Unhappy NZTA staff hit the road
Plummeting morale at the agency responsible for construction of New Zealand’s highways is putting pressure on a roading system worth billions, a leading industry figure says.
The Transport Agency has seen almost a third of its 1400 staff quit in the past two years, and the loss is showing in the poor quality finish of Kiwi roads, Road Transport Forum chief executive Ken Shirley said.
The organisation has had growing concerns from the ‘‘endless restructures’’, resulting in the departure of highly skilled technical staff and were often replaced with people who weren’t.
‘‘All the reseals you see on all the main highways, resealed a few months after being completed, that comes down to supervision of the job and I don’t think they’re managing that well,’’ Shirley said.
‘‘We’re talking about billions of dollars worth of investments, it’s quite critical.’’
NZTA confirmed 405 staff have left the organisation in the last two years and a staff survey this year had returned an overall satisfaction rate of 61 per cent.
Sunday Star-Times understands the figure was 96 per cent in 2016, but NZTA refused to release those 2016 results - saying the methodology used in the older survey was not comparable.
‘‘Before they used to have a director who managed freight and liaised with industry, there now doesn’t seem to be anyone you can contact on freight issues,’’ Shirley said.
An NZTA spokesman said a restructure in 2016, enacted on July 3 of this year, only resulted in one redundancy.
‘‘While many roles were changed as part of the organisational transformation, our approach during the restructure was to place existing staff into new roles wherever possible.’’
A former NZTA staff member, who refused to be named, said this meant people with decades of experience in one department where shifted into another part of the organisation they had no experience in.
There were two main restructures according to sources.
One restructure around two years ago involved more operational roles.
A second, after current chief executive Fergus Gamie joined the organisation, focused on management roles.