We’ve been making our workplace more efficient and transparent to better understand the best way to collaborate and manage responsibilities across the business.
As one of Scentre Group’s key strategic priorities, significant effort during the year went into ensuring there was well-understood role clarity throughout the business, enabling senior leaders to re-evaluate conventional work practices.
The project has better positioned the Group to grasp future growth opportunities, but has also generated greater alignment across our operations within the organisation’s broader strategic goals in relation to joint venture partner engagement, retail partnerships and in particular, customer experience. What began as an initiative focussed on efficiency evolved into an opportunity to align decisions as well as executive and senior manager roles to our customer goals, in line with Scentre Group’s strategic objective of putting the customer at the centre of everything we do.
Accordingly, job descriptions were developed for business unit directors that clearly identified the contribution each made to the customer experience, and this has cascaded through to general and senior manager roles to ensure no overlap was evident and each had a clear path to contributing to the customer experience. A decision matrix (RAPID) covering nine critical cross-team decisions was finalised to support these roles once implemented.
This exercise resulted in some shifts in responsibility across teams and impacted 10 core operating processes and systems, which have been addressed steadily throughout the year.
Success of the project has been measured through the employee survey conducted in late 2017, measuring both role clarity and decision making. The results were very positive for both:
Role clarity assessment showed:
| My leader holds me accountable for delivering the results expected of me in my job. | 93% favourable |
| Scentre Group leaders empower employees to achieve the company’s goals and objectives. | 81% favourable |
| My job description has been shared with me so that it is clear. | 81% favourable |
| I have clearly defined goals for my job. | 75% favourable |
Decision-making assessment showed:
| I know what decisions I can make without asking for approval. | 80% favourable |
| I have the authority to make decisions that improve the quality of my work. | 76% favourable |
Similar work was undertaken during the year in other parts of the business including across the customer experience, brand and media experience and facilities management teams.