Transcript
Transcript: Cup of Joe with Joseph Silva: Developing a Connection Within Your Organization
[0:00 A man standing in front of the camera]
Joseph Silva: Hello, my name is Joseph Silva.
[0:02 Title "Cup of Joe with Joseph Silva: How to develop a connection with everyone in your organization" appears next to an animated coffee mug.]
I would like to talk about a few strategies I adopted along the way to increase my connection with all my staff.
[0:12 Text appears on screen "Joseph Silva, Former Director General, Human Resources, Privy Council Office".]
[0:24-2:54 a white banner appears and stays at the bottom of the screen, with the text "Canada School of Public Service".]
As an executive with a busy schedule and big teams it can be difficult to know everyone in your organization. They know you, but you don't want to be in a situation where you don't know them.
To avoid this, over the years I've adopted a few strategies.
I focused on having regular interactions with employees as much as possible. I would do this by calling a particular employee rather than sending an email, stop by someone's desk for a quick chat or stop by groups of employees when they were having lunch or taking their coffee breaks. Of course this was done when in the office. I would also try to set up meetings with new employees as they started individually or, in the case of larger organizations, in small groups to establish a connection with everyone when they joined my organization.
I kept a spreadsheet on my desktop that had all staff sorted by Director, Manager, and team with their name, level, main duties, and a comment area.
I would populate the comment area with observations I would learn as I would either personally get to know the employee or from information I would get from the managers. This is where I would record what organization they came from, who was new, on leave, their interests, who was looking for an assignment, ready for a move, or who wanted a promotion.
As an executive, I developed a practise to try to meet with every employee individually or in small groups at least once a year as a means to foster the one-on-one relationship with each employee.
During my years as a Director and a DG, I have also tried to make a point to stop for lunch and encourage those working in the office to join me in the eating area, to take a pause and have a friendly informal chat so as to get to know folks better and also to provide an example of balance – this was not possible every day but I tried to do it as much as I could to encourage employees to stop for that mid-day break! this was something I did when we all worked from the office as well as when we introduced the hybrid workplace.
Taking the time to get to know each employee is time well spent as it encourages them to be open with you in terms of what they are thinking vs never meeting with them and then expecting employees to take advantage of your open-door policy.
I've always tried to find something in common – sports, family, travel, music, even motorcycles. Employees not only appreciate that you may have similar things you do outside of work but that you have other interests besides work which in their eyes makes us more "human".
Many employees have told me they appreciated that senior leaders would know their name, talk to them on a regular basis, and show interest in what they do. This goes a long way to promote employee engagement and retention.
[2:48 Title "Cup of Joe with Joseph Silva: How to develop a connection with everyone in your organization" appears next to an animated coffee mug.]
[2:56-3:06 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
