Part 2 - 2023 depa awards for the Worst HR in Local Government

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Published: Wednesday, 20 December 2023 13:03

How’s HR been this year?

Names are often changed to protect the guilty. We are familiar with bad businesses, unfortunately often builders or developers being bankrupted, and re-emerging with a new name but continuing as they had. Sometimes people do this over and over again, same old, same old, a new identity but the same dodgy or unacceptable practices.

Looking at HR, it all began when Personnel became Human Resources. A name change intended to present a new identity, more touchy-feely, less a fearful cluster of people busy justifying and assisting bosses to do things their employees don’t like. The title was criticised for legitimising that people at work were resources, just like plant and equipment. That was a bit dehumanising, but it was still the fearful cluster of people busy justifying and assisting bosses to do things their employees didn’t like.

Now it’s People and Culture, presenting as more accessible, holistic even, concerned about the whole person not just the resource, but it can still be the same fearful cluster of people busy justifying and assisting bosses to do things their employees don’t like.

For us, it’s a couple of letters more at risk than H and R, of being misused. Critics or dismayed employees might think P and C are more appropriate as the first letters for a range of unacceptable words (never seen in depaNews) that can more easily apply crudely to bodily parts. Luckily for us, while some are worse than others, we’re sure that none of them can be described that way.

So it remains our HR awards, at least for this year. Feel free to tell us what you think for next year.

We have a not-quite-bad-enough-to-be-nominated category – on probation for 12 months

 

This year, we had some councils doing things that looked like they were begging for a nomination. But then, for a variety of reasons, goodwill and reason prevailed and they pulled back from the brink. Both of the councils below started badly but improved remarkably, and a probation period will keep them committed!

Like the City of Ryde, where an eavesdropping snitch made allegations against three planners in a late afternoon discussion about their despair over the NSW Government’s intervention in the Council’s plans for Macquarie Park. Not a planner, the content of the discussion amongst professionals was misunderstood, potentially malicious and in a lesson to the Council, just because allegations are put in a stat dec, doesn’t mean they’re more likely to be true or legitimate. This could have been resolved by the Director without fuss. And without losing three good planning staff who decided they didn’t want to work in a workplace where this could happen and went elsewhere.

Like the City of Sydney. The City (as they like to be known) has had more nominations than any other Council, seven between 2014 and 2021, missing out on nomination only once in that time - and with hindsight it was clearly more oversight in the 2021 awards than a reflection of good behaviour.

It was always surprising that the City, with its progressive and benign political leadership, didn’t match that in their approach to employment. The Awards were old-fashioned; salaried staff work 38 hours instead of 35; there was no overtime available over a certain salary level; and over that level there was an expectation that employees work unreasonable hours, and they resisted falling into line with the more progressive and flexible arrangements under the State Award.

We argued with the City to provide clause 9B from the 2020 State Award, obliging them to provide adequate resourcing so that work could be done in hours that were reasonable, but the Council HR rejected that, arguing they had policies that covered it. They always say that, we asked for the policies, repeatedly, but when they did provide them they had nothing to do with what we were looking for but everything to do with trying to fob off acknowledging an obligation to provide adequate resourcing and reasonable hours.

That was the old guard in HR, this year a new broom was able to reverse this and a provision was incorporated in the City Award this year. But as good as the new broom is, he couldn’t shift some of the Executive leadership to agree to introducing the Right to Disconnect clause from the 2023 State award - although he remains hopeful that can happen when we negotiate the 2024 Award next year. I hope he keeps his expectations realistic, they will say they have a policy but an award entitlement to disconnect is much more valuable, and enforceable.

After almost a decade we can now be optimistic about the future for employees of The City. The new broom stopped the City from being nominated.

Or like Randwick City.  The GM took extended leave and, in his absence in June, an acting GM wrote a clumsy message to all staff instructing them that they were all to “return to working from the office full-time … Commencing Monday, 31 July 2023”, five weeks away.

We were onto it with thirteen questions they were going to struggle to answer, like did they have any evidence of a drop in productivity or services when working from home. The Herald ran the story under the headline “Disrespectful and out of step; Council staff revolt over end of flexible working”, based on our letter, some anonymous emails from staff feeling betrayed and an interview with the Greens Deputy Mayor. With a bit of assistance, the real GM found a form of words that calmed everyone by removing the deadline date and proposing discussions when he returned. In doing so, he made it abundantly clear how easy it is to work remotely, by drafting the wording while on extended leave visiting family in Dubrovnik!

It then became a pleasant and benign process (as we would normally expect from that GM) where the unions agreed to a process where anyone who wanted to continue working from home made an application, providing reasons why it’s in the interest of the Council and committing to comparable productivity and service. Often, it’s all about answering calls.

We’re all in the process of developing a policy now but the formula has those who are working from home is two days a week at home and the remainder in the office, and RDOs to be taken on a home day. It’s accepted that this will be a dynamic policy document so that if we can provide evidence about things working well, there are possibilities of more home days, and obviously on the other hand, if they’re not, fewer.

Sutherland, no nomination, not even close, whatever happened?

 

We have four nominations - and too many procedurally unfair investigations  

Hawkesbury City Council

 

This is Hawkesbury’s first nomination in our 13 years, but it has been worth the wait.

It starts with a relatively normal health/building/planning Department but with a Director from none of those professions, and a background in community work. That’s unusual.

One day the Director overhears a conversation taking place between two of our members about resourcing and the need to get some evidence together to pursue a claim for resourcing to fill a gap created by the reallocation of some work. The discussion took place in a closed meeting room (with soundproofing as effective as the legendary Cone of Silence) and then continued in the general office area and virtually outside the Director’s office.

Without raising the issue with either of our members, the Director made a formal complaint to HR. She told our member that she believed his behaviour was unacceptable (although it wasn’t clear whether that was because she thought the conversation loud, or conspiratorial, or anything else) and when he asked to sit down and talk about the issue because he didn’t understand the problem, she refused to do so, stating she was committed to a disciplinary process. Charming.

It’s at this stage this will look like a treatment for a comedy set in a poorly-managed office. The Director was the complainant and when we met for an interview where the employee had the opportunity to respond to the allegations, it was Director who conducted the interview as the investigator. This is unacceptable, depa made the point in the discussions, but they continued.

Then the Director, having heard the response and explanations, made a finding that the allegations she had made were not sustained.

That’s a real FFS moment. The complainant is also the jury and the potential executioner but then finds that her own allegations were not sustained. As improbable as it sounds, this is precisely what happened.

The Council refused to apologise but grudgingly recognised in a letter responding to depa, stressing  those things they believed were procedurally fair but then conceded at the bottom of the page that we were right, it could have been done differently.

It was a farce. The circumstances recited in this nomination would more likely found in an episode of The Office than in a professional workplace where employees and their views are respected.

Alarmed about the new culture in the organisation, our member, cleared of having done anything at all, was astonished at the lack of disrespect and found greener grass elsewhere. A tragic loss of valuable employee, well-regarded, committed to the Council up until this fiasco, and now a gaping hole they will struggle to fill.

MidCoast Council

This nomination was clearly foreshadowed in the earlier issue of depaNews this month where an update was provided about the dispute which earned the Council the Golden Turd last year. The dispute continued without respite all year. Periods of conciliation in the IRC failed, two dates were set for arbitration in Newcastle in November, and we were all back in the IRC on 13 December with the expectation that if we couldn’t settle it, final submissions would be made and the Commission would resolve it by arbitration.

The dispute is about an attack launched on the salary system by the GM, Adrian Pannucio, appointed in 2018 and, up until a point, based on advice from his HR Coordinator. If you look back on how the dispute was reported in August and December 2022 in depaNews you will see the redaction of the name of one of those. This report will be sufficiently polite that no one will feel obliged to pursue defamation against us this time, even though as ineffective as it was, and inconsequential other than the redactions, it was good fun.

This was all about the GM trying to wreck the salary system. Originally developed at Great Lakes, to provide 13 steps of 1.25% each, requiring only that the employee “Met Standard”, because the GM at the time preferred to spend his money rewarding employees for their loyalty and service and doing the job properly, rather than on the apparatus necessary to manage more complicated progression. There were also options for more than one salary step for people performing beyond expectations.

It’s impossible to understand why this is a cause the GM is pursuing with such vigour. He claimed in his evidence to the Commission that this was not because of the costs but we don’t believe him. It is the only way you can understand an initiative to erode the progression of employees and prevent them getting access to the pay increases available. We have three members who provided statements and evidence about the financial losses to them from the Council’s proposal - anywhere from $30,000 up over the next 10 to 15 years.

Morale at MidCoast has never been lower. This is a dispute that affects most employees who see a ferocious attack on their standards of living and their expectations.

It’s also a dispute that tests clause 8(xii) in the State Award which everyone knows means that if the employer introduces a salary system that negatively affects your pay or progression, then you can remain on your current system. This has been notorious in the industry, supported by both LGNSW and the unions and everyone has understood and interpreted that provision as meaning any disadvantage, but the Council is pursuing whether the individual words used in the Award say what everyone in the industry says they mean.

It’s a black letter law argument, when it’s all about intent and context and how it’s operated without any assault like this one, for the last 13 years since that provision went into the Award.

The dispute is not yet resolved. But the obsessive and bloody-minded GM has rejected a series of significant concessions being made by the unions in conciliation, disregarded the dreadful morale at MidCoast (32% of employees resigned in the last recorded 12 months - when the industry average in the area is closer to 12 to 15%) as if it didn’t matter at all, and he ploughs on.  

Port Macquarie Hastings Council

Nominated in 2021, and this year watching a handful of their environmental/building professionals go to better offers, they abandoned all of the concepts of procedural fairness in a clumsy and heavy-handed investigation of a grievance that had our member off for two weeks with elevated blood pressure. A new HR employee was allocated the role and clearly had no concept of procedural fairness, nor how to properly conduct an investigation. She should not have been given the responsibility without oversight.

The first meeting would normally be brief, the Council would give the employee a letter containing the allegations and the option of responding if they thought they could, and a further meeting arranged for a response or in writing. The Gestapo would have handled it with more sympathy and respect for procedural fairness. This person demanded that our member respond immediately, asserted this was the opportunity for responding and harassed and cajoled our member, and our delegate, for three hours.

After hearing of the fiasco we intervened, stopped the process and demanded the Council to start again. They agreed and contracted a capable and professional external investigator to do just that and start again. This should not have happened at all, and apparently now all the Council’s HR people are doing training on workplace investigations through LGNSW. Better late than never.

Our member reported that when he was contacted by that same unreasonable interrogator to pass on the news that there would be a new investigation, she sounded like she had been “scolded”. Not scolded enough given the appalling treatment handed out to our member …

Shoalhaven City Council

We’ve had two industrial disputes with Shoalhaven this year. The first over an investigation we regarded as lacking objectivity and impartiality. It was not obvious they had had failed to speak to the relevant Manager and a Team Leader until the investigator had made a range of findings. Allegations had been made that we believed reflected the responsibilities and authority of both the manager and team leader positions, and our member wasn’t being provided with procedural fairness while ever these employees were not involved in the investigation. We asked that the investigation be reopened and those two employees interviewed.

The Council refused. We filed a dispute, the Commissioner made a recommendation supporting our request and requiring depa to outline the reasons why that we believed that to be essential, and the Council acceded to that request. They had little option to do otherwise, it was such a glaring error. this. 

HR already had the result they wanted and didn’t think it needed to go any further.

One of the principles of natural justice is that you can nominate people that you would like to be interviewed because you think they will assist your defence. This was not offered to our member, and it was contested by the Council until the IRC persuaded them to do so. This was not fair to our member and this experience, and a preceding experience, made it look like the Council conducted investigations convinced that the role of the Investigator was to nail people.

We shared a redacted version of the investigator’s second report to the Manager (who has now retired from the Council) and he identified six or seven areas of what he believed to be inaccurate recording of his statements. But on revealing this to the Director, advice was sought from HR and the Manager was threatened with code of conduct breaches if he were to proceed any further. He chose not to. The Council thought it more important to prejudice the integrity of their investigation, than do the right thing. Lovely.

Then later in the year, as we reported in the earlier issue in December, the Executive Leadership Team decided that they would roll out new template email signature blocks that would require anyone with a Council phone to have their mobile phone number on their email.

This alarmed members in compliance and a whole range of other activities where they know the risks that can arise when people who are already aggrieved by your actions and decisions, get access to your mobile phone. One member had a previous experience at another Council where she was harassed so significantly on her mobile phone, that the Council changed her phone number.

But at Shoalhaven, there was no consideration of the likely impact on employees with difficult jobs making decisions that invariably result in someone being aggrieved. There was no complaint from the Council, or anyone else, there were assertions about enhancing the customer process, there was no evidence about the current process and projections for that improvement. A director “floated” the idea, and all the compliant directors fell into line - astonishingly none of them, despite their local government experiences, were conscious that this might be an issue. Or if they were conscious, failed to act on it.

We won the dispute, the Council agreed to provide a choice of templates so that employees had the opportunity to choose whether to reveal their mobile phone number or not, but when we subsequently conveyed a request to HR that members who send a lot of emails were finding it a nuisance to have to do this for every email - making them less productive - and whether or not IT, if they could change the template to set up a default without the mobile number, why they wouldn’t.

Apparently the majority of employees were choosing the Council’s preferred template and in those circumstances we wouldn’t have pressed the request. But instead of telling us that was the case in a professional manner, our request was branded “unreasonable”, said twice in one quite small paragraph, and then it was asserted “we feel we have been very accommodating of your request to date” when multiple requests to stop the rollout to allow us to confer had been rejected and their decisions after the filing of the dispute were all made on the back foot with pressure from the Commission. When that could not possibly have been true with the GM refusing our requests to stop the rollout while we met.

Then the Director to whom HR reports, the Director of City Performance, launched an attack upon us, our correspondence  was “disrespect of our senior staff”, she was “appalled at the way you communicate with staff... disrespectful and we will no longer be communicating with you”. Take that depa!

It’s a bit hypocritical to be alarmed about disrespect when we were adversaries in an industrial dispute which was filed because the GM had repeatedly refused our requests to stop the rollout to allow us to confer without pressure - three or four times in fact - but that’s apparently not seen as being disrespectful. A Zero Tolerance “for communications that affect the wellbeing of our staff” should have stopped the Executive moving until they were certain there were no staff whose wellbeing could be affected by being more accessible after publishing their mobile phone numbers.

A Zero Tolerance policy doesn’t prevent unions and others examining and criticising the decisions of the Executive if they have an adverse impact on our members, and if the decisions were not backed by evidence or consultation. It can never be a policy which makes bad decision-makers untouchable.

Here is our letter to the GM in response. If the Council were to put a ban on a union official, it would be unprecedented in the industry. Good old Shoalhaven, they won the Golden Turd two years in a row, in 2014 and 2015 and have been under the radar ever since. Until now.

And the winner is:

Despite a late surge and commendable effort by Shoalhaven, how could it be any different? Mid Coast had a head start and kept grinding their employees into the ground all year. A policy deliberately developed to stop employees progressing in the salary system and costing them very large amounts of money if they remain at the Council.

And at the time where the statistics show an alarming collapse in the morale of staff, evident in staff turnover since 2018, 300 resignations in 12 months in the last report to the consultative committee and almost 500 USU members meeting and rejecting the proposals to the salary system with not one person supporting them. It’s a sad old place, bring back Glenn.

That’s it for us – looking forward to 2024

The depa office will be closing at midday on Thursday 21 December and reopening on Wednesday 3 January. Sue Burton, our new Office Manager will be returning to the office and will manage anything urgent with access to members of the Committee or our legal team. And if everyone can behave themselves in the meantime, I’ll be back on Monday 29 January.

From the office and the Committee of Management, we wish you a joyful and festive Christmas, however you celebrate or spend the break, and an enthusiastic return to satisfying work, an absence of miscreants and councillors behaving themselves. And a Minister for Local Government committed to speedily implementing the legislative changes necessary to section 340 of the Local Government Act 1993, to bring senior staff into line with their equivalents in the NSW Public Sector, by removing term contracts and, as a bonus, reducing the risks of corruption.