Finance continues to foster a strong and inclusive workplace culture according to our APS Employee Census 2025 results. These results reflect our ongoing commitment to creating an environment where all employees feel respected, valued, and empowered to contribute.
Finance achieved a strong participation rate of 89 per cent, ensuring broad representation of our people and providing a robust foundation for impactful action planning.
Finance's agency-level highlights report contains a summary of employee census results across areas such as engagement, wellbeing, leadership, and innovation. We saw improvements in many scores and remain highly comparable against other APS agencies.
Key Strengths
Inclusivity
We maintained a strong inclusive culture – 84% of respondents agree that their teams felt safe and inclusive, and that the department actively promotes an inclusive work culture.
Health and Wellbeing
The results showed positive shifts relating to managing workloads and capacity and the department’s health and wellbeing policies – indicating solid progress against the themes identified in the 2024 Finance Census Action Plan.
Technology
We saw a significant increase in technology satisfaction with 50% of staff seeing departmental technology as less of a barrier to performing at their best – reflecting the department’s commitment to uplifting data and digital capability among staff.
Innovation
More staff are feeling inspired – 79% of staff feel encouraged to engage in innovation, with 75% of staff believing that innovation and creativity is encouraged by their SES.
Leadership
We saw strong above average results for leadership among SES managers – a reflection that our core values of integrity, collaboration, stewardship, and capability uplift are implemented within our own department.
Finance Census Action Plan 2025–28
While our 2025 Census results confirm that we continue to perform strongly compared to the APS overall, we remain committed to continuous improvement and looking ahead.
The Finance Census Action Plan 2025–28 outlines the steps we will take to help us perform at our best, foster commitment and success, and ensure a safe and inclusive workplace for all.
The plan spans across 3 years to focus on long-term impact. Our commitments will be embedded and tracked over the 3 years, with progress checked annually against each year’s APS Census results to ensure our actions remain meaningful and responsive.
For more information on the APS Employee Census 2025, visit the Australian Public Service Commission website.
