Michelle Wetherill is the Manager of Human Resources at the City of Maple Ridge.  She is responsible for the overall people strategy focusing on attracting, retaining, and inspiring top talent. With over 25 years of experience in Human Resources, Michelle has worked in both the public and private sectors.  Michelle’s strength lies in building high performing teams and delivering strategic solutions that drive business results in support of organizational growth. Michelle is a seasoned HR Manager who began her career in the financial sector, and has worked in the areas of benefits and compensation, labour relations and recruitment. With a diverse background and expertise, she has been able to lead implementations of various programs, policies and to support ongoing change within the organization. Some examples of her vast experience would include range from implementing applications such as PeopleSoft and eRecruit to various organizational policies and programs. Michelle is devoted to her family and international travel to experience the cultures of our planet. This perspective is a valuable tool in her human resources work.

October 5th

10:45am - 11:45am (Breakout Session 8)

Performance for the New Age: Re-Igniting Conversations ( with Anita Bhandari )

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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”.