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4. Organisational health and capability

In this section:

Stewardship

Stewardship

Being a good steward requires proactive planning and management of resources so that the public’s medium and long-term interests can be protected. At the Department, we uphold this responsibility by promoting good stewardship, guided by a duty of care across five key areas:

long-term capability and people,
institutional knowledge and information,
systems and processes,
assets, and
the legislation administered by agencies.

Long-term capability and people

The Department is committed to creating an inclusive workplace, where people feel supported, connected, and empowered to be themselves and deliver for New Zealanders.

Our people

To be successful it is important that our workforce reflects the communities we serve. Our permanent workforce includes 2,747 employees. Refer to Appendix A for details of our workforce profile.

Equal employment opportunities

We are working to close our gender and ethnic pay gaps. Our gender pay gap is 11.4% (up 3.6%). The gap is primarily caused by occupational segregation, with a disproportionately higher number of women working in lower-paid jobs. The organisational change programmes implemented over the past 18 months have also impacted the gender pay gap.

Leadership Development

In 2023/24, we developed a Leadership Development Framework and related programmes to support our leaders to improve their leadership skills, connect with other leaders, and be better equipped to lead our people. This work reflects the critical role leaders play in creating a culture where kaimahi feel supported to perform at their best. In 2024/2025, we’re continuing to invest in this area, recognising the important role leaders play in creating an inclusive culture.

Papa Pounamu - Diversity and inclusion

We continue to progress work under the five focus areas of the Diversity and Inclusion work programme established by the Public Service Commission to bring together diversity and inclusion practices and initiatives across the Public Service. We are committed to delivering and implementing this strategy alongside our Kia Toipoto – Closing Gender, Māori, Pacific, and Ethnic Pay Gaps Action Plan.

A key focus has been on strengthening our support for our employee-led networks, which play an important role in fostering inclusion and providing input into Department initiatives. We promote these networks through our induction programme, ensuring kaimahi feel supported and empowered from the beginning of their journey with us.

In 2024, we reviewed our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) strategy, which will be available on our website in early 2026.

Key DEI initiatives include:

Launching Te Whare Kura, a Māori capability self-assessment tool that supports staff to identify development needs and activities.
Delivering e-learning modules to improve intercultural capability and raise awareness of unconscious bias.
Launching three new leadership programmes focused on developing inclusive leaders.

Health and safety

Our commitment to staff wellbeing and safety remains paramount. In 2024/25, we:

finalised our Wellbeing, Health, and Safety Management System to help us manage our health and safety risks
rolled out the Health and Safety Assurance Framework
continued to uplift the capability of our kaimahi and leaders through targeted training and guidance.

The Executive Leadership Team endorsed our new Wellbeing, Health, and Safety Three-Year Plan (2025–2028), which outlines a clear focus on proactive risk management and governance, and sets a clear direction for the next three years.

We successfully implemented Rourou, our new health and safety incident reporting system empowering kaimahi to report incidents, near misses, and hazards promptly. The system enables people leaders to proactively investigate reported events and address gaps by putting appropriate corrective actions in place. It also provides senior leaders with the ability to identify trends and monitor the environment for emerging or changing risks.

Building capability to engage with Māori and understand Māori perspectives

To lead and strengthen Māori capability across the organisation, the Department has appointed a Chief Māori Advisor.

We relaunched He Waka Eke Noa, our cultural capability implementation plan, supporting staff to integrate te reo Māori me ōna tikanga into their work and deepen their understanding of te ao Māori and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Staff continued to engage in capability-building opportunities, including:

Te Reo Māori courses (Levels 1–3)
Aotearoa history workshops (for example Wall Walk, Te Tiriti o Waitangi sessions)
He Tohu tours as part of induction
Celebrations such as Matariki, Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, and Mahuru Māori.

The Digital Services branch has also piloted Te Ao Māori for Professionals, a 12-month self-directed learning programme.

Institutional knowledge and information

Preserving institutional knowledge is essential for the Department’s efficiency and continuity. To enhance efficiency, compliance, and innovation while fostering a positive workplace culture, we have undertaken the following activities during the year:

Knowledge preservation, Improved access and collaboration: We implemented a new enterprise content management system and intranet on one platform. This makes it easier for staff to find and share important information, improving day-to-day efficiency and decision-making. It helps us protect valuable knowledge, encourages collaboration across teams, and supports innovation by building a smarter and more connected workforce.
Legal compliance: to help us stay compliant with legal requirements by disposing of unnecessary information, we introduced a digital records management tool.
Staff training: provided ongoing training to ensure staff are aware of best practices and legal obligations, leading to better information management.
Te Tiriti commitments: we introduced a Māori Engagement Reporting questionnaire and are developing the Māori Data Governance Framework to guide the appropriate use and protection of Māori data.
Employee engagement: we value our staff experiences and expertise creating a supportive environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their knowledge, leading to a more engaged and motivated workforce.

Systems and processes

In 2024/25, we continued to modernise, simplify and automate our corporate systems and processes to improve efficiency and service delivery. Key achievements include:

Introduced e-invoicing to pay our suppliers more quickly, improved time-sheeting and functionality for financial forecasting and reporting.
Moved human resources, property, security and privacy requests to the Departmental workflow platform, streamlining internal processes.
Implemented scalable and cost-efficient network connectivity for our offices, consolidated servers to reduce data centre costs and modernised telephony and printing systems.

Assets

Cabinet Circular CO (23) 9 [1] requires all departments to include asset performance indicators for service critical assets in their Annual Report. The Department is continuing to strengthen its asset management approach, including updating its information on critical services and the assets required to support these. This will include updating our critical service asset register and developing performance indicators of past and projected performance. We are planning to report against these indicators in our 2025/26 Annual Report.

Property assets

We monitor key asset performance indicators for our property assets to ensure our buildings comply with legislative and health and safety regulations, and are a safe and efficient environment for employees and visitors:

All the buildings we own meet the seismic standard, apart from one where we have implemented a seismic programme to address the risks.
All the buildings we own have a current warrant of fitness, except one where we are awaiting Council sign off.
We have met our office space density target of no more than 16 square metres per person.
We continue to exceed optimal humidity and temperature targets in our Archive storage environments for the preservation of our taonga.

Technology assets

This year we maintained a steady level in the average service time our ICT systems were available, reflecting an ongoing focus on service resilience. Our incident resolution timeframes measure how long it takes to resolve IT incident tickets. This year, we identified process issues that were affecting the management of some requests. This has lifted our results back above the target level and we will continue to improve our incident resolution process in the coming year. Of the changes made to IT systems during the year, 99.3% were made successfully, exceeding our target. We measure asset utilisation by the amount of workstation devices in service. The headcount changes driven by the closure of Water Services Reform that affected our utilisation in 2023/24 have now largely been absorbed, and we expect to return to target levels within the next 12 months.

Asset condition performance for Property and ICT assets is detailed in Appendix B.

Stewardship of legislation

The Department is responsible for a wide range of regulatory systems and both primary and secondary legislation. Over the last year, in addition to our regular programme of legislative and regulatory review and development, we have progressed work on the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. The Bill proposes amendments to 23 Acts that the Department either administers or has a regulatory role under. The Bill allows us to maintain our regulatory systems in an efficient and timely manner.

1. Refer to the circular here - https://www.dpmc.govt.nz/publications/co-23-9-investment-management-and- asset-performance-departments-and-other-entities#introduction