Mount Barker District Council
Mount Barker is now the second largest city in South Australia and it’s growing fast! To meet the demands of this population boom, the Mount Barker District Council not only needed additional staff, but to adapt how they worked too.
There was a real desire to continually improve and maintain high performance operations within the Council, to align teams and leaders, and to gather staff feedback to proactively take action whenever possible.
That’s why their People and Culture team sought out the best tools available to navigate these challenges, which is how we first met Nicole Newton, their Manager of People and Culture.
But this isn’t just a typical customer story.
Nicole was candid about her initial skepticism toward Teamgage and some of our points of difference.
So let’s explore was she had to say, in her own words.
My initial concerns
Within our industry, a lot of culture training will teach us that culture surveys are the best way to measure organisational performance. In fact, I’m actually accredited in these tools and I greatly value culture survey tools and have learnt a lot about the scientific and statistical application of surveying.
So when I first saw Teamgage, I did feel it may be a little light in those areas.
Fortunately for me, we had someone in our team who’d experienced Teamgage before at another large metropolitan council.
She’d used it extensively and praised it as a great tool, so we trusted her judgment that it would be the right fit for us too.
Over the following few months, I approached Teamgage with an open mind and embraced it to the best of my ability.
The result? I was pleasantly surprised!
Being won over
Now as a culture enthusiast, I’ve used a lot of different survey tools. But with Teamgage, it was great to see how quickly and effectively the Council could adapt based on the results that we were gaining from the platform.
I feel like it acts as more of a current climate survey, that can run alongside those deeper culture surveys.
They both have their place and can play a strong role together in organisational development. So it feels like I’ve opened my heart to a second child here and a different way of doing things!
Helping with rapid change
Let’s get into some specifics.
Last year Mount Barker District Council increased our workforce by 18% in one year.
That’s significant for a council and it had an impact on all of our systems and processes. We were concerned our people could be experiencing new barriers to performance, our core values could slip or leader support may be reduced.
But with Teamgage, we’ve been able to get fantastic point in time feedback in these completely custom areas to us, direct from our people.
For example, the platform is regularly asking our people:
- What barriers to high performance are you experiencing?
- How well are we living each of our 5 core values?
- What level of support do you feel like you get from your leader every day?
A standout moment was receiving 66 comments in Teamgage about what a barrier to performance our IT systems had become. It was clear we needed to act and after 3 months of focused effort from our teams, the number of IT-related comments dropped to just 6!
While some people still had their frustrations in that area, they recognised our ongoing efforts to improve things.
Double-loop feedback
So seeing this kind of double-loop feedback, from an entire workforce, in such a short space of time is remarkable in my world.
I have many similar examples to this, where we swiftly acted on Teamgage insights that we otherwise wouldn’t have been aware of, leading to more positive feedback, or a rapid drop in negative comments from staff.
Specific data to act
To reiterate, I honestly feel like Teamgage and a culture survey both have their place, but feedback from a culture survey, while valuable, often comes in percentiles making it difficult for staff to feel individually heard.
With Teamgage, it’s enabling us to be very specific on feedback, where I know the staff feel like they’ve been heard, almost comment to comment.
It’s also allowing us to be very specific on our numbers too. For example, one area of concern may get 33 comments and so this is what our focus will be for that month.
Those numbers and feedback can also feed through all of our other forums too, from our Health and Safety Rep Group, to our Enterprise Agreement Forum etc.
Sharing Teamgage results at different levels
Finally, a lot of this action wouldn’t have been possible without our Executive Team taking Teamgage very seriously. They’ve actually been responding to the results even more enthusiastically than I expected and have actively been asking for summarised results, far more than I anticipated!
They also receive regular updates with more comprehensive documentation that includes our Teamgage results, plans and recommendations. This has helped to drive further action based on the staff feedback.
Moreover, the Executive Team has allowed us to share these same updates, with no filtering of the results, at our regular Manager and Team Leader Forums.
This commitment to collaboration and transparency is a really powerful thing for Mount Barker District Council and sets us up for more change and improvement in the future.
Final thoughts
"I was on the fence about Teamgage.
But honestly, give it a go and be open minded about a new way of doing things. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can cycle through staff insights, take action, and then gather further insights again!
Not only will you be able to address issues you wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of, your staff will be left feeling like their voice has been truly heard.
Nicole Newton
Manager, People and Culture
Mount Barker District Council
