A reshuffling of top jobs at Auckland Council is being proposed as the organisation tries to meet calls from Mayor Wayne Brown to group similar services to cut duplication.
In what’s been called the biggest shake-up to the inner workings of the council since the creation of the Super City 13 years ago, council chief executive Phil Wilson proposed wide-reaching changes to the leadership structure of the organisation to staff on Thursday.
Chief among these: a reduction of senior leaders at director and general manager levels, and fewer general manager roles, each with more responsibility.
Wilson said the proposal he has put out to council staff for consultation sees a reduction of the council’s upper management layers and changes for a small number of staff who support those roles.
While it was too early to say exactly how many roles would eventually be disestablished, he anticipated there would be a net reduction.
“The reason the large majority of roles at these two tiers are proposed to be disestablished (along some supporting role we’ve mentioned above) is that any new roles are designed to be larger with clearer accountability and the leadership expectations we’re looking for will change as a result,” he said.
“While we’re still only in the consultation phase and cannot pre-empt any decisions and the recruitment process that will follow, I do know that we have a lot of great talent within these two tiers already and would anticipate a number of those people being successful in applying for roles within the new structure once we confirm exactly what that looks like.”
Meanwhile, governance and policy functions are being combined, along with different functions involved in land use decisions.
Changes to the organisational structure hope to combine functions for improved collaboration efficiency while taking a more customer-centric, coordinated and cost-effective approach.
The changes are currently at a consultation stage, with staff able to give their feedback during the next week. The new structure would go live in late June.
As the selection process is open to council staff first it’s expected many staffers will be able to make a relatively seamless transition into the new regime.
However, the proposal does say if a candidate is not appointed through the selection process, the position will be advertised externally.
The mayor’s proposal for the long-term plan called for widespread cutting down of duplicated services, while expressing disappointment it hadn’t happened in the first 18 months of his mayoralty.
“I am disappointed at the slow pace of change with group shared services, even after putting an emphasis on this activity in the letters of expectations to the CCOs,” he said. “Aucklanders are sick of the duplication and inefficiency of having to deal with multiple versions of the same service from different parts of the council group.”
Brown said there was a pressing need to stop duplication across council and have one quality version of these services like contact centres, finance, human resources, ICT, corporate property, procurement, communications and marketing available for all council entities to use.
Speaking on this directive, Wilson said it was an opportunity to take a refreshed look at how the organisation worked.
“Our organisation must be adaptable and agile. This means refreshing our senior leadership and consolidating portfolios in a thoughtful way that brings accountability and organisational culture into sharp focus,” he said.
“Planning for the future also means investing in our people through graduate, cadet and intern programmes, using vacancies wisely and creating career paths to retain talented kaimahi and create a thriving, stable workforce.”
North Shore councillor Chris Darby said a number of restructurings in recent years had affected less senior staff.
“There has been quite significant restructuring of middle to lower management,” he said. “One thing I have raised is how it is the middle and the lower end that have suffered – and now the new chief executive has come and reflected there is cause to have a look at the top tier of management.”
Rather than just saving on payroll, there could be savings made from a more efficient structure.
“If you create greater efficiency in the structure of that, you also get financial benefits,” he said.
“You can create much tighter communication in those key areas.”
A number of the new roles are aimed at getting the organisation to work in better collaboration with itself.
There’s the group strategy director role, created to set strategic priorities, track performance outcomes and maintain relationships with council-controlled organisations and the Government.
Meanwhile, the chief sustainability office, group recovery and Auckland Emergency Management branches of the organisation would be combined to apply lessons from the 2023 weather events in tandem.
“Climate change and the impact of recent weather events has heightened our focus on the need to be a resilient region,” the report reads. “Infrastructure is critical to resilience and therefore grouping these functions together with those involved in mitigating against, and responding to, critical events should enable us to take a broader view at the role we play in building and maintaining a resilient Auckland.”
Other consolidations include combining health, safety and wellbeing offices with the people and culture office – two areas split just three years ago to heighten the focus on the health, safety, and wellbeing of council staff:
“This was the right thing to do at the time, but with greater maturity it is proposed to bring these together again to create a team focus holistically on kaimahi needs.”
Darby pointed to the changes in Auckland in the past decade as potential reasons for changes to the organisation structure.
“Auckland has grown. The demands are similar, but different – they’ve multiplied.”
Totally support this strategy and changes with focus on new blood and training and expect this to extend to all CCOs. However be careful not to “throw out the baby with the bath water” as has happened in the medical profession, armed forces and many government departments. Quite a bit of knowledge needs to be passed on to new bloods until it’s their turn to make change.
Much local knowledge was lost in the centralisation forces by the Super City. Worse was that much of the work was outsourced to organisations only in it for the money and little or no local oversight.
In my view there are city departments that are in great need of upskilling. One is in the supply and purchasing and the other is in audit and quality assurance. We ratepayers are being totally ripped off by incredibly inefficient and lazy suppliers of most of our city services. Getting a 5% increase in their productivity and a 5% reduction in their costs would give the city a chance to successfully address the challenges it currently faces.