Strategic Plan Update
I suspect it comes as no surprise that there is considerable work underway at WJS Canada. Our strategic plan was approved in November 2017 and since then employees across the organization have been working hard to support progress on the identified priorities for this year.
I want to acknowledge that the amount of change being experienced is significant. It’s important work, but we need to ensure that we are not placing an unreasonable burden on our employees. We know that we have asked a lot in a short timeframe.
The implementation of the Microsoft Office 365 & Exchange platform is already bringing great benefit to our employees and our teams. We do know that learning curves have the tendency to slow down productivity in the short-term. Our Organizational Development team is committed to helping us minimize this impact with the end goal of supporting your learning and creating better workflow efficiencies.
Many individuals have committed their time and expertise to help us build our new document management and communications platform, Microsoft SharePoint. It’s currently in the pilot build stage, supported by people and programs across the organization, and it will serve to provide us with the tools and resources to collaborate more easily. We look forward to sharing this exciting project with you in the coming months.
I want you to know that we have been listening to the pulse of the organization and at our last NMT meeting we examined our existing timelines and reassessed them to ensure that a manageable workload is maintained.
We have fundamental pieces that will remain a priority:
• redefining our values;
• clarifying roles and responsibilities for management;
• building a strong client services framework; and
• building out our talent development strategy.
We recognize that our policy review project is also a foundational piece, so we want to make sure we maximize the knowledge and experience of our esteemed colleague, Lyn Policha, before she retires in the fall.
We have assessed where we will need our management group to provide input and some of the work, and have adjusted timelines to reduce multiple asks coming at the same time.
We know we need to support our teams to be successful. This is especially true when staff vacancies exist, when challenging clients take extra time and effort to support, and when our accountability requirements remain constant.
Thank you for your contributions and for staying on the journey with us. We promise to keep listening to ensure we can all be successful in our roles at WJS Canada.
Caroline Bonesky