I think culture is a very complex thing, and I would say that we have many cultures in the public service. Every department has its own history. My first deputyship was in Fisheries and Oceans, which had preceded Confederation. The culture there is different from the culture at PCO. I think that's just the nature of our business.
But I do think there are many ways in which we can create the incentives. Clearly public servants aren't necessarily there for huge financial incentives, but I think what they feel strongly about is that they can make a difference in the lives of Canadians. I think that's why most public servants do come to work every day. Our job as senior leaders is to recognize that and celebrate when we do kind of neat things for Canadians. You know, we're doing that every day.
Examples keep coming back my way. For instance, the border agency has just recently come up with a new program so that if you are travelling to the United States you can basically find out wait times through their website. So you can make a determination, if you are a trucker, as to which border point you want to go across. They are also very much trying to speed up individuals going through airports by automating some of the work there.
We have many things to celebrate. We have Public Service Week coming up, in which we're going to recognize over 120 public servants for the great work they've done. The other thing we felt we needed to do, which perhaps we weren't doing as well as we should have been, was to ensure that we have a solid performance management system in place for the public service. This idea is now being implemented.
There are three key aspects to that.
First, at the start of every year, the manager is to sit down with his employees and basically lay out and write up the objectives for the year.
The second component is that at the end of the year, another conversation takes place, which is an assessment of that particular employee's performance. Through that, we celebrate our high performers. We work with those who perhaps need training or need other support, and, of course, there are those whom we call our “non-performers”. We try to figure out if they are in the wrong job, whether we need to move them, or whether we need to deal with them differently.
Performance management is a key aspect of how we continue to drive the cultural changes we want. We can then look in each organization at the changes we want to make. Those can be in the performance agreements of each of our employees. That's one way of doing it. You know that is done in the private sector as well.