City of Gold Coast

Becoming Australia’s most Modern, Flexible, Local Government Workplace

The Gold Coast’s crown jewel is its world-famous beaches. Add in theme parks, a vibrant outdoor lifestyle, and ancient rainforests, and it’s no wonder this destination is a global tourism hotspot.

But beyond the attractions, what truly sets the city apart is the shared commitment of its 4,500+ council employees who work across depots, libraries, community and sports venues, and administration hubs to support the region’s growth and goals.

The Challenge

In 2022 the City shared its bold ambition: to become Australia’s most modern, flexible local government — recognising that to keep pace with a fast-evolving region, the City needed to create a work experience as exceptional as the place itself.

With a geographically dispersed workforce, tired, unproductive work spaces, and fierce competition for talent, the goal wasn’t just bold, it was essential.

Why this Mattered:

Outdated spaces were limiting operational efficiencies and collaborative behaviours.
To attract and retain top talent, the City needed to elevate its workplace experience.
Flexibility had to go beyond just ‘working from home’ — it needed to be inclusive and equitable, addressing the diverse needs of indoor, outdoor, and community-facing teams.

The Solution

PHASE: STRATEGY

We recognised that delivering on the City’s bold ‘flexibility’ objective would require a strategy that was not constrained to addressing the physical environment alone. The strategy required a people-centric, whole of Council approach, that considered the design of work itself, as well as policy, procedures and governance, as an enabler of flexibility across the Council.

COMUNiTI partnered with organisational psychologists, Carousel Consulting, to lead an extensive discovery and consultation process including CEO and Executive interviews, ELT briefing sessions, employee workshops, leadership forums, office utilisation and benchmarking studies, and a whole of council online workplace sentiments survey.

Taking rich insights from the discovery process, we developed a phased workplace strategy that provided actionable, data-driven solutions around three interconnected dimensions — People, Place, and Technology — each reinforcing the City’s aspirational culture and opportunities for operational efficiency to move them towards their goal of becoming the most modern flexible local government.

People: redefining ‘flexibility’ and fostering modern, trust-based mindsets and behaviors as the foundation for flexible work.
Place: consolidation of the City’s administration buildings into a refurbished campus that supports flexible, activity-based work, and the recommendation to activate depots as ‘work near home points’ under a hub and spoke accommodation model to leverage the City’s unique linear geographical spread.
Technology: the development of a technology roadmap to enable the City’s fresh approach to flexibility.

You can read about these initiatives in more detail in the Execution Phase of the project, which is up next.

“The workplace strategy that COMUNiTI and Carousel Consulting delivered provides the foundation for the City to make informed, data-driven, and strategic decisions about its future workplace.”

Melissa Marsden, Director + Founder, COMUNiTI

PHASE: EXECUTION

People

COMUNiTI and Carousel Consulting delivered:

A new definition of ‘flexible work’ underpinned by a decision-making guideline.

An important part of our brief was to foster more ‘equitable flexibility’ across the City, by ensuring flexible work options were available for indoor, outdoor, and community-facing teams.

To achieve this we redefined flexibility at the City as more than simply working from home, expanding it into a comprehensive approach that considers how, when, where, and with whom work happens.

While flexibility at a human level is about choice, autonomy and agency, our approach also acknowledged that flexibility and choice in a workplace setting cannot be without constraints, so we proposed a guideline, as opposed to a sweeping policy.

The decision-making guideline focuses employees on three considerations when choosing how, where, when, and with whom they work:

the City’s needs
your team’s needs, and
your individual needs.

“This forward-thinking approach recognises that true flexibility is about empowering individuals and teams with autonomy and choice, supporting diverse workstyles, and designing workplace experiences that cater to people’s varying needs across different moments.”

Dr Meg Hooper, Managing Director + Principal Consulting Psychologist, Carousel Consulting

2. A training and development program designed to shift mindsets and behaviours.

Flexible work must be underpinned by a culture that trusts people to make good decisions about how to work most effectively, rather than enforcing rigid structures.

Understanding that this required a shift in mindsets and behaviours across the City, COMUNiTI and Carousel Consulting developed a leadership training program to guide leaders through the transition. The training focused on how to build trust, autonomy, and high performance — essential foundations for modern, flexible work.

The initiative included the delivery of comprehensive content which informed the development of a Modern Flexible Work eLearn and an Activity Based Work eLearn, for all employees to complete.

PHASE: EXECUTION FOR HORIZON 1

Place

During Horizon 1 COMUNiTI delivered:

A consolidated and refurbished administration campus.

Recognising the unique geography of the Gold Coast — Australia’s most linear city — we recommended a ‘hub-and-spoke’ model in the workplace strategy, which blends central administrative hubs with distributed satellite locations to ensure employees are never far from each other, or what they need.

To bring this model to life we analysed an exhaustive amount of data looking at existing space utilisation, industry benchmarking, and various occupancy and ratio scenario models.

As part of Horizon 1, and based off COMUNiTI’s recommendations, the City consolidated and refurbished their Bundall administration buildings resulting in:

A campus-style precinct developed at Bundall, with the Nerang Administration building to be repurposed.
Approximately 37,000sqm consolidated into 25,000sqm.
Some 18 floors redesigned and refurbished across 3 buildings, housing some 3,000 administrative /professional services employees.

COMUNiTI led the process by delivering:

A blocking and stacking analysis that examined workspace needs for all City of Gold Coast’s administrative employees, including departmental space usage, team requirements, and co-location dependencies.
Sharing ratio recommendations for each branch and team, responsive to their unique needs and ways of working.
Test fit plans to explore and validate effective space and accommodation options, including spatial arrangements, furniture placement, circulation paths, departmental adjacencies and zoning, and occupancy capacities.
A functional brief to guide architects, services engineers, and project teams around the specifics of sizes, spaces, technology, acoustics, and lighting.
A brand experience pack and conceptual designs. The brand experience pack set the visual direction for the administration campus, drawing inspiration from the Gold Coast’s lifestyle and landscape, and also leveraging the region’s unique metaphor. This brand experience pack and the accompanying conceptual designs translated into materiality and aesthetic choices, textures, colours, finishes and overall, how the City’s employees would feel in their new workplaces.

COMUNiTI’s recommendations gave the City the confidence, visual direction, data, and functional specifications they needed to go to market and begin the consolidation and refurbishment activities.

Drawing from the lifestyle:
The Gold Coast is renowned for its culture, sport, beaches and waterways, and famous for balancing urban and natural elements.

Drawing from the landscape:
From the lush hinterland to endless waterways, golden beaches and stunning habitat, the Gold Coast truly is a place of natural beauty.

2. Design advisory.

During the design and construct phase of the administration campus COMUNiTI transitioned into an advisory role for the City. Our role linked two aspects of the change: advice on the organisational change approach to enable flexible working, and advice on the environmental and design changes that would support new ways of working.

We provided oversight, ensuring the integrity of the workplace strategy was maintained and flexible work principles were thoughtfully translated into the refurbished physical spaces.

We also participated in regular Project Control Group meetings liaised directly with the design team to collaboratively manage specifications due to time and cost constraints, represented the City and advised them on decision-making processes, and provided technical reviews and advice in relation to variations and program and construction challenges.

The redesigned workspaces provide activity-based work choices from quiet individual work spaces to high-energy team collaboration zones. Employees can choose to work in spaces that best suit their work style and the task at hand, throughout their day.

The workplace design concept integrates the Gold Coast’s regional identity into physical spaces, cultivating a sense of connection, inclusivity, and high performance.

Employees benefit from thoughtfully designed spaces that reflect the Gold Coast’s natural beauty, lifestyle, and community spirit — amplifying the City’s aspirational culture and positioning it as an employer of choice.

“Our new workplaces truly reflect the essence of the Gold Coast — open, vibrant, and connected to the community. Our workplace design ensures that flexibility is not just a policy at the City of Gold Coast, but an integral part of how we work.”

Melissa Cheniart, Accommodation Workstream Lead, City of Gold Coast

PHASE: EXECUTION FOR HORIZON 1

Technology

During Horizon 1 COMUNiTI delivered:

A technology roadmap.

Recognising flexibility’s reliance on technology, in collaboration with Aston Consulting, we developed and delivered a technology roadmap working closely with the City’s IT team, to create a cohesive, seamless tech ecosystem that would support:

Digital connectivity: a robust, cloud-based infrastructure portfolio supporting seamless, location-independent collaboration. Enabling seamless transitions between ‘hubs and spokes’ and office and remote work make it easy to collaborate regardless of location.
Omnichannel communication platforms: allowing real-time collaboration across diverse work locations.
Workplace management tools: enhancing asset management and data-driven decision-making about workspace utilisation.

“Modern flexible work is made possible when people, place, and technology intersect. This way of thinking also reflects the latest global thinking in workplace strategy, where leading organisations are moving towards more human-centric models — focusing on wellbeing, performance, and purpose-driven use of space. It also acknowledges that the role of the office has fundamentally changed, and that flexibility now plays a key role in attracting talent, driving culture, and supporting high performance in a hybrid world.”

Melissa Marsden, Director + Founder, COMUNiTI

The Result

The City of Gold Coast is now well on its way to achieving its ambitious goal of becoming Australia’s most modern, flexible Local Government organisation.