This short film is about DFAT's review of its own red tape.
Now, Nathan, ask me what we discovered?
Louise, what did we discover?
Well it was extremely interesting, Anne and I went out to all posts and everybody in Canberra
and first of all I should say we were encouraged by the enormous willingness of our colleagues
to participate.
We have come up with a whole range of practical suggestions some of which are already underway,
and some of which will be implemented in the short and medium term.
And that is a great thing.
But at a deeper level, we discovered something else and that was the Red Tape turns out to
be quite emblematic, quite a powerful metaphor about how we feel about ourselves in the workplace
and our colleagues, and about our institution and how it feels about us, and my strong sense
was that was where our colleagues wanted the change to occur.
And this presented itself in three recurrent themes, they just came up all the time and
the first of them was this, "Trust", over and over.
I think more interaction between the senior executive and working level staff can only
give us positive cultural dividends in this department.
It also builds their trust in their staff.
Well I think a key issue is trust in the department.
It's about the department being able to trust its staff to make judgements themselves on
key issues.
There are so many small processes that require excessive approvals.
If you trust most people, the majority of those people will go with that trust.
The second great theme was "Making Room", and what that means was, what that meant was
people felt that they had being encumbered with these terrible troglodyte systems.
That were kind of discourteous toward them as people and their use of time, they were
very unproductive, slow, requiring a lot of manual, intense manual interaction.
And we felt that if those could be changed, moved to electronic formats, shifting were
delegation resided, so that they were more closely aligned with the people that did the
jobs, we would actually make room for the things that people were urging us to do, like
think more strategically and be more productive, So "Trust", "Making Room".
Now on the subject of Red Tape, I would like you both very, very experienced DFAT professional
officers, to tell me what has driven you most mad?
Travel, Travel, definitely travel, yes.
Divisional coordinators are in my view, are pinnacle corporate enablers for divisions
and yet we are not enabled to enable the department.
It's ridiculous.
At the end of the day we are responsible for running our business units, so whether that's
a geographic division, a corporate division, a trade division, in my case, so when senior
officers are doing what they are doing best we should be enabled to do what we need to
keep things ticking over.
So whether that's travel.
There is an army of us, and we are ready and willing to help.
Tell me, where are you going on the bus.
I'm going to get six signatures so I can log into Satin Lo on Monday.
Will you be back by sun down?
I hope so.
If you think that's hard, try leaving the department, fifteen different signatures,
all in sequential order.
Now that's a lot of time wasted.
Well if you think about it quite conservatively, I mean, 5 hours per staff member per year,
you are looking at, a lost efficiency of over 1 million dollars.
Tim, you're so difficult to get hold of, what does that say about you?
I would like to think Louise that we are very busy, I think part of it is that, we certainly
recognise that DFAT have been very understanding and stoic.
I think it’s more than that, I think you are reshaping the way we do things.
Both the Red Tape Review and the InnovationXchange and the challenge have really showed that
the department has a yearning to change the way we are.
They have a yearning that we share more information.
And clearly I think a lot of the things we do will enable that if we do it properly.
So I think you are right.
So Buck here has been working on very hard on coming up with a single briefing portal
which will essentially enable a user to go directly into a one stop shop on the intranet,
and bring up the template that they would want to use for a particular meeting.
But Buck, how has this been for you in terms of developing it?
Well, it's a matter of consolidating the idea of 12 templates into one.
It's been a good exercise to see how you can bring the policy need and the technical expertise
together, it's been great.
Very nice, and would you do this again for us Buck?
Sure, we're always here to help the users.
Bob, you are really the absolute hardened DFAT warrior, and that’s why I am showing
you this list of the top 40 suggestions we’ve received from staff about removing red tape
from the department because I wanted to know what you in particular thought of them?
Well Louise the first observation I would make is that these are precisely the sort
of things that people are grumbling about these days, it's these things that are of
an administrative nature that are relatively simple but time consuming and frustrating.
Ok, if we were able to make these systems better or change them entirely or chuck them
out, do you think that would make a difference to the way people feel about working in the
department?
I think it would make a substantial difference to moral, but I think it would also make a
substantial difference to productivity.
So you think it’s worth a shot?
Absolutely, Absolutely.
The third thing was, "New Ways".
One of the refrains that we also heard in our discussions was the working smarter campaign
a decade ago, or over a decade ago, had quite significant cut through in the way that people
were able to conduct their lives in the department, and we wanted to build on that.
There are so many ways of providing briefing to each other and to senior colleagues, and
to hold meetings and to share information.
Staff were very, very keen to get moving on those things, and there was almost a sort
of cottage industry out there of parts of the department and different divisions and
posts where they are already adopting many many more streamlined practices and I would
like to see those made absolutely mainstream.
One of my big bug bears is the volume of material that you get to take to international meetings.
The volume of briefing, and the day before leaving I was presented with six volumes of
briefing, over one thousand pages in total.
It was so big; I had to take an extra suitcase just for the briefing.
So my team came up with the brilliant idea of been able to load all publicly available
documents onto an iPad.
And I have to say that it impresses all of the interlocutors at the table who still carry
their enormous amounts of briefs.
And what maybe we need to do is think about our staff as our customers, and how do we
make their process or their experience of been at work at a DFAT on a particular day
as pleasant and as easy as possible.
We've found stand up meetings an excellent tool for quick downloads of information.
They run from seven to ten minutes there’s no room booking required, no long explanation.
They are just a short sharp way to digest information and ask questions and it’s all
on the go.
And you can be back at your desk in under fifteen minutes.
Yes Louise, well my idea is instituting and normalising verbal briefs in the department
for briefing our senior executives before they go off to senior official talks or if
they are going on a ministerial visit on what the key outcomes should be from that visit,
so much of the time we sit at our desk as working level officers, trying to put our
mind to what that senior official most wants to achieve the visit and how we can tailor
the message to best capture their objectives.
So the idea would be that verbal briefs would become more common place in the department.
So, these are our themes and to my mind it goes to working even smarter, you'll find
on the intranet this short film, the at a glance outcomes and a manual.
A manual, like all manuals hardly anyone will look at but we will because we want to follow
through right to the very end to get these things through, thank you.
And I could barely carry it down the four flights that I needed to to get to the meeting
room.
And if you can't trust your divisional coordinator then who can you trust?
Absolutely right Gai.
Louise, my big idea is about working even smarter through putting more emphasis on verbal
briefing in the department, it can be, god this is really hard, sorry.