I had never worked in human resources before I came to this job. I had four years at National Defence, where I was practising as a senior manager. I would say that I have come to appreciate how important the leadership is on things such as those you're talking about. The tone is set by the leader for the value-based public service and the values in human resources management staffing.
This new regime I talked about is value based: fairness, access, and transparency are in the preamble to the legislation. So the more leadership in an organization, the more engagement, the more setting of clear expectations about how they want people to make decisions and communicate with employees--that is how we change it.
I'm not giving you a simple, easy answer on a specific, because I'm telling you that this isn't a simple, easy world. It's a world where we have to keep pushing, we have to keep focused, we have to keep expecting our leaders to walk the talk and to basically expect that the leaders at different levels are doing this.
When it comes to the human resources piece and decision-making, for me it's the engagement of the collective. The more you have the team sitting together talking about common challenges and issues, then the more you can get to topics like these: how are we doing this, how are we making decisions, and what do we want to stand for in our organization.
I really believe there is progress being made. I've been immersed in it now for 18 months, and I have to say it's coming. It's not perfect in every place, and people will say we're not where we need to be, but there's a level of engagement and priority that's been put on these issues now by our clerk, on renewal. I have to say that at the agency pretty well all our work is involved in trying to help departments make progress.