By Carolyn Rance
The NSW government's Fit for the Future blueprint for local government promises change across the sector.
Premier Mike Baird has been open in his view that current boundaries will not meet the needs of growing and changing communities and that, with a third of councils facing financial problems, the system as a whole is not working as well as it should.
Marie O'Connell says HR professionals in NSW local government need to be ready for change.
Whether a current review will lead to unpopular or forced amalgamations is unclear but council submissions indicate many in the sector acknowledge there must be change to the way they do business.
Marie O'Connell, executive manager human resources at Maitland City Council, says the state's council executives and HR professionals need to be ready for the challenges ahead.
"Some HR teams will need support. In my career I've dealt with some large scale redundancies and change but you can never really say you are comfortable with it," she says.
O'Connell's working life has included more than two decades of HR, training and change management. In Ireland she worked in the financial services and IT industries before a job with United States semiconductor manufacturing company Xilinx where her duties included assisting restructures in a number of European countries and the transition of work to sites in Singapore and India.
In 2011 she joined other members of her family in Australia, working in local government for the first time as director of human services at Tamworth Regional Council and helping implement a long awaited review of processes and services in the wake of an amalgamation a decade earlier.
"I was part of a team that looked at how we could streamline frontline services and ensure staffing structures were set up in the best way to deliver those services. In some cases that meant changing positions, creating new positions and also some redundancies and redeployment." Her accumulated experience of organisational change has convinced her that no-one should underestimate its impact on the individuals affected and the people implementing it.
As councils work to convince the state that they are, indeed, fit for the future, senior HR professionals will need to support and guide leadership teams on the varied issues that arise from restructuring.
Where amalgamations occur, a key part of their role will be helping stabilise new executive structures in ways that minimise disruption at other levels of the organisation.
Practitioners will also have to support managers and directors who face the difficult task of telling some employees they are going to lose their jobs. This may sometimes require explaining to a manager that if a decision required by the business is not made by them, someone else is likely to make it. Executives giving unwelcome news need to manage their own emotional response and understand that staff must always be treated with respect and dignity.
O'Connell says all councils should be working to instil a sense of pride among their workforce and help staff see that changes can improve services and perceptions of the organisation.
"The challenge for HR is to be calm and stable in environments which may be in flux."