Canada Regional Meeting: A Recap

It is always a fun time when we gather with our clients for valuable best practice sharing, networking, and robust conversations around strategy and performance management.

Last month was no different when we convened virtually with the City of Vaughan, ON, City of Cambridge, ON, City of Airdrie, AB, City of St. Albert, AB, City of Edmonton, AB, City of Regina, SK and Student Transportation of Eastern Ontario (STEO) for the ClearPoint Community Canada regional meeting. While our team missed traveling to the great nation of Canada to see everyone in person and partake in their wonderful cuisine (especially poutine), we learned  a lot about how to run productive meetings, generate a sense of purpose in your team, and strike a balance between city goals and council priorities. Below are a few highlights from our time together.

Get the most out of meetings

For the last year, the City of Edmonton focused efforts on setting up a reporting framework for all city services. The City is also releasing a 10- year strategic plan and a new 40-year municipal development plan. They will monitor, track, and measure certain aspects of their strategic goals and initially focus on services, the bottom level. The City divided everything up into 73 different services, which follows the municipal reference model for the public sector or municipal government services. They’ve run workshops and put a lot of effort into developing strategies and relevant measures for each of those services.

The City uses ClearPoint as the management distribution tool. Various managers leverage ClearPoint reports during their performance management team meetings to ensure the meetings are productive and they have the data they need to make decisions.

Experience a sense of purpose

In late 2019, the City of Vaughan embarked on an organization-wide journey to adopt a new business management framework, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Teams were asked to draft their 2021 OKRs and then share them at an executive retreat in early 2020. Teams enjoyed this activity so much that they decided to pilot it in 2020 with 8 teams. During this pilot session, the City is documenting lessons learned, refining their approach, and leveraging ClearPoint across the organization for a successful roll-out.

While there are many benefits to OKRs, a significant value beyond the framework itself is that employees experience a greater sense of purpose. Teams and individuals know exactly what they need to work on, when they need to work on it, and what results they should aim for. They also experience autonomy and can plan out their day accordingly and make sure that they are on track. The OKR framework in ClearPoint allows them to easily see the progress of their efforts and how they are improving. This, in turn, motivates them to work harder towards their goals.

Strike a balance

The City of Regina uses the Balanced Scorecard methodology and leverages ClearPoint for corporate scorecard reporting. Currently, the City is working on resetting their strategic plan due to COVID-19 and other environmental changes. For the first time, the City will include their Council in this process. Typically, the Council is responsible for the vision validation but will now contribute priorities to the strategic plan. Priorities are more detailed compared to the current strategic plan, which is a very high level, internal plan. The process, which is expected to last six months, commenced just recently with a focus on resetting (not redoing) the strategic plan. It is important that they achieve buy-in across the organization and remain agile in all that they do.

The City of Airdrie is also focused on tying together corporate and council priorities and changing mindsets at the highest planning level as it relates to the relationship between the two. Corporate priorities exist because of what the Council and the community want and making that connection across the organization is paramount for the City of Airdrie.

Gain transparency with ClearPoint

ClearPoint enabled each organization to improve transparency during a time of change. By taking the time to develop reporting frameworks, implement new strategy frameworks, or tie together city and council goals, each local government set themselves up for success for years to come.

Because each organization utilized ClearPoint throughout these transitions, they were able to implement new frameworks and easily evaluate the success of them. ClearPoint’s transparency features also allow teams to feel engaged, understand their purpose, and thrive throughout the change.