Kicking goals with the Sydney Roosters

As the rugby league giants enter into the ‘business end’ of the season, the Roosters’ management team has engaged the services of AIM to support their staff and players ‘beyond the business end’.

This forward-thinking initiative focuses not only on the Roosters’ corporate staff but also on up-skilling Roosters players to ready them for their own career once they have left the field.

"It’s exciting for AIM to work with an organisation that not only recognises current needs in its staff but is also future-thinking and proactive in setting foundations for its extended team (the players)," said AIM Group Executive of Commercial, David Croft AFAIM.

With the partnership now agreed, the Roosters wasted no time in organising staff development and last month ran a series of in-house time management sessions. The training package was developed to balance the club’s need to be welcoming and available, which defines their culture, while also carving out time to plan ahead with projects.

AIM Facilitator Lisa Elias said the unique challenge for the Roosters was the need to be approachable to their stakeholders while also allowing time to plan the projects that will ensure the club’s future success.

“Within that overall dynamic, three key areas they wanted to explore were email management, meeting management, and coping with unexpected interruptions,” Ms Elias said. “Due to the varying rhythms of the football season it is certainly a challenging environment and the time pressures will only escalate between now and the end of the season.”

Sydney Roosters CEO Brian Canavan AFAIM said that in an organisation such as the Roosters where roles are quite disparate, there is a need for greater communication and accuracy as people are not always at their desks or accessible.

“The roles within our organisation range from commercial to football coaching and from administration to finance and the feedback we’ve had right across the organisation is that time management was an area that we needed help with,” Mr Canavan said. “The needs of the staff are dictated to me by their performance reviews and this then informs the kinds of training we require."

“AIM offers a great range of courses, offers them in a very professional way and the bonus for us is that some of them can be conducted on-site which makes the workplace easier to manage without having people away for the day. As a member for over 14 years, the choice to use AIM was an easy one as the professionalism offered by the AIM courses adds to the professionalism of the Roosters.”

AIM Chief Executive Officer Daniel Musson FAIM has said he hopes the partnership with the Roosters leads to success both off and on the field.

“After such a successful year last year, it is impressive to see the Roosters are still trying to find ways to improve the performance of the whole organisation,” Mr Musson said. “This partnership is a great example of the flexible training options we are delivering to our corporate partners right across Australia.”

“AIM prides itself on working closely with corporate clients to identify and understand learning and development requirements and develop solutions that work.”