NSW Police to tackle staff turnover with new insights platform

NSW Police Force is seeking a new employee engagement platform in an effort to address workforce attrition and help it enhance employee health and wellbeing.

The state police force has gone to market for a “modern” software solution capable of providing a “holistic view” of employee sentiment and engagement through a single, integrated platform.

Critically, the solution is intended to exceed the capabilities of a standard survey tool and instead provide insights across multiple employee interactions and feedback channels.

The agency hopes the platform will surface and analyse the “root causes of employee disengagement and attrition”.

It also aims to “predict at-risk groups” and “develop data-driven interventions to improve retention and recruitment” through “sophisticated” analysis.

“A key distinction from existing survey tools will be the integration of feedback from different employee surveys and moments along the employee lifecycle... and allow insights to be drawn about factors impacting retention, attrition, promotion, satisfaction and more,” NSW Police Force said in a request for proposal [pdf].

NSW Police stated that it is “currently experiencing a high number of unfilled vacancies” across its workforce of 22,000 operational, specialist and administrative roles.

The agency’s Annual Report 2023-24 revealed that police officer turnover reached 1484 in FY2023-24, almost doubling in four years [pdf].

More than one third of these - 575 - were police officer resignations.

Turnover among non-police staff also rose by 48 percent during the same period, with 302 staff resignations recorded.

As a result of its vacancies, NSW Police’s 2023-24 employee-related expenses were under budget by more than $100 million.

However, the force is confident that the platform’s rollout could “have profound impacts on the long-term attraction, engagement, and retention of employees across the organisation”.

This will be achieved through better engagement; improvement in the quality of insights from employee surveys; enhanced ability to monitor employee health and wellbeing and improved survey accessibility.

NSW Police plans to integrate the platform’s analytics with existing business intelligence and reporting tools, including Microsoft Power BI, to maximise the utility of collected data.

From a security standpoint, the solution is likely to operate at the PROTECTED classification level and will include confidentiality features such as the removal of IP addresses and other identifying data from survey results.