Chapter 8: Managing, sustaining and engaging the APS workforce
› Key APS capability trends and workforce challenges
› Workforce planning and succession management
› Managing for improved performance
› Retention, job satisfaction and people management
› Productivity and employee engagement
› Key chapter findings
As outlined in the MAC report on Managing and Sustaining the APS Workforce, the APS faces a challenge in attracting and retaining skilled and talented staff in an employment environment very different to that of the past. In this new environment, agencies will need to adopt strategic and dynamic approaches to sustaining the APS workforce. These approaches will also need to take account of the increasingly diverse career paths and aspirations of this workforce.1
This chapter begins by recapping on aspects of the statistical snapshot of the APS presented in Chapter 2, with an overview of the key capability trends in the APS in recent times and the key workforce challenges that APS agencies report having faced in 2004–05. It goes on to examine the ways in which agencies are responding to these challenges, concentrating on the extent to which agencies are planning to ensure they have the skills and capabilities they need into the future. It also examines how agencies are managing for improved performance.
The chapter then examines employee intentions with regard to leaving the APS and the factors which impact on employees’ job satisfaction, including employee perceptions about their immediate supervisors’ people management skills. The chapter concludes with a discussion of employees’ perceptions of their own productivity levels, including the factors which affect their individual productivity, and a preliminary discussion around the complex issue of employee engagement.
1 Management Advisory Committee 2005, Managing and Sustaining the APS Workforce, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.
