Listening Tour supports the City of Melbourne to form its strategic pathway.

Challenge

The City of Melbourne works with other local councils and the Victorian Government to ensure that Melbourne is one of the safest, healthiest and cleanest cities in the world. It supports Melbourne's position as Australia's pre-eminent centre for arts and culture, education, dining and shopping.

Led by the CEO and Executive Leadership Team (ELT), Team Melbourne consists of 1,800 staff across 35 sites. They provide municipal services, facilities and infrastructure to the community; implement Melbourne City Council (the ‘Council’) decisions; and support the Council with impartial advice.


An upcoming Council election and Council planning cycle presented an opportunity to engage the organisation and gather insights for optimising delivery of their long-term strategy that would endure past the election.

What Zing & Co did

Zing & Co designed and facilitated a Listening Tour to gather ideas insights into how to best deliver the City of Melbourne’s strategic priorities. To maximise participation of the dispersed, 1,800-strong workforce, the Listening Tour comprised three distinct engagement activities:

1. In-person satellite sessions held at a selection of remote sites
2. Large group in-person sessions held in the CBD
3. An ‘always-on’ online survey.

Insights generated presented opportunities for Team Melbourne to action immediately, and focused what they took into the next Council planning cycle informing the City of Melbourne’s 10-year community vision. In addition, each in-person session built connections between the ELT and Team Melbourne teams, and generated excitement and engagement about the future.

What you can learn from this organisation

Providing staff with the opportunity to input to strategic planning processes provides valuable organisational and operational insight that serves to enhance the plan, enables alignment of the plan across the organisation, and increases staff engagement and excitement about the future.

What the client said about working with Zing & Co

“The ease of working with Zing & Co, the discussions to get a clear vision of the scope and outputs, loved the iterations along the way to get to the finish and see the breadth of work evolve in a collaborative way. I really loved the large session design, it was upbeat, punchy, energetic and staff loved it.”