Rocky road to Rome
Former government-owned Terralink International has had a cultural revolution.
By Leslie Shiers

Inside Terralink International’s Wellington headquarters, an imagery team sits in front of computer screens wearing 3D glasses. Remote-sensing experts are using the latest satellite technology to create high-resolution land maps. And the boss is riding the halls on a silver scooter. Who wouldn’t want to work here?

Yet it’s taken some effort to make Terralink a fun place to work. The past five years have been rocky for the geographical information company, which transitioned from being part of the Department of Land and Survey Information to a state-owned enterprise in 1996. It went into receivership in 2001 and was finally privatised by Terralink’s current senior manage-ment and majority shareholder Animation Research Holdings later that year. Although the company circumvented going belly up, managing director Mike Donald recalls the first few years as a private company as being “quite horrendous”.

Getting Terralink back on its feet required throwing out its old business model and prioritising customer needs. According to Donald, the company had to get rid of the prevailing “don’t answer the phone, it could be a customer” government mentality. Restructuring began by trimming full-time staff from 276 to 100.

Terralink has managed to turn around its business since then, with annual revenue now at $13 million, but it continues to work on improving corporate culture for the benefit of both employees and clients. “While we’ve lost some [employees] along the way,” Donald says, “many have stayed. Now they can see a way forward … Now we can have fun.”

The company has launched an internal branding campaign to remind employees of its new customer-centric image, and to alleviate tensions between the sales and development departments. Bright posters blaring ‘YES — Innovate — Deliver’ hang in the boardroom, reminding employees to respond to customer requests and earn their trust.

Today the office pulsates with productive energy. A young, dynamic team is hard at work on raising the public’s geographic IQ with digital maps, wireless information systems and comprehensive property information. Terralink’s products and services have a wide range of do-gooder applications —informing fire departments of the fastest emergency routes, assisting farmers with precision agriculture, even helping locate lost dogs — which has to be good for morale.

But recruitment remains a challenge. It’s hard enough finding skilled IT workers these days — try finding specialists in the field of spatial sciences. To address the issue, Terralink has established scholarships at Massey and Victoria universities to encourage studies in remote sensing and precision agriculture. The company is hoping at least some graduates will become future employees.

Terralink also recruits from abroad with the help of NZTE, recruitment agencies and immigration referrals. Approximately 15% of Terralink’s new hires in the past three years have come from overseas, most recently from the US, Germany and South Africa. Manfred Seitter, a German software developer, came on board to combine his IT knowledge with an interest in spatial studies.

Cartographer Heijo May made the move from South Africa to Terralink two years ago, bringing more than 20 years of experience in geographic information. At Terralink he has worked in photogrammetry, landbase maintenance and mapping. May says New Zealand’s small size and diverse topo-graphy makes it a great region to plot.

And that translates into renowned expertise. “Our first forays offshore showed us New Zealand has world-class technology,” Donald says. The company scaled back on overseas business during its transition to a private company. But boosted by an alliance with German aerial surveying company Hansa Luftbild, it has re-entered the European market. And as Terralink expands abroad, the varied backgrounds, languages and cultures of its workforce may further stretch the company’s reach — let’s just hope ‘geographic IQ’ doesn’t get lost in translation.


Working it out
As its name suggests, In-Work NZ helps keeps employees at work.
By Caitlin Sykes

Adrian Roberts remembers his father telling him: “When you go to work, son, you leave your problems at the front door.” Roberts, however, founded a company on the fact that, for some, it’s not that easy.

West Auckland-based In-Work NZ’s core business is contracting to government agencies, like Work and Income and the Tertiary Education Commission, to help get beneficiaries into jobs by supporting them to stay there.

While it’s the mandate of HR departments within individual companies to tackle workplace issues, Roberts says at the lower end of the employment market (where most of the company’s clients are placed) it’s often problems outside work that manifest themselves in poor job performance. Debt, transport and housing woes are among the headaches that can make it hard to hold down a job for long, so the churn through the benefit system continues.

In-Work’s staff deal with clients, their extended families, and networks, to tackle these sometimes messy issues, doing everything from arranging work transport and liaising with employers, to dealing with evictions and organising probation check-ins. The result: more than 90% are still in work after three months, says Roberts, and about 86% are still in work after the first six months — by which time clients are considered to be in sustainable employment.

Since the company was founded in 2001, it has worked with more than 10,000 clients and now has 26 staff based across four North Island branches. For its entry to the 2003 Waitakere business awards, the company calculated it was saving about $19 million in benefit payouts a year in Waitakere — a figure based on all 2,250 clients the company had served in the area from 2001 to 2003 staying off an average benefit of $160 a week. Work and Income, however, says benefit savings are not readily quantifiable and it doesn’t track such statistics.

Roberts ran an IT recruitment company before he says Y2K dried up the budgets of many IT companies. Later, while on a recruitment assignment for a forestry contracting company — which employed staff mainly from Work and Income — he identified and tackled some of the reasons for the company’s massive staff turnover, which he says was about 10% a week. Although that case was extreme, Roberts approached Work and Income and asked if retention was an issue across the board, and was told it was.

“The light bulb came on then and there,” says Roberts. “I thought about a proposal just for retaining [staff] and that’s how the business started.” His proposal, however, was turned down by five Work and Income regional offices, before the Auckland/North branch gave him an opportunity to pilot his scheme.

The $50,000 pilot, which Roberts ran from home, involved 50 long-term unemployment beneficiaries. It produced impressive retention results and further contracts followed. In-Work has since developed programmes for others marginalised in the workforce, including solo parents, mature workers and sickness beneficiaries.

Tracey Parkes, Number 1 Shoe Warehouse northern regional manager, has worked with In-Work, whose clients have been placed in three Auckland stores. “They go through everything with the staff member and I’ve found that the attitude and work ethic of the people is great.”

Roberts says the business has been self-funding from the outset and turnover is now in excess of $3 million. However, he’s quick to point out that government contracts don’t offer money for jam. In-Work is among the three largest privately owned businesses operating in the sector, Roberts says, but competition is tough — from both other businesses as well as community organisations.

And, ironically, as the economy has steamed ahead and unemployment levels dropped, In-Work has had to diversify into non-government work. Drawing on its extensive networks, it has started recruiting unskilled and semi-skilled workers for private-sector companies, offering its ongoing support as a point of difference in the competitive recruitment market.

But the company’s future growth, says Roberts, lies in exporting. In-Work is tendering for a multimillion dollar contract with UK government agency Jobcentre Plus, and is also looking to the US and Canada. “Somebody who’s unemployed in New Zealand has pretty much the same barriers as in Australia, the UK, Canada, and we need to be addressing them in similar ways,” Roberts says.

Breaking down barriers and making a difference are guiding philosophies for the company, which once refused a “lucrative” offer to set up a finance company arm, due to the problems staff have seen arise around personal debt. “This is my business, but it’s also my passion and it allows us to give something back to the community,” Roberts says. Clearly not a place where you leave your values at the door.