The best thing you can do is get ready for change, says CEO of the City of Gold Coast
Taking up the helm as the CEO of an organisation comes with a lot of responsibility but it can also bring about fresh ideas that can benefit both employees and clients.
Tim Baker, CEO of the City of Gold Coast, recently did a podcast with HRD Australia about some of the new initiatives he has implemented since taking up the role over 12 months ago.
“I came to this role with a clear mandate, a mandate that was given to me by the city and the councillors who run the city,” he said. “And that mandate was to effect transformational change inside the organisation.”
Baker explained in the podcast that the company put in place a culture survey and got an assessment of what was going on inside the city. The plan was to get a baseline for the behaviours and culture inside the organisation before developing solutions to any issues that came up.
“When you're a new CEO and you come into a role, you get told lots of things but it's really important to get that baseline in place,” he said. “So we did that and I think it was in week three of me starting this job, I announced that we would be doing the first whole of organisation wide culture survey in over ten years.”
In addition, the company kicked off a range off range of conversations around what high performing meant and what it should look like inside the organisation.
Following that survey, the City of Gold Coast went on to roll out the signature actions program. “What we did is off the back of the culture survey, we went back to the staff and said, ‘Look, you told us we needed to do a number of things and in response to that we're going to do the following things’.”
For Baker, it’s about ensuring employees are involved not only in participating in organisational surveys but tracking its progress as well.
“Any staff member at any time can go to our intranet and get an update on how we're tracking with those actions,” he said. “To give you a flavour about what some of those actions are, there are things like putting in place an independent reporting whistleblower line because we were told that staff were raising concerns and they weren't necessarily being listened to. It's things like an innovation fund. So we were told that staff inside our organisation have lots of great ideas but they're not necessarily being listened to so we're putting in place an innovation fund.”
For more insights from Baker, be sure to check out the podcast.
