Annual Report 2018-19

It’s important for us to identify areas where we’ve communicated well to our stakeholders, and areas where we need to improve.

How we responded to our 2018 survey results

In 2018–19, we worked on continuing to improve our reputation survey results by:

• holding internal workshops to develop response strategies to each team’s reputation survey results
• ran plain English workshops for staff
• developed a ‘publications release checklist’ to help teams prepare communications materials ahead of key releases
• implemented our revised stakeholder engagement framework and charter of consultation.

The Victorian Energy Upgrades team also developed a comprehensive stakeholder engagement strategy to strengthen their understanding of the sector’s needs.

Each year we run an annual survey and collect responses from more than 350 stakeholders on how we’ve kept them updated on key decisions, workshops and other useful information. Here’s what we found in 2018–19.

How we compared

We checked our performance on how we communicate to stakeholders against benchmarks for Australian regulators (rounded figures):

Our 2019 results show further improvement

Between 2017 and 2019, our results have improved across all measures, with ‘communication with stakeholders’ and ‘the commission’s processes’ improving the most (+12 per cent).

The biggest changes have happened in the energy and Victorian Energy Upgrades groups with significant improvements in consultation (+16%) and ‘providing information to the commission’ (+17%) respectively. Other teams have also had significant improvements in these areas.

All groups worked with the strategic communication team to identify areas for improvement including setting targets in their annual work plans.

In 2018–19, we continued to embed our revised stakeholder engagement framework and consultation charter by:

• establishing new planning templates
• using the Engage Victoria platform to help increase online access to consultations
• communicating key dates and timeframes for projects through our revamped website, and our plain English enewsletters.

Over the next year, we will be continuing to focus on improving stakeholder consultation and engagement, our website and communication with stakeholders.

 

Dimension	2017	2018	2019	External benchmark(2019)
Overall satisfaction	58%	61%	64%	65%
Communication to stakeholders	60%	67%	72%	69%
Stakeholder consultation and engagement	68%	75%	73%	71%
Providing information to the commission	58%	65%	66%	63%
The commission’s processes	55%	62%	67%	65%
Interactions with commission staff	64%	73%	70%	71%
Outcomes and decisions	53%	59%	59%	56%

 ‘I’d like to acknowledge how much the commission’s communication with stakeholders has improved over the past four years. I have previously completed this survey and ... I have seen a really significant change in this area, with a clear focus on improvement.’
Anonymous stakeholder response in our reputation survey 2019