EQUITY & DIVERSITY ANNUAL REPORT – 2007

Section 3.3: Staff Mobility: Promotions, Transfers & Secondments

Promotions, transfers and rotations within the Bank, including to overseas and regional offices, are an important means of staff development. Staff are also provided with opportunities to act in higher positions and to undertake secondments to other institutions. Over the past year, staff have worked at the Bank for International Settlements, UK Financial Services Authority, Bank of France, Australian Treasury, Australian Taxation Office, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

The Bank has the following policies and processes in place to ensure the provision of a fair and equitable method of assessment for promotion and transfer and to remove possible barriers to career mobility:

• provisions relating to equity and diversity within selection policy and guidelines;
• specified gender representation in the composition of the selection panels;
• training for selection panel members which contains information on the equity responsibilities of the panel members and the implications for the process;
• centralised job evaluation mechanisms;
• stablished criteria for assessing merit; and
• eligibility for part-time staff to apply for promotion.

Internal mobility rates for staff continue to be monitored across all equity groups. With regard to gender, in this reporting period, the transfer and promotion rate for female staff was 37 per cent and 39 per cent respectively, comparable to their participation rate of 42 per cent. Overall, 18 per cent of all women have been transferred this year, compared to five per cent last year. These figures reflect staff movements associated with internal restructuring and staffing of the Bank’s new business resumption site (BRS).

The BRS was built to provide comprehensive back up for critical Reserve Bank operations in Head Office. The Bank therefore developed a strategy to staff the BRS with appropriate skills and experience. This involved close consultation with senior personnel in relevant departments on issues of job design, determining the basis on which positions could be best filled, and training for managing remote teams. The process, while lengthy, was designed to provide a fair outcome for staff and minimal disruption to business operations. To assist with that, a BRS Intranet page was created to provide staffing information on transport links, childcare centres in the vicinity and relief arrangements. The BRS is scheduled to be fully operational in the second half of 2007, and will ultimately have a total staffing complement of 60.