What is CivicExcellence? (click to watch video)
Overview of how CivicExcellence came to be, and how it works!
Hi, my name is Tracey Lorenson.
I’m one of the principals of CivicExcellence. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about what CivicExcellence is and how it came about. I’ve been consulting with local governments for more than 25 years, first as a labour and employment lawyer, and for the last eight or nine years here as a consultant.
And in discussion with some other consultants that work in the local government sector. We realized that a lot of the questions we were getting asked by clients were questions that their neighbours already knew the answer to. And we asked ourselves what if there was a better way to create a community of communities to connect local governments to each other with experts alongside them? In a way that enabled them to use their consulting resources more appropriately. For sort of front of the room presence or deep dives into organizations versus general advice.
So at CivicExcellence, what we’ve done is we’ve created this community of communities, and it’s got a number of elements. The first is the online forum. Now there’s other forums and Facebook Groups where local governments can connect with each other. The goal of CivicExcellence though is to create a community where local governments can go back to over and over again and connect with their peers. But what’s unique about it is in the forum we’ll have experts in the areas of management skills and development, human resources, corporate communications, economic development, asset management.
So you’ll have the ability not just to liaise with your peers but also have experts weighing in and pointing the forum to where communities are doing things well, examples they might use, templates they might provide. We also have those same experts participating in our monthly members Q&A calls.
At this Q & A call, what you can do is submit a question in advance or frankly come on live and have experts that normally you’d pay hundreds of dollars to answer your questions in real time.
We also have a series of blended learning courses that are either included in the all access membership or available a la carte. Now by blended learning what we mean is bridging the gap between live training which many local governments sectors do very well and webinars which are, I would argue, really becoming dated.
So why not webinars? Well, we’ve been delivering webinars with the local government management association in BC for eight years now and they’ve been very successful. Local governments have really enjoyed the opportunity to come on, learn about a topic in a couple of hours and connect with colleagues that are facing some of the same issues.
But what we’ve decided with CivicExcellence is, “What if there was a better way? What if there was a way to not just share information but to introduce the ability to apply that information and to stick the landing?” Because many of us have been to lectures or conferences where we’ve gotten good content but we haven’t necessarily had the time or ability to apply it back at the office.
So at CivicExcellence what we’ll have is a series of bite-sized videos that will deliver a topic and provide you with the opportunity through answering some questions or doing some worksheets to apply it back to your local government context. There will be interaction with the instructor and you can do it at your own pace from your own workstation. What this does is obviously save travel time, reduce the cost of going to live training’s, it also means that individuals can get the same training that they used to have to leave the workplace for a day or multiple days without ever taking time off work. By taking an hour here and there to complete the programming.
We also realized there was an advantage in having the same type of instruction provided to individuals at all levels through an organization. So at CivicExcellence our experts are experienced in liaising at council at the management level, as well as with frontline employees. And what we realized is if we could make this affordable enough for frontline employees to master communication conflict skills, customer service skills earlier in their employment. Not only does it meet the needs of our younger generations at work. But it ensures that we’re creating leaders inside every job at the management and supervisory level.
What we’ll provide is not just some of the same training and skills. But tips for managers to lead discussions with their teams on the topics that are under discussion. For emerging supervisors the opportunity to take supervisory skills training before they aspire to be promoted into those roles. This allows human resource professionals to use that as one of the vetting elements, “Have you taken any supervisory courses?” So that when individuals want to be promoted from within the bargaining unit into a supervisory or management role. They can demonstrate success in a learning process as they go through the interview stages.
Finally some of the very same language around customer service, conflict and communication will be communicated to elected officials through our elected essential series. This provides the opportunity for a common culture developed between elected officials and the organizations that are charged with carrying out their political will.
While we do encourage people to join with a membership, giving them access to an annual program. Where they can tap in monthly depending on the membership a series of four to six courses. They can either be self-paced or if you want to join us an organization. We could have the whole cohort going at the same time.
