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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2014-11-28 Minutes for Communications Working Group Meeting Date: Friday, Nov. 28, 2014 Time: 10 a.m. Location: 1A Attending: Duncan Anderson Jenny Bilenduke Curry Clifford Linda Coutu Marie Marano Stephen Myers Basia Radomski Sarah Vaisler Leanne Walker Gord Weir (for Mark Berney) Paul Wirch Absent: Cindy Fleming Susan Hajnik Laura Pinto Section 1: Clarington Connected (review and ideas) Basia asked for everyone’s opinion on the first issue of Clarington Connected. What have you heard in your department from other staff? Paul - No buzz heard yet, not sure who from planning has sent in content, has not heard anything negative Duncan - No feedback from staff to date, not sure what is being sent from Animal Services, thinks the e-newsletter is a good start but it will take time for people to get involved. Steven – Has not heard any feedback, will continue to push it at meetings with upper management Sarah – Hasn’t heard anything from staff, the management team likes it because they have a better sense of what is happening it the departments. Jenny – Thinks it’s a good idea, has heard nothing negative about the newsletter Corporation of the Municipality of Clarington 40 Temperance Street, Bowmanville, ON L1C 3A6 905-623-3379www.clarington.net Linda – It could be confused with the community services newsletter that has a similar name. Linda felt some information was redundant, but overall it was good, will improve with time as people get more involved. Basia – Some content may be redundant to MAC employees, but for satellite offices, they aren't in the know. It’s difficult to get information in. Please go back to your respective departments and push to get information. Would like for the newsletter to become more of a collaborative effort with content from all departments. We received a lot of content for the first issue, but not as much for the second one. We want this to turn into something that staff look forward. Any and all input is welcome, both good and bad. Curry – The e-newsletter is admirable and important to communication. It’s off to a great starts, it’s fun and a great idea to encourage more participation. The challenge is to try to determine how to best build the newsletter by both getting info and gaining readership. Basia – We want to have a competition each month. Marie’s idea to submit a photo from the municipality and have staff guess the location is a great one. A way to encourage staff participation. Jenny - Will we be getting info from people going to the kids Christmas party? Basia – Communications staff aren’t going, but we could get more information from the social committee, perhaps they can share some photos. . We would love to hear any other ideas for the newsletter Section 2: Improving communications (what is your department doing?) Basia - At the last meeting, Laura mentioned some initiatives that Finance is doing to improve communications in their department. What are your departments doing to improve communications? Every Wednesday, Finance offers their employees training webinars. It’s an opportunity for staff to sharpen their skills. Can everyone look into this - what works, what doesn’t - come back next meeting to share? Paul – Are we looking to improve internal or external communications? Basia – Both. If you know of initiatives that work for your department that could be incorporated corporate-wide, we would like to hear what’s working. Corporation of the Municipality of Clarington 40 Temperance Street, Bowmanville, ON L1C 3A6 905-623-3379www.clarington.net Paul - Planning will occasionally offer webinars, common goal with engineering with regard to development review - they share that with us. Over March Break, Planning has a brown bag lunch series. They talk about experiences, some are more social and some are learning sessions. Linda - Sometimes departments do things (ie. Finance did a hat and mitt initiative), but it wasn’t opened up to the rest of staff for whatever reason. They wanted to keep it a Finance initiative. Gord – Because of the WSIB audit, Fire and Emergency Services has continued to maintain a monthly safety message. We could add that to the e-newsletter. Everyone agrees. Jenny - Charity section in e-newsletter, opening all initiatives to all departments (corporate-wide) Curry – I agree with Gord’s suggestion to have one department provide leadership for an initiative Jenny – Something new from Engineering/Planning in new year – They are making a project list of new and existing projects. They will split into two or three groups, rent a mini-bus and go out to look at all the projects around Clarington. Even Clerks will be able to go out and see the project sites first-hand. Basia - Homework - See if you can brainstorm ideas within your departments to improve communications, ideas on how we can break down silos to help the corporate talk amongst each other, have fun, fundraise, etc. Section 3: Website Redesign (ideas and input) Basia - We have assessed the proposals for the new website. Our biggest challenge is accessibility, making sure it is accessible is our top priority. We want to streamline, make it first-point of customer contact, simple, easy to search, written in an engaging and simple way. There is too much writing on it right now. We will be asking each department to discuss ways to streamline their content, what’s working/not working for you. We need to streamline content, make it more engaging, not as technical. Engineer and Planning have their own language and it’s hard for regular people to understand. We want to make your department as accessible to the public as possible, we want to archive plans, pages. Anything that is legislated we can have it up for a period of time. With the content management system we can set the start and end dates so content will come down after the approved period of time. Corporation of the Municipality of Clarington 40 Temperance Street, Bowmanville, ON L1C 3A6 905-623-3379www.clarington.net Find ideas from your departments on what should be on the website. Discussion about the community calendar - new website will allow us to have different calendars. We have a media centre - we are including press releases in our twitter and Facebook feed so we are sending out our own news. This allows the community to hear the news from us before they make a decision about what they’ve read in the newspapers. Curry – Two-thirds of customers would prefer to get their communication through the website. Curry reinforces Basia’s point about the importance of communication through the website. Section 4: Establishing Focus Review of goals: A. Do you work efficiently, know who does what? B. Achieving a high level of customer service. C. Creating a positive work culture, promotes a sense of belonging. Basia asked Curry to give an overview of what the committee meant by each of the three goals. A. Do you work efficiently, know who does what? Curry - the matter of ensuring staff know who does what. What are ways that we can work efficiently (i.e. We can use outlook calendar to improve communications) B. Achieving a high level of customer service. Curry – A nice bi-product of good internal communications is that we can provide better external customer service C. Creating a positive work culture, promotes a sense of belonging. The is the underlying rational of why the group came together - creating discussion (ie what should be in the newsletter) Curry can help to draft a TOR before next meeting. We can discuss today and he can bring it forward at next meeting to discuss. Linda – For point A - New employees coming in might not know who to transfer people to. There are a lot of new employees who she doesn’t recognize. Corporation of the Municipality of Clarington 40 Temperance Street, Bowmanville, ON L1C 3A6 905-623-3379www.clarington.net Basia – Adding employee photos in outlook is a decision that needs to come from higher up Paul - Our goals need to be more concrete Basia - There is no end date for this group, we need to set a clear focus. We can consider having people rotate if necessary. Linda - For B - There is a customer service initiative through the CAO’s office (High Five Program). Can we promote through the e-newsletter? If you see someone going above and beyond the duties of their job, you can give that person a slip of paper from the High Five Program. If you collect 10 slips, you can redeem them at the CAO’s office for a Tim Hortons Gift Card. You can acknowledge your peers and they can get recognition for their effort. Linda suggests everyone can send in their ideas for concrete initiatives to Basia and she can compile them and bring them to the next meeting Steven - Can we all bring our org charts to the next meeting? Gord - Everyone should send their ideas to Basia and everyone pick their top five and go by the top items. Those can become our concrete goals/initiatives. Basia – Before the end of December, come up with two to three concrete items that we can do to improve communications, bring our org charts, photos on Outlook, etc. Basia will send out the list of our top goals and anything we want to work on will be included in a list of items to bring to the next meeting. (Org chart for example). Section 5: Next Meeting Next meeting – end of January 2015. Corporation of the Municipality of Clarington 40 Temperance Street, Bowmanville, ON L1C 3A6 905-623-3379www.clarington.net