As we wrap up the financial year, we’re proud to share that over 1,700 people participated in Marana facilitated sessions. This is testament to the continued demand for practical, customised professional development. Amongst other areas, assignments have taken us across to Perth, out to Dubbo, Wagga Wagga and Tamworth, up to Gosford, Maitland, Newcastle and Coffs Harbour and down south to Wollongong, Goulburn and the ACT.
Our most requested topics reflect the current focus on people, purpose and practical support in the workplace. Especially as workplaces continue to respond to restructures, organisational change, and the accelerating influence of AI and automation.
Leading the list are our customised Leadership and Management Development Programs, with a noticeable rise in interest around our Leader as Coach content. Organisations are recognising that effective leadership today means adopting a coaching facilitated style with empathy, clarity, accountability and purpose to support engagement.
Close behind are sessions focused on Feedback Skills and Cultivating Positive and Respectful Workplaces. The latter continues to resonate strongly, especially as we collaborate with clients to customise case studies and skills practice that go beyond legal compliance. Facilitated face-to-face sessions allow for deeper, more robust conversations that genuinely support healthy, inclusive workplace cultures while also strengthening individual and team well-being. Well-being and resilient leadership have also emerged as dominant themes in many of our coaching conversations, highlighting the ongoing need for grounded, people-centred support in times of change and complexity.
Customer Experience and Service also remains a key focus, as stakeholders aim to enhance both internal and external relationships in an environment where expectations can be high, and situations of entitlement can emerge. This is particularly relevant in regulatory legislative settings, where managing expectations with clarity and being able to manage self to constructively respond is essential.
Recognising the need for a more practical approach to knowledge transfer within workplaces, we have developed and delivered a hands-on Delivering on the Job Instructions program. Unlike theoretical Qualifications such as the Cert IV in Training and Assessment, this program focuses on practical application, enabling employees to effectively share and embed expertise and effectively communicate Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Safe Work Method Statements (SWMs).
In addition to group sessions, we’ve seen steady investment in both one-on-one and team coaching, reflecting a broader shift toward tailored, high-impact learning that supports sustained performance and personal growth. In the past financial year, at least two government coachees were nominated for leadership awards, with one receiving the honour. This is meaningful recognition of their development and leadership in action. Coaching supports accountability for action, helping individuals turn insight into progress.
Leadership, feedback, communication, and workplace behaviour may be long-standing focus areas, but their relevance has never been more current. As the workplace continues to evolve, these core capabilities remain central to building healthy, effective teams. I’d like to personally thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to partnering with you in this coming financial year.
“The workshops were tailored to our business, hit the nail on the head in terms of the brief and delivered some great outcomes that helped shape some huge improvements in our service delivery, commitment to our customers and some positive change in how my leaders lead their teams.”
Testimonial from our Local Government – Leisure and Aquatics client regarding the recent training program designed and delivered by Marana.
Our Client
Our client provides Leisure and Aquatics facilities across multiple locations in their local government area. Visitors of all ages are welcomed and programs and services are offered including learn to swim, aquatic facilities, fitness classes, gym services and a golf course.
The Challenge
The Executive Team have a comprehensive direction and strategic plan for the Leisure and Aquatics facilities and required practical skills to support People Leaders and staff to lead and drive change. Part of the strategic direction is to have a Customer Experience Culture at the core of everything Leisure and Aquatics do.
It was identified that some staff may require assistance with adjusting to and embracing culture change including new ways of working. People Leaders needed the skills and knowledge to lead and drive change and staff would require the skills and understanding to implement this into both internal and external customer interactions.
Some of the key challenges were:
Mystery Shopper survey results revealed that customers wanted staff to be able to assist with their enquiries at the first instance. Staff were accustomed to helping only with enquiries for their section, and weren’t working as a whole team across the Aquatics and Leisure Team.
Staff understanding the importance of taking ownership for consistent service delivery and how their interactions reflect the Council as a whole. It is important to promote that Leisure and Aquatics are not separate to Council, they are Council.
People Leaders required the practical skills and knowledge to create, develop and maintain a Customer Experience Culture. This includes being able to facilitate difficult conversations with staff when actions or behaviour were not in line with agreed expectations.
Staff required understanding of how Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) fit in with the bigger picture and People Leaders required skills to measure the quality of customer experience / service and how to effectively use measures to support a positive customer experience culture.
The Customer Experience Charter was identified as outdated and required revising to underpin the Customer Experience Culture change.
The Solution
For People Leaders this consisted of a two-day Leading a Customer Experience Culture program that was designed to support participants to lead, champion, develop and maintain a customer experience culture.
During the program People Leaders developed skills in identifying customer expectations and linking these to the Customer Service Charter, working with and measuring KPIs, understanding change management, skills to praise and recognise staff as well as how to provide redirection when standards are not being met. It also included the importance of being detailed and specific when providing feedback related to service delivery.
Over the past few years there has been a growing demand for more flexible work arrangements – and then came Covid-19. Very quickly most of us had to work from home full-time and adapt to remote working. Now with people increasingly returning to the office, it is clear flexible working has become the new “normal” and it is a huge incentive to attract talent and maintain the workforce.
At Marana we adopted flexible working practices a number of years ago and along the way we have learned how to make it work for us. We are now working with clients to make their adoption of flexible work practices a success for staff, teams and the organisation and its customers and/or clients.
Beyond complying with legal issues, our recent experiences with clients suggests the following approaches make flexible working positive for everyone.
1. Decide which flexible options the organisation and its work can support and then develop a Flexible Working Policy and communicate it to staff. For many organisations, it may not be possible to have everyone work from home all the time and it’s unlikely you cannot have some of your staff work flexibly. It is important the Policy outlines who can apply for flexible work and what arrangements can be adopted, how to apply, what the decision-making process for an application will be and how it will be monitored and reviewed. The Policy helps managers and staff understand the process and the reasoning behind decisions made and assists in achieving a consistent approach.
2. Have a transparent flexible work assessment system that can review which parts of the job can be performed remotely and which in the office or workplace. It will be important to consider the deliverables or outputs of people’s work and the customer’s or client’s needs in this. It is essential for you to have coverage for client-facing work.
3. Check whether you have the systems and technology to support the arrangements you want, including methods for knowledge transfer and training. Staff may need additional hardware for working remotely and some may require additional strategies and support when poor internet connection impacts productivity. This is especially the case for some parts of regional NSW – staff often tell us about their “technology rage”!
Over the past few days we have received an influx of promotional marketing material – one reads “Massive changes have come to the workplace. In the past weeks, these times of uncertainty require your workforce to be flexible and resilient, and to reskill for the changes ahead.” It went on to say; “The most successful organisations are the ones that can navigate uncertainty, tackle challenges and pull together to drive innovation.”
Well I think we can all say we are currently facing uncertainty and challenges that we have never personally imagined or experienced before. Every day people are having to change ways of living and working. There is a lot of fear, concern, confusion and sorrow out there about how lives are being affected and changed and the impact this pandemic is having on all of us, right round the world. For those lucky enough to generate an income, it is hard to focus when we don’t know what the next moment will bring and we hear so much negative news.
Why is it that some people thrive in the face of challenge and adversity at work, while others panic and withdraw into themselves? And why is it some people appear to get ahead while others tread water, or slowly drown in the turbulent waters of life? Resilience is not a characteristic gifted to some individuals and not others. The key is that resilience is not a passive quality, but an active process.
In organisations it is fair to say that the effectiveness of large scale change is in some part due to the resilience of individuals to cope with the stress entailed in implementing or being on the receiving end of the change. While people can experience some stress as energising and exciting, too much stress is disabling and the circumstances that brought this about seen as adversity. Everyone has different resilience abilities and resources and luckily they can be built and enhanced.
