Bullying is apparently alive and well in the City of Greater Geelong. Well, hand me a crayon and colour me surprised! A whistle-blower has accused (some) people in management at the City of Greater Geelong of bullying in the workplace.
Again.
Despite apparently spending the past four years cleaning up their act at City Hall, reporting in local media in recent weeks is telling us that nothing has changed within the structure of the council. According to a report in the Geelong Advertiser on the 16th of May, the Australian Services Union received “almost twenty bullying complaints” in “a matter of weeks”. A long-serving council worker, who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, said, “The whole joint is running on fear”.
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound like there has been a lot of progress since the release of the Halliday Culture Review and the EY Sweeney Culture Review Quantitative Report in October 2015.
Former City CEO Dr Gillian Miles initiated the reviews in February 2015 during her brief eight-month stint leading the City. The findings of these reviews ultimately led to the 2016 Commission of Inquiry into Greater Geelong City Council being established by the Minister for Local Government in December 2015. The Victorian Government then sacked the council within weeks of the release of the Inquiry report in late March 2016, appointing Administrators who would be in place until the state-wide council elections scheduled in October 2020. This is where it all started to go from bad to worse.
The State Opposition, whose job it seems is simply to oppose things, would not allow the legislation to remove the council to pass the Upper House unless there was an amendment to the Bill. The State Opposition and the Greens wanted the new council elections to be run at the end of 2017, a paltry eighteen months after the council’s impending dismissal, instead of the proposed, and sensible, four years.
What’s that you say? How could the Administrators possibly deal with all of the issues in the City of Greater Geelong, and allow the city to continue to function within such a tight timeframe? Well the answer is – they couldn’t.
While the City was trying to operate under the guidance of the Administrators, the bullies, who were never named in the report due to privacy concerns, were still at their desks and still indulging in their bullying behaviour. Not to forget that most bullies are pretty smart. They never pinch you when the teacher is looking; they just wait until the teacher turns their back.
According to Geelong psychologist Gary McMullen, sacking the Geelong Council in 2016 has not made a whit of difference to the workplace culture. Speaking to Harrison Tippett of the Geelong Advertiser, Mr McMullen insists that ‘the culture of bullying “absolutely” persists throughout the management levels at council.’ The culture of bullying is so embedded at the City even the drastic measure of sacking the council and removing some key positions had not made any difference in this ‘top-down, do as you’re told workplace’.
Mr McMullen has treated City of Greater Geelong workers at his practice in Geelong for many years and raised concerns as early as 2010 that bullying at the City was so bad it could result in a death.
So serious is the concern that 2017-elected Councillor, Cr Anthony Aitken has called for a new probe into this on-going problem. While Cr Aitken has suggested that the City should conduct a ‘”genuine investigation” in an article published in the Geelong Advertiser on the 17th of May, it has to be said that the City does not have a good track record when it comes to cleaning up its own house.
Even after initiating the 2015 review that lead to the sacking of the council CEO Dr Gilliam Miles told reporters that she ‘did not see a bullying culture within the organisation’. CEO Kelvin Spiller was less than forthcoming about bullying allegations in November 2017. Current CEO Martin Cutter released a statement on the City of Greater Geelong website on the 24th of May. Mr Cutter assures readers that in his ‘experience’ there is a ‘positive and supportive culture across the organisation’.
Does this strike anyone else as naïve? Excuse me? You are the boss, so of course they are all ‘nice’. Not to forget that bullies are smart. Mr Cutter does however intend to review current processes and will get feedback from the staff. Most of us have probably heard the idiom “Don’t let the fox guard the henhouse”. In this case, the City administration is the fox.
What is not needed is another EY Sweeney style review. The EY Sweeney Culture Review Quantitative Report was a useful document for the time that it was produced, but there were many nuances that needed to be taken into account when reading the data. Someone unfamiliar with these nuances would read this data very differently to someone familiar with the region and of course, it is likely that the reader will see what they expect to see in the data.
The City of Greater Geelong is one of the largest employers in the Barwon Region, with nearly 1600 full-time equivalent employees. According to information taken from the City of Greater Geelong website, between December 2014 and March 2015 the unemployment rate in Geelong was hovering just below 8%, while the rest of the state was sitting around 6.5% and the Australia-wide rate was just above 6%. Major manufacturing industries such as Alcoa and Ford were closing and large employer Target was relocating to Melbourne. Geelong was haemoraging jobs.
When the EY Sweeney survey was conducted in 2015, the answers around advocacy and retention could have looked somewhat different if employment prospects in Geelong had a better outlook because, let’s face it, a bad job that helps put food in your children’s bellies and keeps a roof over your head is still a job and better than no job at all.
Between March 2015 and September 2015 the employment participation rate in Geelong dropped from 61% to a staggering 54.8%, while the state sat almost 10% higher 64.4%.* Long-term unemployment was on the rise. An average of eleven people were applying for each job vacancy, and less than 20% were invited to an interview.* Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that 45% of people have not ‘actively looked for another job in the past 12 months’, and another 25% were unsure if they actually did look for another job.
Of course, statistics are very open to interpretation. I actually read this response as 54% of those surveyed may have looked for another job, and certainly when looked at by subgroup this figure reads as 44%. How good is an organisation when nearly half of the workforce is thinking of leaving?
Here is the problem though. The upper echelons at the City of Greater Geelong have much to lose if the allegations of on-going and systemic bullying within the administration can be substantiated. Mr McMullen’s suggestion that a trained investigator, such as a retired police officer, should be assigned to the task of conducting this investigation has some merit. Perhaps the state government could intervene. What about WorkSafe? It certainly cannot be someone local though. For all of its size, Geelong is still a large country town and the degrees of separation are uncomfortably small at times.
The issue of bullying at the City of Greater Geelong is real and has gone on for far too long. City Hall needs to take a step back and think about the many voices that are crying out for help. This isn’t an attack on the current CEO. The problem existed long before he did. But everyone has the right to feel safe, especially at their place of employment. We should all be able to look forward to our jobs as a something we participate in, not something we have to endure.
It is time for City Hall to put their big boy (and girl) pants on and sort this contentious issue out once and for all.
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