A number of Wyndham council directors and managers are facing the chopping block in a whole-of-house restructure aimed at cutting red tape and ‘enhancing customer experience’.
Wyndham council chief executive Kelly Grigsby last week unveiled the council’s first restructure in more than a decade, which was prepared following ratepayers’ feedback and “significant staff consultation”.
Ms Grigsby said the ‘Our Wyndham Towards 2040’ restructure was about delivering value to residents following rate capping and dwindling funding by other levels of government.
The restructure includes overhauling and rebranding council departments – with new departments such as city life; urban futures; economic growth, industry facilitation and visitor economy; and community first and digital mobilisation.
Ms Grigsby said a number of positions would no longer exist under the new framework, but some staff would be redeployed to one of the new or “reworked” positions.
She could not confirm the number of job losses, saying only that redundancies were likely to occur at director and management level.
Streamlining services
Ms Grigsby said the main aims were to streamline customer services by ensuring the council’s traditional in-house services performed better, cutting red tape to fast-track developments and business permits, and leveraging tourism opportunities.
“When you ring council, you should be able to deal with one person … you won’t be referred to six different people across five different departments,” she said.
“It’s about establishing a much more contemporary, modern organisation that is focused on putting the community first in everything we do.
“[It’s] also reducing red tape, reducing bureaucracy, making it easier as a community member to go through the council system –whether it’s accessing life-stage services such as early years through to age and disability services, applying for a planning permit, and so on.
“I’m not a believer in change for the sake of change.
“This is a very deliberate, well-considered sort of change that’s about putting the community first, and that’s the way local government should be.”
Ms Grigsby said the restructure was stage one of a three-stage process to improve council efficiencies, with the next phase likely to start in June.
