Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Thank you very much, Minister. I will follow up on some of the comments that the Minister has made on the issues that have been raised by the Member.
Starting off with occupational health and safety, we are very, very proud that we have launched our overall Occupational Health and Safety Program. It comes on the tail of the Occupational Health and Safety Policy, which was approved by the Executive Council about a year ago this time.
What we wanted to do was put some meaningful action behind the policy itself and so what we did
was we have worked extensively with the Northern Safety Association, and we have other contractors that we have engaged with, as well, to really provide a broad range of safety training to our employees, to ensure that we are upholding the safety of our employees, given the diversity of our workforce and the diversity of the kinds of work environments that we have.
I would like to note, as well, that we have made the offer available through our training calendar that if there are other Aboriginal and community governments that are interested in accessing this training, we welcome them to come and take part in this.
A lot of things that we’re doing that we’re really looking at on-line training to be as timely as we possibly can. We appreciate the pressures that are on our staff to deliver good programs and services, so we try to balance that with the amount of time that they’re away from their office or workplace to be able to take training.
I’ll go through some examples of the occupational health and safety training that we’re offering up to employees now. We have an overall course, Employee Safety Awareness, a one-day training session we are offering in all the regions, which is really intended as a broad introduction to employees who may not be familiar with what they need to be aware of in the workplace, what their responsibilities are and what our responsibilities are as an employer. We really look to employees to be the first level of, you know, being aware of their work environment, flagging any issues that may come up and being very cognizant of the fact that they are in partnership with us to make sure that we are able to support and uphold safety in the workplace.
Another one that we’re looking at implementing right away is supervisor safety training and we think that’s a very, very important one. For managers to really be aware, again in the diversity of the kinds of work environments that we have, it is very important for supervisors to know that they have a responsibility to look out for and oversee their employees and make sure their employees are very aware of safety on the ground.
After that, we have a whole range of different kinds of training and I will just name some of them off very quickly. So, for example, WHMIS training, that’s a very important one that many people want to take and we work very closely with the Northern Safety Association to make sure we’re able to offer that on-line. We think that’s a great advantage to our employees and to other people who may want to access it. So that e-learning is a great way to get on-line and be able to access that training at a time that really works for the employee himself.
We are looking at slips, trips and falls, hazard recognition control, driving safety, workplace
violence, winter driving safety, proactive safety attitudes, prime contractor training calendar, back injury prevention, Emergency Response Plan training, fall protection, scaffold awareness, confined space entry, asbestos, transportation of dangerous goods, loss prevention and control for executives and senior managers, and Occupational Health and Safety Committee training as well. So we have a really diverse angle of things. We have worked with departments very closely to make sure we are really providing training that is very relevant and very appropriate for departments.
I will move on to the issue around overtime that the Member raised. As the Minister mentioned, overtime is a fact of reality in our workplaces. We really want to make sure that we balance out a work-life balance for our employees, but there are times when overtime has to be a reality. The operational need will come up, for example, if there is a heavy snowfall and we have to get the roads cleared. We know in 24/7 operations, like hospitals and correctional centres, there is often a need to be able to work overtime, to balance off shifts and make sure that there is that continuity of service.
We know that there are other important deadlines that come up throughout the year. For example, meeting fiscal year-end is an example that we use quite a bit, where people will have to work some overtime to be able to make sure that we meet the deadlines that are set for making sure that we have met the terms and conditions of legislation and reporting that we’re required to meet.
We really try to balance this though. We really exercise with managers a lot of process issues that we’ve implemented, using some of the systems that we have, and support for managers to make sure that as they work with their employees, the employees say overtime needs to be worked, it definitely needs to be approved by managers in advance. We have mechanisms and tools built into our PeopleSoft reporting system that allows for that. When time is entered into the system and when time is approved, managers and employees are able to really document what the overtime is for and why they’re doing it.
Again, it is a fact of reality in life, but we really work very hard to manage it closely and make sure that we’re not using it too much because, of course, that’s a pressure point both on budgets and on employees themselves.
We’re really recognizing, as well, through the rest periods MOU that we negotiated with the Union of Northern Workers, we’re very mindful of not wanting our employees to be working extensively long hours. That’s not in anybody’s good interest. So that’s something that we’ve been very mindful to make sure that as part of our rest periods, we are looking at the overtime factor in there as well.
The Member raised an issue around the service partnership agreements and we’ve been working very closely with the health system on really monitoring and implementing an approach to be able to support clarity around process when it comes to human resource management.
The Department of Human Resources, we provide the corporate supports and the tools and we add value. We really look to managers to be able to manage and we want to support them to the full extent that we can. We know that the Department of Health and the health authorities have taken that responsibility very seriously. They wanted to pilot with us the ability to be able to have a service partnership agreement that lays out roles and responsibilities, timelines for service levels that should be met and how we will track that information. So we’ve been working to do that and we’re feeling quite good about that. The information that we’re able to track right now, for example, we set targets for ourselves when it comes to staffing from the point in time that we have a job description ready to go where a departmental manager says I’m ready to start the staffing process through until we make a verbal offer. Our target is eight weeks, 56 days, and we’ve been coming in around 59 days on average around that. So, we have room for improvement but we are tracking and able to document that we know the timelines that are involved in being able to staff. So, we’re continuing that good work and our intent is, of course, to be able to roll it out across the entire GNWT overall.
The Member made some excellent points around the Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Survey. We are working to do this survey biannually, so the 2012 Employment Engagement and Satisfaction Survey is the last one that we have available. We made it available in 2013. We take that information very seriously. That is a very key data for us when it comes to indications around employee retention. We do a lot of good work around employee recruitment, but retention is very important to us, too, to keep the talent that we have, to really let people know they are valued in the public service and to really engage with them to say, what’s going to make a difference, where are the areas that we can improve to really keep your interest, keep you feeling like you’ve got some good opportunities to do meaningful work, to be supported, to advance in the organization.
We’re really proud of some of the top level scores that we have. I think we’ve got many of them in the high 80s that indicate that people have meaningful and challenging work, they have a good work environment and they get along really well with their colleagues and managers.
We track the other areas very closely where they are identified as room for improvement. A number of those we are looking at very closely and taking
action on. For example, I just happened to scan very quickly here on page 8 of the Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Survey under the diversity and inclusion theme, employers responded in 2012 that they would like to see more information on cross-cultural awareness for employees. So we were very pleased to release in 2013 the Aboriginal cultural and awareness training on National Aboriginal Day. We were very pleased to have our disabilities awareness training that we’re publicizing and we are ramping up a little bit more.
So we’re taking each of these areas where we know they need to be a priority for action and looking if we do have tools in place to address some of those areas, do we need to be publicizing them more with our employees to make sure they are fully aware of them and make sure they can fully access them.
For other areas where it does need to be an improvement, we certainly look at trying our best to deep dive and see what was the root of the issue there and what are we going to do to tackle some of those issues to improve them.
If I can just finish off around safe disclosure, we were very, very pleased to work with our partners at the UNW to reach a memorandum of agreement on safe disclosure, which currently applies to all members of the UNW bargaining unit. So it came into effect last April 2013, and we have monitored very closely with the UNW. We are very eager, quite frankly, to see if there are any cases that come forward that are raised. To date, we haven’t had any cases raised.
The interest we have in having cases raised is that gives us an opportunity to test the mechanisms that we put in place through the memorandum of agreement because we want that to inform the development of our legislative proposal, which would then open up and expand safe disclosure to all GNWT employees.
The Minister mentioned that at this point in time, we are mandated to look at GNWT employees, but certainly in the development of the legislative proposal we will be looking at the policy issues behind the point about safe disclosure and allegations of wrongdoing have been defined, that people can feel supported in being able to bring those forward in a way that’s going to work within the public system that we have. Thank you.