Consultants hired for culture change

A council once labelled as being ‘‘toxic’’ forked out hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve its culture.

Documents released under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act reveal that last year, 1261 Wellington City Council staff were quizzed in culture and climate surveys.

The council hired consulting firm, Human Synergistics, paying it $124,118 to undertake the ‘‘benchmark’’ work.

The same firm surveyed the Ministry of Social Development in 2015 to introduce a programme of culture change, which was paid for by taxpayers. The programme aims to change the thinking and behaviour styles of staff, and uses colours to illustrate current operating culture and the preferred culture it wants to achieve.

Blue is seen as good, and includes behaviour identified as achievement, selfactualisation, being affiliative, humanistic and encouraging. Red and green styles are unfavourable, and include avoidance, dependence, being oppositional, competitive, perfectionist, power and convention.

Underlying performance effectiveness is broken down into three styles: constructive, passive/defensive and aggressive/ defensive.

The documents show the council’s culture survey looked at what behaviours staff believed were required to ‘‘fit in’’ and ‘‘meet expectations’’.

A climate survey explored how staff felt about the culture.

The 2013 culture survey measured the council’s preferred and actual culture. The preferred was identified as being highly constructive, but the actual was reported as passive – looking for mistakes, being critical of others and opposing new ideas indirectly.

The climate survey in 2014 examined how staff felt about the culture. The findings included a lack of a clearly articulated mission/vision and a shared ‘‘philosophy’’ of organisational life among senior executives, the HR systems not supporting constructive behaviour, and a need to improve communication upwards.

In response, the council management team agreed to have a leadership conference and the council committed to improvements in performance management, leadership and employee involvement.

Council chief executive Kevin Lavery said the 2017 results indicated progress had been made since 2013, including an increase in staff who felt the council’s culture was supportive, constructive and open.

The cost of poor culture was high turnover, he said.

Six years ago it was more than 30 per cent and now it is about 20 per cent, which saved money because the council was not recruiting as many new people, he said.

Its depth of knowledge also lasted longer, with more people staying, he said.

‘‘Building a great culture does take time, but we are already making good progress. We’ve got more work to do, but positive feedback we’ve already received from our staff shows we’re on the right path.’’

However, last month the council was still dealing with staff issues, including claims of harassment as concerns were raised about a ‘‘bullying culture’’ .

A LGOIMA request revealed personal grievances and complaints had increased, and an incident of bullying was reported to WorkSafe New Zealand.