'We've really had to pivot as an organization'

With the huge rise of remote work through the pandemic, one of the challenges for the RCMP has been reversing the concept of “out of sight… what are you really getting done?” according to CHRO Nadine Huggins, who will be speaking at the upcoming HR Leaders Summit in November.

“An organization that never believed in remote work before, we've really had to support the leaders, managers and supervisors across the organization to understand that remote work is still work and it's still valid, and we're still productive.”

But there’s an interesting dynamic and tension when a majority of your workforce – 20,000 out of 30,000 total – is working on the front lines and they don’t have the luxury of being able to work from remotely, she says.

“So, we've really had to pivot as an organization to focus on ensuring that we provide the supports that the front line need in a timely way whilst respecting the broader public service mandate – because we are part of the public service… for hybrid or remote work.”

There’s also a tension in adjusting that flexibility as the pandemic subsides.

“That's an interesting challenge, because what happens with employees who have been working from their kitchen tables or their bedrooms or their home offices for the past couple of years is that it evolves from a response to a crisis to an entitlement – and it's not an entitlement to work remotely,” says Huggins.

“One of the messages that we deliver consistently is the baseline is not the pandemic and what we had to do during the pandemic; the baseline is what our organization was prior to the pandemic, and how we’ve evolved from there.”

Changing expectations

The nature of policing is evolving, with a requirement for different skill sets and capabilities to prepare for the next generation, she says.

“People want different things, and the pandemic has really accelerated the appetite for different things, so we’ve really had to look at our models.”

For example, mobility has always been an important element of the RCMP, with people relocating across the country for training and posting.

“There’s just not appetite for that,” says Huggins, as folks are less willing to move their families.

“It's a model that made sense when there was one person who worked outside of the home and one person who worked inside of the home. And that's just not the case now; everybody has careers and ambitions.”

And with the pandemic, people were even more reluctant to leave their families “so it really has forced us to look at things differently,” she says.

The panel “Restructuring HR to manage future business challenges” will look at how companies can move from traditional operational silos to new HR models and quickly deal with critical issues:

• Positioning HR Leaders as business advisors and agents for change
• How have the lessons learned during the past two years changed HR?
• A look at new strategies to increase agility, efficiency, and productivity
• Using HR technologies to improve workflows rather than processes.