The 2K7 created the foundation for the HR Strategic Plan 2003 -2007 and strengthened Main Roads to address operational / business requirements, industry and workforce changes. Some of the major challenges faced included attracting and retaining the right people and creating innovative talent through learning and development opportunities.

However, back in 1999, Main Roads developed an integrated five-year HR strategy which they called the “Dynamic Resourcing Strategy”. At this time, John had just come into the role of Executive Director Human Resources. He was faced with a downsizing effort which left a number of people at the organisation feeling very insecure and John believed that it was important to set a longer term human resource direction for their people so that they could focus on their work rather than the future of their jobs. Speaking about the Strategy’s top three objectives, John shared, “As a member of the Corporate Executive I was involved in setting the direction for the organisation and so I had a fairly good idea of where we were heading. This made it easier for me to develop a human resource strategy which would work towards achieving the corporate goals.”

He added, “ Our three areas of concern was to get the fractionalized organisation to work as a single team, to have our human resource allocations to be more dynamic in its placement, and to get the right compensation packages in place so we could attract people to Main Roads.”

There was a clear need for a plan. At the time, John was faced with an organisation in which people were disengaged and who were leaving, for other opportunities. Leadership and direction was lacking and to some extent, the human resources area was seen to be the cause of a lot of the problems.

The human resources strategic planning is now into its eight year and all of the commitments in the plans, three to date, have been achieved. The last plan which is in its first year, is now striving for international best practice. John attributes the success of this plan to the fact that Main Roads has embraced it throughout the organisation with total commitment. This despite three different Chief Executives since the plan was put in place. Main Roads now is one of the best performing public sector organisations in Australia.

John notes that the plan was driven from the executive level and adds, “The Chief Executive Officers and our Corporate Executive have been the real champions in making this happen. This has been critical to its success. Too often in organisations, these people pay cursory service to the people management side of things and I believe that this demonstrates poor leadership which harms the organisation.”

If your organisation is faced with such an initiative and you need to achieve some level of management buy-in to your plans, the important thing is to engage your key people who carry influence in the organisation.

“A trap we often fall into is trying to deliver good human resource services without considering the impact on the business. It is critical that you understand the business first, work out what the key drivers are, work out who your key stakeholders are – and this is beyond the Chief Executive Officer and Corporate Executive – and then try and market your strategies in the language of the business, not human resource jargon,” John stresses.

In a 2004 article in Australia’s Human Resources Magazine, John was quoted as saying,“From the time we took the decision to change our organisation we knew we had to be seen to be in total control of our change agenda or face the real possibility of someone else doing it for us.”
While this is a very dramatic statement, looking back, John feels that there was a fair element of truth in what he said.

Main Roads was a good organisation with good people on board. They had a great history but somehow, the external perception of Main Roads was not very good. According to John, “We were reacting to external pressures rather than being in control of our destiny – and this was because we didn’t have a clearly articulated direction which everyone supported. This can often sound a death-knell for a government organisation as, if our political masters or the community we serve cannot see a clear justification for our existence or believe we are not effective in meeting their needs, they rightly question whether we need to be there in the first place or if the work is better done by another organisation.”

An aging workforce
Like many other organisations out there, Main Roads is plagued by common HR problems including severe skill shortages and further, faces competition on a monetary level (as compared against the private sector). So, they do have to concentrate on employing perhaps, creative and innovative strategies to not only attract but retain the right people.

Which brings us to an interesting point about Main Roads - it has an aging workforce with large numbers of people due to retire in the near future. This certainly poses a real concern to the loyal people who had been with them, some for up to 40 years.

So, in order to manage this, a Development Employee Program was implemented. It would result in over one third of the people retiring being replaced with people from this program over a 10 year period. These employees are graduates trainees, cadets, associates and people successful in gaining Main Road scholarships. And to date, targets both in quantity and quality have been exceeded.

Innovative and creative strategies
Another innovative strategy has been the tie-ups with local universities. The Employee Development Programs did result in some partnerships with the University of Western Australia, Curtin University and other academic institutions on executive, management and leaderships programs. This led to specifically designed programs (in terms of direction and their people) for Main Roads and some 30% of their employees have completed these programs to date.

Some of the other strong learning and development programs include Middle Managers and Leaders for the Future. These programs contextualise Strategic Management, Leadership, Innovation and Values-Driven Management to provide nurturing in a consistent direction.

The fact is that HR is now seen to be a business partner at Main Roads, in the true sense of the term; seen as helping the business rather than merely being an imposition. There has been an increasing need for human capability at the organisation and the HR department has managed to meet this need by exhibiting an innovative approach in terms of the compensation packages being offered as well as putting in place best practice learning and development initiatives. So now, not only is the organisation retaining its people but its also attracting new ones.

Since 1997, their workforce planning has incorporated the human element into their occupational functional reviews, assessing their current skill base, identifying scenarios that they could face over the next ten years, identifying skills required to address these, and developing strategies and initiatives to bridge the capability gap.

Tieing back to the issue of strategic HR management, John has a firm belief that strategic HR has some amazing opportunities at both the corporate and board level. According to John, “Our organisations are looking to us to work with them to meet the ever increasing challenges of the future. Employees today have different drivers from the employees of yesterday. They have higher expectations, are more socially conscious, and are more loyal to themselves and their peers than to the organisation. At the same time, organisations require HR at the executive table making equal, if not greater, contributions than finance and technology. Our HR strategies need to be ahead of all of this as it will be too late if we follow the trends.”

It is clear that not only has HR had a direct impact on the bottom line, but this is been acknowledged across the board.

“People in Main Roads know the current employment environment and the difficulty in attracting and retaining people and so they see the work by HR as being critical to the success of the business. If we did not have the people available within Main Roads there is general acceptance that it would cost us twice as much to get the expertise through consultants or contractors, assuming they had the necessary skills and experience,” John notes.

The cultural impact
And what of the cultural dynamic at Main Roads? Interestingly enough, Main Roads has always had a culturally diverse workforce. Throughout its 80 years of operation, the organisation has had to work in the far flung parts of Western Australia and it is their indigenous employees who have been the backbone of the construction workforce together with people from other parts of the globe who saw opening up new parts of the State as somewhat challenging and exciting.

And so, when it comes to managing talent, its really about understanding the people who work for you and what drives them.

As John noted, true talent management was about the effectiveness of individuals in achieving corporate objectives rather than individual goals. As he put it, “You can attract great people but the challenge is to keep them, develop them, align them to the organisation’s values and get them to work towards its goals. I have had academically brilliant, ambitious, and driven people who have been the most dysfunctional employees because they values did not align with those of the organisation and as a result they were not part of a team.”

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John Taya on ....

... two leadership initiatives in place
Perhaps the most significant is having leadership as one of our key areas of focus in our corporate strategic plan for the next 5 years. We have this up there with our technical and business objectives as key performance indicators. Another is the current Senior Executive Development Program we have developed with the University of Western Australia and we are putting all Executive and Senior Managers through this program. Complementing this program are others covering our middle managers, leaders for the future and development employees which have all been developed specific to Main Roads’ needs and have a consistent direction. In this way we are not only able to clearly state the leadership expectations of all of our people but also actively develop and support them in achieving these expectations.

... managing and reducing the fear and resistance that arises when changes are being discussed and implemented
This depends on the maturity of the organisation. The strategies we use today would not have been effective 5 years ago let alone when we developed our first human resources strategic plan. The more successful you are with your change initiatives the more confident your people will be in what you propose. We are now at the stage where people in Main Roads see changes as positive or opportunistic rather than negative as they would have in the past. I believe you have to take small steps, gain confidence and commitment, achieve results, and then tackle the big issues. Communication, engagement and committing people is critical and only when they associate change with opportunity will you be successful.

... Main Road’s stand in respect of work-life balance
We see our people not just as employees. We know that they have lives outside of work that in most cases are more important to them than their work. This is often their families, sport and other interests. We believe that if we can allow them to balance this with their work they will actually perform their work better. As everyone is different we ask them to let us know how they believe they can make their work/life balance work and they have come back to us with very creative work arrangements which in most cases we can accommodate. Our challenge to our managers is to see how they can encourage better work/life balance for their people.

... the global skill shortage and its effects
I am not sure if we have really accepted that the skills shortages and the effects they are going to have on us in the future is of our own making. To some degree we have caused the problems by not focusing on the need to train and develop people seeing them as an investment in the future rather than a cost. The lack of strategic thinking on a global basis rather than individual countries or organisations has been the problem. For years throughout the world we have promoted the philosophy that “people are our most important resource” but have not done enough to make sure that this is a sustainable resource. We have taken them for granted and are now suffering the consequences.