Debates of February 13, 2014 (day 11)

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. We’ll take a short break.

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I like to call Committee of the Whole to order. Committee, we’ve agreed to continue general comments from the Department of Human Resources. Minister Beaulieu, do you have witnesses?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, I do.

Does committee agree?

Speaker: SOME HON. MEMBERS

Agreed.

Sergeant-at-Arms, please escort the witnesses to the Chamber.

Minister Beaulieu, I’ll get you to please introduce your witnesses.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my right is Sheila Bassi-Kellett, deputy minister, Department of Human Resources; to my left is Michelle Beard, director of policy, Department of Human Resources.

Thank you. I’ll open the floor for general comments on the Department of Human Resources. Mr. Bromley.

Bob Bromley

Weledeh

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the department being here today. We had a pretty good start to general comments and I appreciated the discussion yesterday and many of the points that I had were ticked off there. That is, addressed one by one.

There was a lot of discussion on vacancy rates and recruitment. One thing I didn’t hear about was turnover rates. We’re winning these awards as the best darn employer around, which I appreciate and I want to reiterate my earlier congratulations to the Minister and his staff, but if it’s just, you know, we pay really well and we help with expenses and people leave soon after it’s a bit hollow, hopefully that’s not the case.

Do we have information on turnover rates, how long people stay in a job, and what the trend is on that over time? Of course, ultimately, that might be instructive – I don’t know – for the Minister if it was available by community and region and so on.

Also, in terms of vacancy rates and turnover rates, do we have numbers for other jurisdictions so that we can sort of see where we fit on the scale? If I could start with that, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to thank the Member for mentioning the best diversity employer. The department appreciates the Member’s comments on that.

On the turnover rates, there has been, from the information we have, a slight decrease between 2011 and 2012 of about a 1.3 percent. On average, we pretty well turn over about 10 percent of our staff on an annual basis, although our average tenure for the public service in the GNWT is nine years, but annually we’re turning over, I would say, about 10 percent, a little under 10 percent and sometimes slightly over 10 percent.

Bob Bromley

Weledeh

Thanks to the Minister for that response. The other side of that was, do we know where we fit in the larger scale looking at other jurisdictions?

I’m going to ask the deputy minister to provide a response on that.

Thank you. Ms. Bassi-Kellett.

Speaker: MS. BASSI-KELLETT

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. We are competitive. We’re comparable to other jurisdictions in terms of our turnover rate, but clearly, it’s one thing where we know in the public sector across the country we’re competing with other public sector governments, as well, for many of the jobs that we may have where we don’t have the labour pool at home. So we’re clearly really interested in focusing on a lot of retention initiatives to make sure that we build up and enhance the ability for our own staff to stay longer in their jobs. We’re really looking at opportunities and certainly the employee engagement and satisfaction survey is one way that we constantly check in with staff to see how they’re doing.

Thank you, Ms. Bassi-Kellett. Mr. Bromley.

Bob Bromley

Weledeh

Thanks to Ms. Bassi-Kellett for that. I guess I’m going to leave it at that. Like I said, many of the topics were covered. I was particularly interested in succession planning and where we are at that and whether there are any trends in that trying to build ourselves a bigger buffer there, because it was pretty serious a few years ago. I think I’ll just leave it at that at this point.

In terms of recruitment, one of the concerns I have – and the Minister addressed this the other day – is that the exit interviews aren’t telling us what the external factors are that are causing them to leave. There are obviously positive things, they found a better job or whatever. They’re moving up in the department or to another department. But then there are the negatives, the cost of living is too darn high – I’m out of here sort of thing – and it would be very good to be able to capture that sort of thing. It’s because people are choosing, and I guess this is an option to choose, not to do the exit interview.

So maybe I’ll just ask, is there any other way that the Minister could consider how we could get that information, what these external factors are so that we know which are actually things that we can deal with in the government and others as a personnel manager and others that we can deal with as a government in terms of quality of life and things like this, cost of living and so on? Is there any other way that we can get at that information? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We do surveys with our public service. Satisfaction surveys are one way that we are gauging whether or not individuals in the public service are happy or unhappy. That is, for us, the preferred method to try to make the changes while the staff are still with us, and usually if we only take a survey of the individuals that leave the public service and we’re going through exit surveys, the data is very slanted. So, like I indicated yesterday, it appeared to be an opportunity for people to vent their frustrations with having worked with the government and why they left more than anything. Many of the people that did leave on a good note, we were not capturing that. We were capturing some, but not capturing that, but it wasn’t a good stat across the board.

When we’re doing the satisfaction surveys with the staff while they’re employed with us, it’s a good, true percentage of the staff. I think it’s 43 percent of the staff that completed the surveys. I believe that was the number that I had seen, but we can confirm that. It was a high number for statistical purposes. So that gives us a good indication of those people that filled out that information, 80 percent roughly were very satisfied to be employed here.

Thank you. Mr. Beaulieu. Mr. Nadli.

Michael Nadli

Deh Cho

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple of comments. First of all I’d like to congratulate the department on its recognition of its efforts to maintain our labour force within government. That being said, I was somewhat reserved in terms of this initiative to go to Ottawa and seek people from outside the NWT to move into the North and basically join the workforce.

I acknowledge that it’s a challenge of hiring Northerners and First Nations people in the NWT. The act itself of going to Ottawa and recruiting people from outside of the NWT presumes that it’s a matter of fact that we have a challenge of ensuring that we have a very diverse labour pool and that we’re trying to seek Northerners and also First Nations people to join the workforce. It’s pretty clear that it’s a challenge in terms of being employable, looking for jobs or business opportunities in communities, and it’s hard to accept that this idea of going out of the NWT and trying to get people other jobs when in fact here in the NWT there’s still a high rate of unemployment in the communities. So that was hard to take. I understand perhaps it was necessary for the department to go to Ottawa.

The other point I wanted to make is in terms of vacant positions. Obviously, in the small communities, because there’s a somewhat limited labour pool, people are put on casual and it’s probable for people to work on a casual basis for the rest of their lives, but it creates uncertainty for families and for people that are trying to make a living when they’re given a casual position perhaps on a seasonable basis and they have to basically work from month to month or else even year to year. In that respect, I think there’s likely ways that the department is trying to remedy that challenge of ensuring that we address that dilemma in the communities.

I wanted to ask, in terms of the Affirmative Action Policy, whether indeed such a policy still exists within government, and whether indeed we’re employing it and invoking it to ensure that there’s a level of parity for people that have grown up here in the NWT, have been encouraged by their parents and by their leaders to go to school. We send our kids down south, perhaps to other institutions, to go as high as they can and they come back up here and they’ve gone as far as they could in terms of getting an education, perhaps lacking experience to apply for a job, and then they’re told that they don’t have the qualifications or the experience. That’s hard to accept, but at the same time, I do realize that it is a challenge that we’re trying to meet and that we could perhaps do more.

One thing that I also became aware of is that there is an element of an Aboriginal component to this that we’re trying to bring people that have a very solid track record, in terms of their careers, and serve as, perhaps, role models, and that we’re trying to gain from their experiences and expertise in trying to remedy some of the labour force challenges, especially for the labour pool that exists for the NWT and also particularly for First Nations people.

Those are just some of my comments that I had. Perhaps if the Minister responds, likely I will have some supplementary. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Nadli. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. The career fair that we had in Ottawa is one method for the GNWT to attract individuals to come to work in the Northwest Territories. As a government, our approach is holistic when we try to also bring in some population, bring some people in and we have a goal of increasing our population in the territory, but one of the principle reasons for going to Ottawa would be to look at some of the very difficult to fill positions. Also, attracting some Northerners to come back to the territory.

When we were down there, we had contact with over 600 people. Some of them are Northerners that are working down there that would like to come back to work in the territory. In addition to the open houses, we want to gauge the success of that, but we’re not obligated to just hire people from the South. What we’re doing is we’re trying to spread out the methods in which we use to try to fill the public service positions in the GNWT. We have the open houses that we’re going to continue to use to communicate to individuals in the regional centres, in the communities and so on. We have completed one open house – I personally have not seen the results of that open house – and we’re continuing to run open houses into May in the various centres, including a couple of open houses here.

We want to have some of the strategies, Workforce Planning Strategy, which has the regional recruitment and the Aboriginal Management Development Program in our overall Workforce Planning Strategy, so we are looking everywhere to try to keep the vacancy rate down as low possible across the territory.

Going to Ottawa is not something that we would do in replacement of trying to hire Northerners. Our priority is to still hire Northerners. Our priority is still to apply the Affirmative Action Policy when they come to apply for jobs with the various departments across our government. Human Resources does ensure that the Affirmative Action Policy is used on all hiring actions. So if a department has a job out and there’s a priority 1 candidate that is qualified for that job, they would receive their interviews first to try to get our affirmative action numbers up as high as possible. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Mr. Nadli.

Michael Nadli

Deh Cho

I move that we report progress.

---Carried

Report of Committee of the Whole

Speaker: MADAM SPEAKER

Can I have the report of Committee of the Whole, Mr. Bouchard.