Anita Bhandari
Anita Bhandari is the Manager of Learning and Development at the City of Maple Ridge, where she brings a progressive experience in developing and managing a wide range of learning and development strategies. She brings a background from the private sector, having founded and run a company called ‘Safety etc.’ where she honed her skills working in communities throughout BC, First Nations and serving as a consultant for a number of educational institutions and associations. She later moved to the public sector to pursue opportunities in the Human Resources field. She has worked with her team on projects ranging from employee engagement to performance development, which supports the growth of the City’s internal talent pipeline. Anita is passionate about creating a culture of employee success where employees feel recognized and valued for the contributions they make.
Anita has her BA in Adult Education from the University of Fraser Valley, Graduate Certificate in Strategic Human Resources Management at the University of Royal Roads, and post-secondary diplomas/certificates in the field of instructional training, safety and disability. All that education is great, but her ‘superpower’ is the energy, enthusiasm and passion that she brings to her work every day. As a mother of two, she lives what she teaches – lifelong learning, volunteerism, commitment and passion.
October 5th
10:45am - 11:45am (Breakout Session 8)
Performance for the New Age: Re-Igniting Conversations (with Michelle Weatherill)
​
Are your managers avoiding emails reminding them to file the annual performance reports for their staff? Do you feel your HR department is the “administrator”, forever having to “sell” the value of the program and monitor return rates? After numerous renditions of our own Performance Plan Program resulting in continuing lackluster feedback and inconsistent return rates we decided to embark on a journey with a goal to rethink the whole process. Armed with recent performance management trends, emerging neuroscience findings, collaboration technology, and a shoestring budget, our new program represents a seismic move to our new employee-centric model called My Plan. Utilizing SharePoint, an existing City application, our new program named My Plan puts the employee in the driver seat while shifting focus from “assessment” to “development”. We will also describe how our organization moved to incorporate a number of stand-alone human resources transactional processes such as probation, trial period and increments. What has emerged is an integrated holistic model, encompassing all key chapters and events in an employee’s career. By creating the structure, the training and space, this new program emphasizes key job responsibilities and the value of ongoing quality conversations. We will walk you through how we brought our City along on creating My Plan. Join us to listen to our story; what we learnt along the way and how we developed a new model around “Performance for the New Age and Re-Igniting Conversations”.