The important role of managers, team leaders and supervisors

Clarifying and managing expectations

Managers, team leaders and supervisors (from here on referred to collectively as managers) can maximise an engagement activity’s success and minimise associated risks by carefully reviewing project plans to ensure details relating to goals, timelines, stakeholders, roles and responsibilities are clear. Managers can further support an engagement process by briefing upper and middle level managers across the organisation to ensure an appropriate level of corporate awareness and ownership. Ensuring relevant staff within and beyond the organisation are aware of the engagement program, what decisions have already been made and what decisions are yet to be made will also enhance the effetiveness of an engagement activity.

Having reviewed and endorsed an engagement process, managers are generally responsible for ensuring the outcomes are considered within agency decision-making processes. Where this is not possible, managers can help to manage public reaction by assisting staff explain to stakeholders why certain information was not incorporated into final outcomes.

Supporting professional engagement practice

Managers can maximise an engagement process’s success by selecting suitably skilled and qualified staff to be involved in its implementation. The Office of Public Service Commissioner website includes check lists designed to support recruitment, selection and performance-appraisal systems.

Community engagement generally involves direct contact with members of the community. This can be extremely rewarding and enjoyable. However, high levels of stakeholder fear, frustration or anger, low levels of trust among stakeholder groups and other legacies of previous poor practice can cause stress for some public servants. Other officers find themselves questioning their professional and personal values, beliefs and frameworks as a result of engaging with people they may not have had contact with previously.

Managers can assist staff to achieve positive outcomes by ensuring they have access to professional debriefing and support from an appropriate person within or external to the organisation.

Effective community engagement processes will often succeed in reaching out to people who have experienced a degree of social isolation. In some situations it may be necessary to outline the role of public servants in an engagement process and how that role differs from the role of a friend, an advocate or a direct service provider. It may be appropriate to ensure staff have time to support socially isolated participants engaged in an agency process to establish links with relevant networks or agencies as a parallel activity to the engagement program.

By encouraging staff to share and reflect on findings from community engagement processes within and beyond the organisation, managers can build the organisation’s overall engagement capacity and contribute to the development of inclusive government processes.

Disclosure protocols

Organisations and/or managers may develop disclosure protocols to guide officers undertaking engagement activities who are advised about the abuse or neglect of a person with a disability or possible criminal activity. Such protocols are likely to address:

• the types of disclosures that must be reported
• to whom disclosures are to be reported and within what time frames
• the appropriate format for reporting nominated incidents.

Disclosure protocols should be developed and endorsed and all key staff made aware of them prior to an engagement program commencing.

Keeping up-to-date

Neither the disability sector, nor government is static. Government policy evolves as does knowledge of good practice community engagement. Networks diversify, language evolves, goals shift and the needs and aspirations of people with a disability change as they transition through life stages. It is critical that people with a responsibility to engage with the disability sector and other groups in the community are supported to develop and keep their skills and knowledge up-to-date.

Participation in network meetings, subscriptions to online and other publications, enrolment in training programs, circulation of relevant government publications, secondments to relevant agencies and participation in seminars, workshops and conferences can be useful strategies for keeping up-to-date.

Employing and supporting staff with a disability

Currently 7.2 per cent of Queensland public servants identify as having a disability4. Managers can support these staff to achieve professional and personal goals by ensuring that reasonable adjustments are made and that staff with a disability can access the range of supports and opportunities available to employees without a disability.

By ensuring that public sector recruitment and selection processes are accessible to people with a disability, managers can also play an active role in promoting an inclusive public sector in which people with a disability can compete on merit.

The Office of the Public Service Commissioner via the Disability Champions’ Partnership has produced a Guide to working with people with diverse abilities. It contains a range of legal and good practice information about recruiting and performance managing employees with a disability.