Australasian First for Museum Staff

Australasian First for Museum Staff

Canterbury Museum is the first organisation in Australasia and only the second outside the United Kingdom to achieve Investors in People Platinum accreditation for best practice people management.

The Prime Minister The Rt Hon Bill English presented the award to Museum staff during a celebration event at the Museum today.

Michael McEvedy, Canterbury Museum Trust Board Chair, said “This is a tremendous accolade for Director Anthony Wright and the staff. The Museum team is high performing, motivated and engaged. Staff punch well above their weight in delivering outstanding customer service and consistently over perform in meeting the Museum’s annual objectives and work programmes.”

Stuart Burgess, Investors in People New Zealand added that securing the recently-introduced Platinum Standard was a major achievement. The assessment process gathered evidence in a number of ways over several months. It included confidential staff surveys, face to face management and staff interviews conducted by an Investors in People assessor, as well as workplace observation and written evidence.

The Museum had been assessed against 27 criteria across nine indicators of people management best practice. It achieved the highest level of ‘High Performing’ in eight indicators and the second highest level of ‘Advanced Performing’ in one indicator.

In recommending that the Museum for Platinum accreditation, the assessor, Liz Gordon said that the Museum had “intentionally created a culture where employees, at all levels, live the values and are genuinely engaged in and committed to the work they do.”

Canterbury Museum has used the Investors in People standard to guide its people management since it achieved accreditation in 2001. The Museum achieved Bronze accreditation in 2009 and in 2013 was the first organisation in Australasia to achieve Gold accreditation.

Image caption: The Prime Minister The Rt Hon Bill English presents the award to Museum staff Paul Gallagher (second left) and Kristin Ramsdale, watched by Stuart Burgess, Investors in People NZ.

Background Notes

Canterbury Museum

1. The Museum employs 78 staff. The Museum has a clear vision and strategy; staff are involved in developing the Museum’s Strategic Plan and in reviewing progress; they own the plan and understand their role in delivering its objectives.

2. Museum visitor numbers have grown steadily year on year surpassing the pre-earthquake record of 653,000 in the 2013/14 year. In 2015/16 the Museum welcomed 723,000 visitors to its Rolleston Avenue site and to its special exhibition Quake City in Cashel Mall.

3. The Museum has already exceeded its current annual target of 700,000 visitors in the 2016/17 year. The Museum and Quake City have welcomed record visitor numbers for six of the last eight months. The just-closed exhibition Air New Zealand 75 Years attracted 425,600 visitors during its seven and a half month run – the largest attendance ever for an exhibition at the Museum, surpassing the previous record of just under 250,000 set by the RISE street art exhibition in 2014.

4. Canterbury Museum cares for more than 2.3 million artefacts in the collection. The collection includes 37,000 Māori artefacts and excavated Māori materials and the most comprehensive international collection of items from the heroic age of Antarctic exploration and discovery.

5. The Museum is a centre of research excellence with many staff recognised internationally in their field of expertise. Museum curators engage in a number of national and international collaborative research programmes. In 2016, curatorial staff had 30 peer-reviewed papers accepted for publication, produced a number of other popular articles and made 20 conference presentations.

6. In the 2016, the Museum staged 14 temporary exhibitions; 29,250 people (including 15,500 school students) participated in a Museum education programme and 29,100 attended a public programme. More than 56,000 children and adults visited Discovery, its natural history centre for children.

Investors in People

1. Investors in People has set the international standard for better people management since 1991. Underpinning the Standard is the Investors in People framework, reflecting the latest workplace trends, essential skills and effective structures required to outperform in any industry.

2. The Investors in People Standard describes the capabilities an organisation needs to succeed and highlights the steps required to achieve excellence. Investors in People enables organisations to benchmark against the best in the business internationally. Organisational performance is measured against a number of criteria for each of the four levels of accreditation: Accredited, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

3. Internationally there are 14,000 businesses across 75 countries accredited with Investors in People standards. The Platinum standard was introduced in September 2015; 28 organisations now hold platinum accreditation in the United Kingdom and just one other organisation internationally (based in the Philippines).

4. The Investors in People Standard is owned and managed by Investors in People Community Interest Company based in the UK. This is an employer-led entity governed by a non-executive Board, with the British Government retaining a minority stake in the business. Investors in People CIC contracts with local companies to deliver their services around the world and in New Zealand is represented by Auckland-based Investors in People NZ Ltd.

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