While many HR departments are structured the same across agencies, managing a workforce of 30 is vastly different to managing over 30,000.
We interviewed Sally Martin, acting General Manager of Workplace Relations at Services Australia about the unique challenges, development opportunities, and retention issues the size of their workforce provides them.
How many people make up your HR department? How is it structured?
We currently have approximately 650 staff in our HR workforce. The Services Australia workforce is approximately 30,000. We’re located across the country, in capital cities, regional and remote locations. Our structure delivers services primarily by functions. This allows us to best use the capacity and capability across our HR workforce to meet the priorities for the agency.
Overlaying our structure is our HR operating model which, among other things, lets us create project squads quickly to address priority issues. For example, we currently have a project squad working to improve our recruitment processes, which is one of our highest priorities.
What unique challenges come with working in the largest APS agency?
Ensuring HR understand the priorities of business areas in order to provide them with the support and advice they need is a challenge for us. Our HR Business Partners play a key role in meeting that challenge. Their ‘seat at the table’ allows an ongoing dialogue and helps HR remain customer-centric in a constantly evolving environment.
We have a large geographical footprint, with staff located in every capital city and across more than 400 local, regional and remote locations. The sheer size of our workforce poses a challenge, given the scale of recruitment needed – how we identify candidates, move them through a process, onboard and train them. Add to this the ongoing competitive labour market and how we can attract and retain talent.
Our large workforce and footprint also mean we are well equipped to respond to emergencies, getting support to people when they need it most. That comes with logistical challenges around mobilising staff and making sure we take care of them when they are deployed.
What personal and/or professional opportunities come with working in a large agency?
Our range of work locations is a big attraction for many people. For me personally, this agency has taken me from a small country town in Central West NSW to Sydney, Canberra and now Cairns. Professional opportunities abound due to the range of roles and opportunities within HR. Staff can move both within and between different areas of HR (strategic, operational, multi-disciplinary teams) and the agency, to develop their capabilities and progress their careers.
Our workforce is diverse. We strive to have a culture where everyone is supported, respected and valued by their colleagues and leaders. We’re a leading employer of First Nations Australians and an LGBTI+ gold employer.
What opportunities are there for innovation and what are some of the barriers you encounter being a large agency?
Given the size of our agency, there is enormous opportunity for innovation and ideas!
At an agency level, we have an annual innovation challenge where staff submit ideas that are then reviewed and publicised. In HR, we have an ‘ideas pipeline’ for HR staff to submit ideas for review by our HR senior executives. These crowdsourcing approaches have led to some wonderful innovations and improvements to our customer services over the years.
One approach that works well is using trials and experiments to test out ideas on a small scale. We do that a lot in HR. If we can show that something works, it’s easier to scale and grow. It can also make change approaches easier. We find agile, human centred and evidence-based approaches all very powerful enablers for innovation.
As an HR professional, do you feel like your work is more siloed and specialised or are you still able to complete a variety of tasks gaining experience as an HR ’generalist’?
Having been in HR for 10 years now, I’ve always stayed in roles that have provided the opportunity for a broad range of tasks as a HR generalist. That's not for everyone though.
Many of our HR staff become experts in specialised roles, for example Code of Conduct investigations. We encourage our HR staff to develop generalist HR and ‘human skills’ in addition to any technical skills they have. We understand how important these are now and into the future, if we’re going to deliver on our agency’s vision.
To support that focus, we have our own HR Capability Model. This model identifies key capabilities and behaviours for our HR staff with a focus on HR generalist and human skills. It complements our Services Australia Capability Framework that applies to staff across the agency and links to both the AHRI and APS HR Pathways to Professionalism Framework. It also helps join the dots for staff. Investing in our own ongoing HR capability development means we can readily adapt to change as we support the agency to achieve its goals.
Do you recruit for HR specialists or generalists? Is there movement laterally within roles through different functions or areas?
We need staff with technical skills as well as HR generalists, so we recruit for both. We also “grow our own” through building capability within our existing HR workforce as we find particular skillsets are in high demand across the APS. Workforce planning and industrial relations are good examples of these skillsets.
Many staff move across teams, branches and divisions to expand and develop their experience. For example, staff often move from roles such as rehabilitation case management and HR advisory to more specialised injury management or industrial relations.
Do you see immediate impacts from your work that allow you to have a greater sense of achievement?
The ability of the HR function to come together to solve problems definitely provides a great sense of achievement. We will often pull together a small group of experts to work on a business problem and I don’t see that going away. There are some impacts that take time to achieve, so knowing we have done the work that will enable a change on such a large scale is really exciting. An example is the work on our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and our Employee Ambassadors program. The role of our ambassadors is to advocate for Services Australia by sharing good news stories about how our agency is helping customers progress and their experiences in working with the agency. The impacts of that work will be delivered over the long term. However, for HR in the immediate term, it has generated a sense of achievement, excitement and pride.
Is it easier or harder to influence workplace culture? How do you foster a positive team culture?
It can be harder in an organisation our size, and with our geographical footprint, to influence culture.
Research shows though, that line managers have a significant impact on culture independent of agency size. We seek to leverage that and support our leaders to build positive team cultures. We run an organisation wide program called Empowering Excellence which every staff member participates in. The program seeks to embed a growth mindset, customer centric thinking and a focus on learning, development and feedback.
Services Australia’s overarching people strategy also helps us influence our workplace culture. It casts our vision for a sustainable, engaged, and productive workforce, and sets goals around how we will help staff adapt as the world of work continues to change. The strategy helps us strategically align our work, so that despite our size and large variety of roles and tasks, we are all working towards the same vision.
What are the promotional pathways like in an agency your size? How do you manage this?
When the type of work we do is so varied from service officers in customer facing roles to pharmacists to cyber security professionals, it's important that we’re constantly looking for ways to promote opportunities within the agency.
Our agency’s capability framework supports promotional pathways, as does our people strategy. Focus areas within the people strategy include talent pipelines, leadership, learning and career pathways.
What are the retention rates in comparison to other government agencies?
Our ongoing separation rate for 2022 was 8.1%, very close to the overall APS ongoing separation rate of 8.2%. It is higher than some other large agencies and lower than others.
Retention is an ongoing challenge for all agencies, do you have an ongoing retention strategy? What key activities do you implement to assist with retention?
We have a range of initiatives and activities to assist us with staff retention and don’t use a standalone retention strategy.
We are always looking for ways to better support our staff and build engagement and fundamental to that is understanding our staff experience. We use existing surveys like the APS Census and the APS New Starter survey to help prioritise our focus. We are exploring how modern techniques can give us more frequent feedback without creating additional work for staff.
Our EVP is designed to help retain staff and attract candidates. It can help staff evaluate their career options and compare the perceived value of different potential employers. Other activities to support retention include our entry level programs, the Aurora program, and Indigenous pathways.
We know the importance of good relationships between staff and managers and that great leadership can positively impact retention. We invest in dedicated leadership programs to build leadership capacity in our APS5/6, EL1 and EL2 staff.
With the shift to greater work-life balance and working from home, how do you ensure your agency remains connected?
We have a large geographically dispersed workforce so keeping connected when team members are not in the same location is not new to us. Dispersed teams run activities like daily stand-ups, regular check-in meetings, and also stay connected through more informal engagement like Microsoft Teams messages and group chats.
Where co-location is possible, and staff also have agreements for regular home-based work, teams usually encourage their staff to work in the office on the same days. That enables them to make the most of the time spent in person to strengthen relationships in the team, and to work on any collaboration that is best performed face-to-face.
With the ongoing APS enterprise agreement bargaining, do you think it will be easier or harder to incorporate any changes due to the size of your agency?
As a large agency we’re fortunate that we have dedicated teams with a high level of expertise to manage different components of the process. The flip side of being a large, complex organisation is that we need to be meticulous in our understanding of how proposals and changes being made will impact business. This extends to the guidance and support managers will need to implement these changes.