The Big Shift

The Big Shift

By Lori Bolton, OMHRA President

This year’s OMHRA Spring Workshop is titled The Big Shift: From Personnel Administration to People and Culture Strategy. The conference title perfectly captures the changing role of municipal HR professionals, and the important role we play within each of our organizations.

Today’s Municipal HR leaders must ensure they fulfil their core responsibilities related to compensation and benefits, labour relations, and to meeting all our legal obligations, but increasingly, we are playing the role of strategic advisor and thought leader when it comes to important people and culture issues within our organizations and within the sector.

Over the course of my career, I have seen the role of municipal HR professionals grow and evolve. Today, we are municipal HR professionals, change leaders and change champions and play a crucial role in helping guide people managers, leaders, and staff through the process of change which, let’s face it, is a constant.

Our members play an invaluable role in helping to attract and retain municipal staff and to building their municipal brands, to exploring and adapting to new ways of working, to ensuring our workplaces are inclusive, diverse, and equitable, to ensuring psychological health and safety, and to helping to develop workplace cultures that give staff a sense of purpose and fulfillment. These are challenging and exciting times for us to make our mark and contribute to our organizations.

This year is OMHRA’s 60^th anniversary and therefore marks a major milestone for OMHRA. While it’s important to celebrate and reflect on our past, I am so excited about where our journey is taking us, and what the future holds for our profession! With these thoughts in mind, I look forward to seeing you at our Spring Workshop in Niagara Falls.

If you have not already signed up for our Spring Workshop, I strongly encourage you to do so. The agenda includes 19 engaging speakers, and a Keynote address by Dr. David Weiss, who specializes in innovation consulting, leadership coaching, and HR solutions for the public-sector, social enterprise, and private sector organizations. He will kick-start our conversation on how HR may navigate through these continuing, unprecedented times.

Our Spring Workshop is always a great place to hear new concepts, to share fresh ideas and to network with those we may not have seen for a while, as well as to make new acquaintances. There’s still time to sign-up for our Spring Workshop which runs from April 18-20^th. I hope to see you there!

For sixty years, OMHRA has been the premier professional association representing human resources, labour relations, and senior management professionals within the local public sector in Ontario.

Our members are employed in municipalities, local boards, agencies and commissions; they provide timely human resources advice and assistance to their respective Councils, Boards, Management Teams and Commissions.