Enabling and Supporting a Higher Performing Treasury

Maintaining our organisational health and capability

To achieve the Treasury's three outcomes requires an ongoing programme to develop the capability of our systems and staff. We will be bringing a greater level of attention to measuring and assessing the impact we are having on our outcomes. An effective Treasury also needs to have line of sight between these outcomes and the work each of us carries out.

Specifically we have three objectives that reinforce each other:

• We are an adaptable and productive workforce.
• We strengthen our leadership role and improve our performance.
• We are a well-managed public sector organisation focused on continuous improvement.

Impact: We are an adaptable and productive workforce

We need a workforce that can adapt quickly and act to meet changing demands within the limited financial resources available to us. We must all be clear about our contribution to our outcomes, deepen our capability to influence and improve our ability to assist other agencies to align their work with the Government's economic agenda through effective, ongoing, two-way working relationships.

Our focus will be on embedding a number of significant initiatives that aim to lift the productivity of our people, including establishing a clearer line of sight between the outcomes we are aiming to achieve and individual work plans, and several specific initiatives that will improve our people management (workforce planning, reward and recognition, performance management, talent management and leadership development).

We expect these initiatives to lead to greater levels of staff productivity as they provide a better working environment. We also expect people to move more quickly to where their talents are most advantageous for the Treasury.

We will measure our progress by:

The impact the Treasury is having on intermediate outcomes: We achieve the performance measures in the remainder of this document.

Employee engagement survey results continue to track upwards and place us in the top quartile of the public sector by 2012/13.

Impact: We have a shared understanding of what it will take to lift our performance and we are demonstrating both those attributes and the lift in performance

Senior leadership needs effective coordination of the initiatives critical to lifting the Treasury's performance. Leaders across the organisation need support to better understand the impact of their behaviour on others and how to lead in a way that lifts productivity.

A major initiative supporting leadership and performance is the Treasury Change Programme, which brings together the change initiatives underway in the Treasury (including those initiatives identified under adaptable and productive workforce). The Change Programme enables senior leaders to prioritise the key areas for change initiatives over the coming year. For example, in 2011/12 key areas of focus will be external engagement (including a repeated stakeholder survey), performance measurement and embedding line of sight from outcomes to work programmes. These areas of focus are consistent with the key recommendations of the PIF assessment of the Treasury in 2010/11.

Our focus will be to develop an organisation-wide understanding of what it will take to achieve our ambition for the Treasury, as set out in the Chief Executive's introduction to this document.

We will measure our progress by:

Staff engagement ratings of leadership, through surveys such as the Gallup employee engagement survey, show an upward trend with significant improvements[3] in results at each repeat of the survey. The current rating on the Gallup question of “I have confidence in the leadership of the Treasury to successfully manage emerging challenges” is 3.5.

The Treasury's Leadership and Culture measures demonstrate a lift on constructive leadership styles with associated improvements in staff engagement.

The Treasury stakeholder survey reflects a view that the Treasury is leading, and raising the quality of, critical policy debates.

Impact: We are an exemplar of a well-managed State sector organisation focused on continuous improvement

As a Central Agency, the Treasury has a role in lifting the performance of the public sector. Our objective is to be recognised by our peers and through independent review as an example of how a well-managed organisation operates. We will continue streamlining our structure, and will integrate our internal service delivery to allow maximum resources to go to the priorities identified in the Statement of Intent.

Over the next year the Treasury will work with the other Central Agencies to improve the quality of its management information systems and to develop a single model of supply for integrated corporate services (see Additional information - Integrated corporate services). The Treasury will also be strengthening its management and governance by bringing more systematic approaches to project, process and risk management. These will provide better information for managers, senior managers and the Treasury Board in making decisions about resourcing, priorities and management of risks.

Our focus is to have management information, planning and reporting systems in place that enable the Treasury to measure its impact and to support decisions about efficiency and effectiveness, and to have a risk management framework in place that is embedded in everyone's day-to-day work.