Excellence in employee engagement
How Moore Theological College strengthened its workplace culture
Voice Project has supported Moore Theological College in conducting their anonymous employee engagement surveys since 2017. In 2021, Moore Theological College achieved a Best Workplace Award and a Change Champion Award.
Over the last five years, the College’s leadership team and its People & Culture Manager, Lana Kularajah, have worked to strengthen workplace culture and address areas for improvement.
“In 2017, we started by holding workshops to ask people what kind of culture they wanted to see at Moore,” Lana said.
“Once we had identified our ideal culture, we then gathered employee feedback via an engagement survey to assess any gaps in our current culture.”
Lana says working with the Voice Project took the guesswork out of knowing the right questions to ask. “The question scope covers all the important areas and it’s all data-based. Having external benchmarking is also very helpful, to be able to see which areas are a problem in the sector, or particular to your organisation.”
Identifying focus areas
The survey feedback suggested that staff were highly engaged with the College’s mission and values but felt there was a need to take time to recognise and celebrate their achievements. There was a desire for greater connection outside of one’s team and with the College’s leadership. As a learning institution, staff also saw an opportunity to offer greater learning and development opportunities to other staff.
Lana said the College has around 100 staff, made up of working professionals and academics. However opportunities to mix and share information had been limited.
Lana’s first move was to create a regular ‘snapshot’ - a short weekly meeting for staff to hear announcements and news during morning tea time.
This meeting evolved over time to include regular department updates and shifted to an online format during the pandemic. A summary was sent to all staff afterwards, to ensure part timers, casuals or those who missed it could stay informed. Faculty meetings and manager’s meetings were also established, along with an all-staff meeting three times a year to share important updates from leadership with everyone.
“Initially I led the snapshot meetings, and then as things progressed, I created a roster for various department heads to share relevant updates on what they were working on.”
Lana feels very satisfied knowing that the snapshot has been embedded into staff working life: “When I conduct exit surveys with leaving staff, the snapshots come up a lot as an improvement they’ve seen in recent years.”
Forming a cross-unit committee to organise an all-staff Christmas party was another initiative that gave people a more informal way to socialise. Long Service Awards were introduced and awarded at the party, alongside ‘funny awards’ to celebrate humorous staff moments throughout the year.
A new ‘Thankfulness Month’ was also well-received. Staff enjoyed sending thankyou notecards to colleagues and adding post-it notes onto a thank you wall. These were read out at the weekly snapshot meetings.
“People were really keen to connect!” Lana said.
To facilitate collaboration, cross-unit teams were formed to lead major organisational projects, including establishing a WHS committee to improve safety at work.
To improve learning and development, Lana concentrated on promoting a range of external training opportunities as well as adding some internal courses for staff.
Significant gains
The results of the College’s next survey in 2019 showed that ‘cross unit co-operation’ scores had improved by 29% and were now outperforming the sector benchmark by 16%. Satisfaction with ‘learning and development’ improved by 17%, and ‘safety’ by 13%.
Lana said being able to track the results across time has been an important part of empowering senior management to better understand what is important and how they can make a difference.
The team then turned its attention to improving staff connection with leadership and the future direction of the College.
“During the creation of our current Strategic Plan, there was a real focus from the Chief Operating Officer on presenting the plan to staff and having forums to discuss it.”
Lana also worked to embed the goals of the plan into recruitment practices by building linked KPIs into position descriptions for new roles.
“A new Vice-Principal was also appointed, and a curriculum review process was implemented. I think the academic staff appreciated talking to him about issues like workload in a very practical way.”
Achieving excellence in engagement
The positive impact of these changes was evident in the College’s 2021 survey results. During the pandemic, when the higher education sector was facing great uncertainties, staff at the College remained confident. Awareness of the vision and strategy scored 91%, some 27% higher the sector benchmark. Staff were seeing enrolments grow alongside improvements in their operations and 86% of staff felt the future was positive for the College, which was 21% higher than the sector benchmark.
The efforts to strengthen workplace culture have yielded strong results. Of the 32 organisational drivers measured in the survey, none scored a low satisfaction rating in 2021. These results were exemplary and overall employee satisfaction was so high that the College qualified to be a 2021 Best Workplace!
“I never expected that outcome!” Lana said.
Lana says significant improvements were made possible by clearly understanding the issues and using a consistent approach and perseverance to address them.
“The Voice Project reports are great, so easy to read and to send to staff and senior management. The colour-coded visuals are easy to talk through,” said Lana.
“The Voice portal dashboard was really useful to us during the last survey. It was great to have some extra flexibility to look at results in the way we want to and to drill down to explore certain patterns.”
Lana feels proud of what the College has achieved, especially during pandemic challenges that necessitated a rapid shift from predominately face-to-face activities to an online environment.
“It’s satisfying to know how we’ve made things better [in our workplace] and that our people are happier.”
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