We stop Shoalhaven inserting mobile phone numbers into employees’ email signature blocks
- Details
- Published: Thursday, 16 November 2023 13:32
Shoalhaven provides their Call-Centre phone number only on email signature blocks and business cards. The Centre (and its eight staff) refers calls to our members at their desk, or automatically from their desk to their mobile phones without complainants having access to individual mobile phone numbers. The Centre records the calls as well, which is a very effective disincentive for all but the very worst complainants to be more civil and polite. It allows the Council to keep statistics on calls, good for checking customer service, duration of calls, unanswered calls.
For no good reason the Executive Management Team decided that would change but asserted it would enhance customer service – something never explained or supported. IT began the rollout simultaneously with advice to employees that if they had any questions, they should ask their manager. When the GM refused our request to stop the rollout pending consultation with employees (where there had been none) and the unions (enthusiastically aided and abetted by HR/P&C, of course), we filed a dispute - our second with Shoalhaven this year.
Commissioner Sloan in the IRC recommended that the Council stop the rollout and deal with the legitimate concerns that were being raised by depa and the two other unions. Some of our members had previously experienced harassment on their mobiles at other councils and found the whole process both unacceptable and inexplicable.
In the discussions recommended by the Commission, we were told that there had been no incident, nor complaint by a councillor, nor any trigger for this other than one member of the Executive “floating” the idea and everyone else thinking it made sense - they were the Council’s phones, the Council should be able to do whatever they wanted with them, was the view. A bit like landowners and developers arguing that it was their property and they could do whatever they wanted with it!
We argued about who the unions would need to meet with, rejected the idea that it be only HR (because they are never the decision-makers and were complicit in rejecting the request to stop the rollout) and either the GM or the EMT nominated the Director of Planning, probably because that’s where most of our members were. The Council had rejected the Commissioner’s recommendation but proposed four alternative options as a temporary solution which would give an employee the opportunity to retain the current arrangements, their desk phone, mobile or whatever.
And in-principle agreement was reached between the representatives of the three unions with the Director of Planning that we would accept the four arrangements temporarily offered as the permanent arrangement. It was stressed at the meeting this would be at individual’s aggression discretion, something not opposed by the Director, and not a peep from the mute HR/P&C reps.
The Director would put that to the next meeting of the EMT “as a good solution for both employees and the Council”. We even agreed on the wording that should be put and that we would vacate the report back listed in the Commission, requesting another week for things to settle. Sounds like a deal, doesn’t it.
EMT rejected that proposal coming from the person they had delegated to negotiate with the unions, coming back with a reduced number of options, and the insistence that the employee secure the agreement of their supervisor and their manager. Shoalhaven loves their employees having to grovel.
It’s not making much sense is it, but it does get even more compelling.
Back in the Commission we encouraged Commissioner Sloan to continue to conciliate (it is the primary responsibility under the Industrial Relations Act, after all) and he set the dispute to return in Parramatta, where we’d all need to attend, and that he expected a “decision-maker” for the Council to be in attendance.
That was sufficient for the Council to settle. Not just having to leave the security of Nowra where you are in charge, but having to be accountable before a member of the Commission you couldn’t ignore, or stand over, and where you might need to justify a decision that sounded like it was made by a group of stoners. They agreed it was the individual’s discretion to choose from three options, the third added option being continuing with the Call-Centre.
This is not just unbelievable, and a complete failure in good faith bargaining and reasonable behaviour, it’s so ludicrously illogical we shouldn’t have been surprised to discover later that the email system actually provides five options!
A failure to consult, a failure to provide a proper explanation, obstinate, illogical, nominating one of their own to negotiate with the unions and then betraying that person and rejecting the in-principle agreement is all pretty unimpressive behaviour for a crowd calling themselves the “Executive Management Team”.