Organisational Strategy, Policies and Procedures

• According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute “strategic planning is an organizational management activity that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that employees and other stakeholders are working toward common goals, establish agreement around intended outcomes/results, and assess and adjust the organization’s direction in response to a changing environment.”
• Policies are like documented rules that aim to guide the behaviour of staff and stakeholders within an organisation.
• Procedures set out the step by step processes of particular work practices.

In short, strategy is the big picture and policies should be designed to align with the strategy. Policies should translate the big picture strategy into expectations that can be understood at an operational level for both staff or stakeholders, and then procedures should provide the detail (step by step instructions) where required.

Kakadu tour guides can be working with any of a number of organisations that operate within the national park. All of these organisations should have policies and procedures that aligns with the strategic plan for the entire park.

Formal and Informal Feedback

Formal feedback is often conducted by survey and or structured consultation. It is often used to help shape the reviews of strategic plans, policies and procedures. For example, the Kakadu National Park Tourism and Visitor Services conducted a survey that was open to recent visitor between the 1st of January 2019 and 31st of January 2020. The next step is to analyse the data and use the findings to assist Parks Australia in future planning and management of Kakadu National Park. It was designed to determine whether visitor expectations were met and provides chance to inform parks about aspects that could be improved. (Source)

Informal feedback should be sought by Tour Guides and other stakeholders to help themselves improve. It is a good practice of self reflection and it is especially important in a workplace such as Kakadu because awareness of cultural diversity is critical in order to effectively engage and communicate with both visitors from diverse cultures and the local indigenous people.

The following (linked) article describes how to seek feedback effectively. It is not written in the context of guiding tours but all the points are relevant:

https://hbr.org/2015/05/how-to-get-the-feedback-you-need

Addition link

If you are unsure about the differences between policies, processes and procedures, skim through the following link, which provides an easy to read but detailed description of the differences:

• Polices; Processes and Procedures