outside the ACT. Of those employees located in the ACT involved in service delivery there has been a decline from 34% in 2004 to 29% in 2005.

Of the large agencies, Centrelink, CSA, and CRS are three agencies that stand out, with over 80% of their employees directly involved in providing services to the public.

APS 1–6 employees make up 86% of all employees directly involved in, or managing, the delivery of services to the public, compared to EL employees (13%) and SES employees (1%). This finding is similar to last year’s result.

More women (61%) are involved in the delivery of services to the public than men (48%). The representation of women in service delivery is higher than the representation of women in the APS overall (54%) but it is similar to the representation of women in lower classification levels, particularly APS 3–4 (65%).

Relevant employees were also asked if the services they provided were coordinated effectively. Thirty-three per cent of relevant respondents thought that the service they deliver was effectively coordinated and 35% of relevant respondents agreed or strongly agreed that over the last 12 months cooperation between their agency and other APS agencies had improved their ‘work area’s capacity to tailor service delivery to the needs of their clients’. More information on collaboration between agencies to meet the service delivery needs of service users can be found in Chapter 11, ‘Whole of Government’.

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