Management Assignment Analysing Organisational Performance of APA Group

Question

Task:

Select a ASX listed company and write a report on management assignment critically discussing about the measures for improving its employee performance, the extent of employee engagement and organisational culture.

Answer

Part A In-Class Activity
The report on management assignment would be based on the Sydney based Australian energy infrastructure organisation, APA Group. The company holds the biggest natural gas infrastructure business set-up across Australia dealing in electricity resources and natural gas. APA Group is listed in the Australian Securities Exchange and is a part of the exclusive ASX 200 category and is included in the S&P ASX 50 Index. APA has a market capitalisation of A$ 12 billion along with a product portfolio of $21 billion connecting natural gas pipeline over 15,000 kilometres (Apa.com.au, 2020). The company owns pipelines like the SEAGas Pipeline, Riverland Pipeline and QSN Link while Terranora interconnector and Murraylink electricity interconnector are its electricity transmission resources.

APA Group has around 1800 employees and alike other responsible organisations, the company also treat its employees as valuable resources rather the most important one. Through this report an attempt would be made to have an understanding of the employee performance, organisational culture and employee engagement in context to APA. The employee performance initiative of APA would be discussed with relevance to the health and safety measures undertaken by the company to improve their performance in the current state. The organisational culture of APA would be evaluated through its gender diversity while the employee engagement activities are to be explored by means of development of talent and capability. So the individual report in the following section would be stating the current state of APA in those parameters and its effort in developing the current state of matters.

Draft report framework:

Source: Author

Part B: Individual Report

Introduction:
The individual report would be based on Australia’s biggest natural gas infrastructure company, the Sydney based APA Group. It is an ASX 200 listed company with a market capitalisation of $12 billion and product portfolio of worth $21 billion in pipeline and electricity transmission businesses (Apa.com.au, 2020). The main purpose of the report would be to look into its various human resources aspect say measures for improving employee performance, the extent of employee engagement and organisational culture prevalent in APA. The organisation has around 1800 employees and through this report, the extent of employee performance would be evaluated in terms of health and safety of the staff. In the same manner, gender diversity would be explored for the purpose of understanding its organisational culture while development of talent and capability would be used to determine the level of employee engagement of APA.

Employee performance
APA Group is well-committed to uplift the performance of its 1800 strong staff by developing the health and safety measures. To serve the purpose, APA undertook the Health Safety and Environment (HSE) Strategic Plan for promotion of the well-being of its staff with the intention to enhance the performance of the employees. Accordingly, the company came up with the Health and Wellbeing program called ‘Bounce’ with tagline of the company as Aspire, Participate, Achieve or APA(Apa.com.au, 2020). In 2017, the company came up with the Health and Wellbeing portal that disseminates the staff with relevant information to take care of their personal well-being such as stress management, suggestion on exercise and healthy recipes. The online portal is also designed to provide customised health evaluation for each of the staff.

As per the HSE indicators, APA was able to meet the organisational health and safety standards scoring around 8.9 the Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate or TRIFR.The score indicates that in recent times for the FY 2019, the organisation did not come across any sort of fatalities. Again the Lost Time Injury Frequency rate (LTFIR) stands at 1.76 in 2019 against the target of <1 in 2018. So in terms of organisational standards the outcome of the current year surpassed that of the previous year and that has been possible on account of due diligence of the APA management (Falcone, et al., 2018). The company undertook critical measures like spreading awareness in various aspects of HSE like contractor management, sorts of disruptions, gassafety and safety leadership among others.

APA launched an efficient level of Crisis and Emergency Management training and tests and to serve the purpose conducted a safety training module for the staff and contractors. The phenomenon led to a positive ambiance among the employees motivating them to achieve better productivity for APA. The organisation made its effort by addressing the safety risks and seeking suggestion from the frontline staff to enhance the overall safety level. The feedback thus collected enables APA to improve the safety aspects which directly helps the staff to focus more on their task than their personal or team safety. In this way through various measures of developing health and safety proposition, APA strives to develop the performance of its employees delivering a standardised health and safety measures. The most intriguing fact is that APA continues the effort and keeps on improving it connotation to an improved organisational performance.

Organisational culture
The organisational culture of APA is characterised with an efficient level of Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Strategy to strengthen the cultural aspect, age and gender diversity of the company. A unique aspect of APA has been noticed that it made due efforts to attract and retain diverse talents through an increased representation of female staff especially in the operational and senior management roles(Apa.com.au, 2020). APA constituted a D&I network to track the periodic progress of the company in terms of human resources development like gender diversity and inclusion to lay forth an effective co-ordination among the employees. Such a business environment is quite fruitful to have a higher respectability among the staff and efficient business operationsand favourable to create a gender balance among the workforce.

APA has undertaken the goal to enhance its female participation in the staff pool to meet its 2022target for having 30% female in its total workforce, 25% in senior leadership and more than 30% in the talent pipeline. The phenomenon would be very helpful in building a positive working ambience for women in the organisation nurturing diversified talent and improved business partnership (Pfister & Hartmann, 2011). Such sort of activities would enhance hiring of more number of talented females in various posts striving for a gender balance within the organisational ambit. The gender balance within APA would be highly likely to set forth a positive organisational culture and developing its brand image in the industry. The company undertakes strategies like coaching, talent reviewing, networking and development of technical expertise to nurture the women workers to have their favourable share alongside their male counterparts.

The aspect of gender diversity in APA could be understood by its effort to build up a supportive working environment for the breastfeeding mothers(Mohelska & Sokolova, 2015). This notion of the company has been duly recognised by the Australian Breastfeeding Association terming it as a Breastfeeding Friendly Workplace. The gender diversity aspect of APA shows that 42% of its non-executive Directors are women, 27% of the workforce are female, 20% possess leadership roles and 3% fills the technical roles. So APA has strived out an effective platform for the female staff in the organisationindicating a proper growth and scope of nurturing their talents strengthening its organisational culture multiple times say a women friendly workplace.

Employee engagement

The employee survey of APA shows that it has a 71% favourable quotient in terms of employee engagement and that has been possible with the due effort of focusing the personal growth and development of its staff. The APA leadership is pretty enthusiast in motivating its workforce in partaking in sorts of talent management lesson and training activities. It apparently helps in recognising and creating a strong pipeline of skills and capabilities to meet the existing and upcoming organisational requirements (Hollebeek, et al., 2016). This sort of phenomenon seems to be important in ensuring a long-standing continuation of the principal business activities of APA. It would definitely create a cohesive working atmosphere improving the organisational culture ultimately leading way to an improved organisational productivity and performance.

The senior leadership of APA in lieu of its talent review process has pointed out prospective and upcoming talents to find out efficient manpower for key roles in the company. Besides, the exercise is also helpful in identifying capability gaps of the staff (Zhong, et al., 2016).The organisation prepared a complete profile of each and every employees along with their career goals, ambition, strengths and needs for development.APA has been instrumental in developing the talent of its employees by means of structured evaluations, on-job-training facilities, feedbacks, coaching and customised development for the concerned staff(Apa.com.au, 2020). So the talent review process is an important process in the organisational scenario of APA not only to identify talent and nurture it but also an ideal instance of overall employee engagement program.

APA is fairly instrumental in raving up its internal development techniques like having the APA mentoring program. In 2018, the company stated the initiative to proactively initiate such exercises for nurturing upcoming talents for significant positions in the company.For the time being, 150 odd staff of the company has undergone such process and widely benefitted by chalking out their career path in APA (Apa.com.au, 2020). The organisationhas been instrumental in establishing various kinds of functional and technical expertise to develop the productivity of the staff in terms of competency and acquiring new skills. The aspect of employee engagement is definitely well represented through development of talent and capability by means of various talent review process and programs undertaken by the APA leadership.

Conclusion:
The report concludes that APA being a market leader has undertaken due initiatives to improve its performance by laying down a favourable platform for the development of its employees. The health and safety measures through the ‘Bounce’ program has been effective in setting forth a favourable ambience for the employees. It apparently helps to bring out the safety apparatus so that the workforce could work without giving due effort to their safety as it has been rightly taken care by the company. The organizational culture of APA has been duly uplifted by having a favourable gender diversity program whereas the women employees are given due scope to showcase their skills and talent. Lastly, the talent and capability programs undertaken by the APA management have been quite effective in enhancing the skills of the employees with a 71% participation from the staff establishing it as an effective business practice.

References
Apa.com.au, 2020. apa group overview - APA Group. [Online]
Available at: https://www.apa.com.au/about-apa/apa-overview/
[Accessed 21 April 2020].

Apa.com.au, 2020. Sustainability employees - APA Group. [Online]
Available at: https://www.apa.com.au/about-apa/sustainability/employees/
[Accessed 21 April 2020].

Falcone, D., Silvestri, A., Di Bona, G. & Forcina, A., 2018. Mathematical Models for Reliability Allocation and Optimization for Complex Systems. In: Human Factors and Reliability Engineering for Safety and Security in Critical Infrastructures. Cham: Springer, pp. 43-76.

Hollebeek, L., Conduit, J. & Brodie, R., 2016. Strategic drivers, anticipated and unanticipated outcomes of customer engagement. Management assignment Journal of Marketing Management, 32(5-6), pp. 393-398.

Mohelska, H. & Sokolova, M., 2015. Organisational culture and leadershipjoint vessels?. Procedia-Social and behavioral sciences, 171(3), pp. 1011-1016.

Pfister, J. & Hartmann, F., 2011. Managing organizational culture for effective internal control: From practice to theory. The Accounting Review, 86(2), pp. 738-741.

Zhong, L., Wayne, S. & Liden, R., 2016. Job engagement, perceived organizational support, high?performance human resource practices, and cultural value orientations: A cross?level investigation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(6), pp. 823-844.