Our Organisational Health and Capability

To be a world class Treasury working towards higher living standards for New Zealanders requires an ongoing programme to develop the capability of our staff and systems. We have four objectives that reinforce each other:

• Every member of staff, led by our Executive Leadership Team, lives our values.
• We work collaboratively with others to achieve our outcomes, informed by an understanding of what is happening in the real world (working with others).
• We are an adaptive and productive workforce (growing our people).
• We are a well-managed public sector organisation focused on continuous improvement.

The first three of these objectives form the priority areas for our Change Programme. This is an umbrella programme that coordinates a number of initiatives from across the business that aim to embed the Treasury's values and therefore improve its performance as an organisation.

Every member of staff, led by our Executive Leadership Team, lives our values

The Treasury is seeking to lift its performance by changing the Treasury's culture - how we go about our business - so that the way all Treasury people work is representative of and aligned to the Treasury values: bold and innovative; collaborative and challenging; adaptable and focused; passionate and ambitious.

Leadership is a significant factor in organisational culture and change. The relationship between leadership and culture is two-way: how leaders behave strongly influences the ways others behave, which affects culture overall, which in turn affects leadership. To encourage a culture where the values of the organisation are expressed every day, the Treasury has a number of leadership development initiatives. These initiatives are aligned and integrated, and both support and are supported by the values.

Right now, the Treasury is making progress in moving its culture towards this desired future state. A gap still exists between this desired future state and the current reality. This is to be expected, as culture change takes time, but it is vital that the Treasury does not let up on its change.

Our focus is identifying actions that will embed our values, and sharing stories of successful change in action. Over recent years our leadership team has been working on establishing a collaborative and challenging executive team dynamic. The focus is now on ensuring the leadership team operates more strategically as a team. Leadership development will focus on becoming more strategic and effective leaders and supporting our leaders to drive change. We are establishing in-house capability to enable us to continuously improve our activities, processes and functions.

We will demonstrate our progress by:

• The Treasury’s assessment of leadership demonstrates a lift in constructive leadership styles.
• The PIF assessment indicates a view that our vision and values are better reflected in our day-to-day business, and are driven by a strong leadership team.
• Seeing more examples of values in action across the organisation.

We work collaboratively with others to achieve our outcomes, informed by an understanding of what is happening in the real world

We are seeking to improve the Treasury's external leadership role, in both the economic and State sector areas. We particularly want to lift our financial and performance management capability, as part of an effective Corporate Centre, and collectively lead the State sector to deliver outstanding results for New Zealanders. In doing so, we will work in partnership with other agencies and use our complementary skills to lift State sector performance.

We want to achieve greater depth and breadth of two-way engagement with external stakeholders in all areas of our work, with the aim of lifting the quality of our advice and being more influential by tapping into real-world external expertise. We want to engage with New Zealanders to better understand how we can make a difference.

Our focus is investing in the products, activities and operating model needed to enhance our capability to undertake our State sector performance and financial management, Corporate Centre and Crown asset performance management roles. We want to open up our external communications channels; for example, through high-quality and diverse external engagement and better use of social media.

We will demonstrate our progress by:

• The PIF assessment and the Treasury stakeholder survey reflect a view that there has been an improvement in the quality of our performance analysis and advice and the way we engage with State sector agencies and others to achieve results.

We are growing our people to ensure we have an adaptive 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 need to be able to prioritise work swiftly and reallocate resources when required. 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 deliver the Government's economic and better public services agendas through effective, ongoing, two-way working relationships.

To be successful, we need to ensure our staff feel valued, passionate about the work they do and equipped with the right skills to do it. We need to be able to consistently attract and retain a talented and diverse workforce.

Our focus will be on embedding a number of significant initiatives that aim to lift the capability of our people and our ability to have an impact on our outcomes, including improving our ability to deliver our State sector performance and financial managementrole; enhancing our adaptive and leadership skills; developing a comprehensive development programme for our graduate recruits; updating our reward, recognition and recruitment practices to attract, retain and recognise talent; and delivering on our Workforce and Diversity Strategies.

We will demonstrate our progress by:

• Improvements in our employee engagement survey results.

We are a well-managed public sector organisation focused on continuous improvement

As part of the Corporate Centre, the Treasury has a leadership role in lifting the performance of the State 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 making improvements to our systems and processes to allow maximum resources to go to the priorities identified in the Statement of Intent.

In March 2012 the corporate service functions (finance, information technology [IT], information management [IM] and human resources [HR]) of Central Agencies were integrated into the Central Agencies Shared Services (CASS) sitting in the Treasury. The objectives of this are to minimise risk through building greater resilience and strengthening capability; develop better services, including both improving the capability to innovate, build job satisfaction and career development; and lead by example by building strong corporate services which will deliver services that exceed the sum of their parts. It will take time for the changes to bed in and for these gains to be achieved.

To support wider cultural change across the organisation, the Treasury has established a Continuous Improvement programme of work designed to make a fundamental and sustainable change in the way we work, and to embed a culture of continuous improvement.

Our focus is to achieve the objectives from the establishment of CASS and develop a strategy for the future of CASS. We will continue to improve our management information, planning and reporting systems to enable the Treasury to measure its impact and to support decisions about efficiency and effectiveness. The Treasury will also be strengthening its management and governance by embedding more systematic approaches to project, process and risk management. We will work on improving our cross-Treasury prioritisation.

We will demonstrate our progress by:

• PIF: The majority of the organisational management ratings move to “strong” at the next PIF assessment of the Treasury.
• BASS: Costs of supplying administrative and support services as a proportion of the Treasury’s running costs decrease.
• BASS: The average of the Treasury’s management practices indicators improves.
• An 8% reduction in the overall running costs of CASS by the end of 2013/14.
• CASS will meet the agreed performance metrics outlined in the CASS service catalogue.