Our people
Our people are core to our success. Over the four year life of this plan, we aim to have the right mix of people, with diverse skills and life experience, to support the Government to deliver for the Australian people in an increasingly complex and uncertain environment.
Our workforce must be ready and able to respond, mobilise quickly and work across our broad stakeholder base to deliver influential and impartial advice, drive the big picture policy agenda and work on matters of priority for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet.
To do this, we foster a safe, respectful and inclusive culture where employees and teams use their strengths to perform at their best. We offer a flexible and modern working environment emphasising collaboration, achieving outcomes and learning. We have a continued focus on employee health and wellbeing to positively influence people’s experience at work and promote high levels of engagement and performance.
This year, to build the capability of our workforce we will deliver a range of initiatives under our Workforce Strategy Action Plan:
- optimise our recruitment and induction frameworks to attract and retain a highly skilled workforce
- uplift workforce-planning capability to address workforce risks and gaps
- define critical PM&C skill needs and align our learning and development investment and recruitment activities with these
- implement the APS Mental Health Capability Framework in PM&C to uplift mental health capability and literacy and ensure psychologically safe work practices.
During the uncertain times of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was essential that we were able to implement a responsive and holistic approach to supporting our people, optimising our ability to stay connected and remain aware; as well as support staff to work safely from home and in the office.
We will continue to ensure staff are kept up to date through providing access to the relevant resources to ensure a safe, healthy and productive workplace.
The workforce will continue to be well supported to continue to achieve outcomes through the ongoing impacts on COVID-19, through our established flexible work policy and arrangements, manager training and supportive IT Infrastructure.
We will also continue to implement our 2021–2023 Reconciliation Action Plan and 2020–2024 First Nations Action Plan, and will stand up an integrated PM&C Inclusion and Diversity Strategy and Action Plan. The Strategy and Action Plan will reflect PM&C’s commitment to the 2020–2024 Commonwealth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Workforce Strategy, the 2020–2025 APS Disability Employment Strategy, and the 2021–2026 APS Gender Equality Strategy.
Our Inclusion and Diversity Committee, led by the Secretary with SES Inclusion and Diversity Champions and a range of employee Diversity Networks, will continue to play a key role in leading and implementing our inclusion and diversity agenda.
ICT tools and capability
Our environment is fast paced and requires us to be highly responsive and flexible, so that we can collaborate effectively to support the Government’s priorities. Critical to our success is Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capability, and ongoing investment in our ICT systems will continue.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were required to quickly uplift our digital capabilities (while remaining secure) to support our people to work from home or in the office.
We provided our people with a COVID-19 information portal to capture working from home statistics, updates on wellbeing and track our ICT equipment.
The pandemic has highlighted the need for continued investment in our ICT systems to support a flexible secure working environment where people are well connected.
PM&C’s ICT Strategy 2021–2023 will guide our investment decisions, approaches and practices through to 2023. The strategy consists of four key ICT leadership aspirations:
- Customer centric solutions.
- Flexible, scalable and efficient foundations.
- Secure, resilient, reliable and reusable assets.
- Confidence in our digital capabilities.
The strategy ensures that we continue to deliver and enhance the digital capabilities and security practices needed to enable the Department and our shared service partners to remain responsive and connected during times like a pandemic to achieve the outcomes set out in their Corporate Plan and to meet statutory obligations.
