Townsville Council gets up to speed with PolicyPoint

PolicyPoint today announces that Townsville City Council is progressing to full deployment of the POLICYPOINT compliance education platform, following the success of a four-month pilot program. The Stage 1 implementation includes making its policies and procedures training modules available to over 400 staff via the POLICYPOINT platform, as part of the Council’s strategy to embed a unified, high-performance culture across the organisation.

The need for a policy education management process was identified following the Council’s merger, in 2008, with Thuringowa City and NQ Water. The amalgamated Townsville City Council became Queensland’s largest regional Council, representing 180,000 residents in one of the state’s fastest-growing regions.

During integration, it became apparent that – with the Council’s 700 staff operating on three different sets of policy guidelines – a common policy library was required to help staff manage infrastructure, services, venues and events consistently.

At the same time, the amalgamated Council began an ambitious program to further strengthen the City’s position as the service, administrative and transport centre for north Queensland: and was looking for a system to help it embed a unified, high performance culture across its operations.

Geraldine Wood, Townsville City Council’s Executive Manager Corporate Governance comments, “In short, we needed a platform capable of three things: firstly, managing the rollout of the unified policies - as these were developed and adopted by Council – so that staff could read and review the new Council’s guidelines.

“Secondly, we needed to be able to give managers the assurance that their staff had read and understood the policies, and were therefore up-to-date with requirements.”

“Thirdly, we also wanted to provide a framework that makes learning an everyday part of worklife: with staff engaged in ongoing learning and supported by managers.

“POLICYPOINT met our requirements fully – and the fact that it was so fully embraced by staff during the pilot phase made it easy for us to progress to Stage 1 implementation, in which more than 400 of our staff are now receiving policy and training modules via the platform,” she says.

As part of the pilot program, the POLICYPOINT platform was rolled out to the Corporate Services division – comprising of over 230 staff across nine departments including Corporate Communications, Finance, Human Resources, Governance & Corporate Planning, Legal and Knowledge Management.  A number of policies were deployed during the pilot period – including Workplace Health and Safety Policy -   achieving 100% compliance success (that is, all staff studying the required material and completing an assessment or acknowledgement).

Surveys of user attitudes were also positive, revealing that: 

-       Some 75 percent agreed that the POLICYPOINT-based training program was helping increase their knowledge of Council policies

-       More than three quarters – over 78 percent - agreed that the completion of an assessment or acknowledgement in POLICYPOINT has made them aware of their obligations in the application of Council policies.

The POLICYPOINT service can be easily configured (by managers, with little or no IT involvement) to provide a personalised training library for each staff member. Once set, it works automatically – including re-scheduling training to ensure staff members retain awareness of key policy information.

“The success of the pilot means we can be confident that policies disseminated via the platform will be actually studied and understood. Which means that POLICYPOINT provides us a tool for giving staff the important information they need – as well as giving management a tool for embedding the high-performance culture we want for Townsville City”, Wood concludes.

 Andrew Stein, Director of PolicyPoint adds, “PolicyPoint is proud to have been chosen by Townsville City Council as the foundation for building their governance culture.”

“The platform has, over the years, helped numerous organisations consciously build their culture – by making sure staff members know how to properly fulfil their roles. We are confident that Townsville City will continue seeing the benefit of this platform as they enrol more users, and add more modules to it throughout next year.”

Townsville City Council is currently developing new policy modules that reflect its five-year plan for the City. These will be added to POLICYPOINT and rolled out to staff, alongside the existing modules, in 2010.

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About PolicyPoint www.policypoint.com

PolicyPoint Pty Ltd is an Australian-based developer of a business service that ensures comprehension of vital organisational policies and procedures. It is a proven, Web-based compliance education system, developed in conjunction with a major international services firm over four years in actual operating conditions.

PolicyPoint focuses in legal, financial, manufacturing and government, where its services are used extensively in leading organisations in Australia and New Zealand. PolicyPoint has staff in Sydney, Brisbane and Wellington.