Up to 180 workers are leaving Services Australia every month while nearly 20% say they plan to leave in the next year, at the same time the welfare agency handles a massive blow out in waiting times for Centrelink services.
The most recent staff satisfaction survey, which is still to be officially released, was discussed at a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday, amid reports the agency has been struggling to retain staff among falling morale and burdensome working conditions.
Asked about the staff survey, the chief operating officer, Russell Egan, attempted to speak on the positive results, which included “very strong commitment to [their role] and serving the public” and creating environments which helped customers.
Egan admitted he was choosing the “highlights”. The Greens senator Janet Rice responded, “you are choosing the ones you want to highlight” and asked about measures such as how many staff would recommend the agency as a good place to work.
That measure came in at -5% in 2022. Egan and staff heads did not have the figures to hand for the 2023 survey.
But pushed by Rice, the deputy chief executive officer, Jarrod Howard, admitted that in Services Australia’s service delivery group, about 20% of people did not recommend the agency as a good place to work and 18% of staff planned to leave in the next year. Howard put down the departing staff to retirements and people wanting to move to other agencies in pursuit of promotion.
In 2022, 14% of staff said they would not recommend the agency as a good place to work, with Howard describing the 6% increase over a year as “only slightly higher”.
“Slightly higher? That’s massively higher,” Rice said. “That would be ringing alarm bells to me as a senior manager.”
The hearing was told between 140 and 180 staff were leaving the agency each month, which Egan said was “broadly comparable to the rate of attrition across the Australian jobs market at this point in time”.
Pressed on measures the agency had implemented to retain staff, Howard and other officials said they would respond on notice.
Rice said the agency remained in crisis: “When I questioned Services Australia on this staff dissatisfaction at estimates today, they had no answer for how to address this – they wanted to focus on their positive results. Their heads are in the sand.”
“And this isn’t only from their staff survey. Services Australia employees have reached out to me and told me about their negative experiences … The daily work that Services Australia frontline staff are doing affects vulnerable people across the country.”
The staff exodus follows damning findings of the royal commission into the robodebt scheme and as the agency handles the fall out from separate but related welfare debt legal issues. Services Australia formally apologised to staff in September over robodebt, with management saying workers who enforced the scheme had suffered an “unfair toll”.
On Monday, the government services minister Bill Shorten announced a staff recruitment drive, with $228m committed to hire another 3,000 staff for Services Australia. The staff increase is aimed at cutting down work loads for staff and the resulting wait times for people relying on Centrelink services.
Rice said without an overhaul on the culture, it “won’t fix the failures of Services Australia if they are stressed and overworked and end up wanting to leave soon after they start.”
Howard said call centre staff employed through the agency received regular breaks, including a five-minute break for every hour of screen time, and “specific meal breaks and they can go to the toilet when they need to”, a reference to claims from 2021 that call centre staff were policed about their toilet breaks.
Howard said, under his leadership, Services Australia was moving away from average handling time targets, which measure the length of time calls take.
But he conceded average handling time was monitored and call centre teams with higher averages were looked at.
“If we’ve got a particular team that’s got really high average handling time compared to others, then we will look to, sort of see, whether or not there’s any support that we can give that team to bring it down,” he said.
“We don’t have targets but we do, sort of, you know, we keep an eye on it to make sure that we’re trying because, if we, once again, whilst we want to achieve first contact resolution, we also want our programs to be efficient and effective.”
Despite trends showing the agency is generally fielding fewer calls, the latest data showed the average waiting time for calls to Centrelink in July and August was 32 minutes, compared with 22 minutes the previous financial year. Some 27 of the 32 Centrelink payment types have seen a sharp increase in the time it takes for a claim to be processed before benefits are paid.
