Cr Mike Neoh said he had his colleagues' support to request council officers to release themes of the survey results at the July ordinary council meeting.

"My view is that it is very concerning in terms of a high-level risk to the reputation of our organisation," he said.

"There are issues we have to acknowledge and not be initially dismissive of them, you have to be open and frank so there is public transparency that we are doing the best we can for our staff.

"It sends a message to potential and current employees that we've listened."

Council chief executive officer Peter Schneider said last week the findings would be shared with staff and contribute to "the basis for making improvements" but "not be made public".

But Cr Neoh said staff culture was a "governance risk" that impacted staff retention and the attraction of new staff.

"A majority of councillors will be taking an approach based on a high level organisation risk perspective - not a operational approach as officers keep quoting to us," he said.

"It was councillors who raised staff culture and the need for staff survey data to give us a baseline to ensure we had some evidence-based data on the organisation's culture and whether it is improving or going backwards."

He said councillors had wanted to receive first-hand from staff their thoughts, concerns and how they felt about "how they are managed, treated and their thoughts on the leadership direction set by management".

"We also wanted to know about the staff's thoughts on workplace dynamics," Cr Neoh said.

He said councillors were not hoping to "comprise any staff members" if the results became public.

"It's my belief by council resolution we can release the high level themes and data," Cr Neoh said.

He said "it was a pity" the council had taken a decision to change questions between yearly staff surveys, which meant the council lacked a "baseline" to benchmark any improvement from.

"What we need is consistency of questions over a period of time rather than ad-hoc questions over time. It's something I raised probably 12 months ago."

He said if his motion succeeded he expected officers to release the information "in a timely manner". "I would image it would be the next day."

The council's annual customer satisfaction results took a major hit last week.

The Warrnambool community gave the council a rating of 42 on overall performance, down from 56 in 2019, in the annual local government community satisfaction survey.

The community's scorecard marked the city down in all seven core measures including the council's direction which fell from 50 to 32.

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