Heading up HR at one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities

“We’re actually the fastest growing municipality in the country. We added more than 100,000 people last year.”

So says Gregory Juliano, CHRO of the City of Calgary, in discussing how that rapid expansion is reshaping plans for its workforce, technology and long‑term people strategy — in a province where low taxes are preferred.

“The public is looking for very efficient, very low-cost, very low-tax services to be offered by the city — yet we're growing like absolute gangbusters.”

The municipality now counts about 18,000 full‑time equivalent employees and when part‑time and other categories are included, that rises to 20,000-plus people. Against that backdrop, Juliano describes Calgary as “a big ship to turn,” but one that is leaning hard into technology and governance to manage the scale of change.

“The CIO and I basically look at technological changes [as] the way for us, as an organization, to meet those competing things — how do we deal with this growth at the same time as effectively keeping taxes low?”

Building AI governance before scaling up

For Juliano, technology and process are not side issues in HR – they are central. The city started by putting guardrails in place.

“We established an enterprise AI advisory committee that is multi‑stakeholder. And they’ve set out the governance structure… before you start dabbling too deep. Because… there’s technology issues, security issues, privacy issues, all of those things.”

That committee also controls seed funding and project approval.

“They vet projects for the city to start experimenting with AI and things like that,” says Juliano. As a result, Calgary now has a number of interesting projects and experiments on how to bring new technologies into the workspace.

The organization is starting to get past that initial experimentation phase and scale up, he says: “How do we really increase the adoption level across the organization?”

That’s exciting for HR, says Juliano.

“It's all about the learning and development for our current staff. But it's also we're really looking at ‘What do we need for the future skill sets? How do we change our recruitment practices to bring in the right people to kind of lead us into the future?’

“So, it's such a good collaboration between HR and IT.”

From 'accidental HR person' to people leader

Juliano took on the CHRO role at the City of Calgary just over two years ago, but his route into the profession was not a traditional one.

“I would say I’m an accidental HR person,” he says, citing his background as a lawyer, spending about 10 years in private practice doing labour and employment work for corporate clients. He then moved in‑house as general counsel at the University of Manitoba for 11 years.

The shift came when the associate vice‑president of HR left the university.

“Someone came to me and said, ‘Hey, would you like to look after HR for a while?’ And then I said ‘Yes’ and I’ve been in it ever since… completely by accident,” says Juliano.

What kept him there was the impact. As general counsel, he says he would “sort of parachute in and have a little bit of influence on this thing and a little bit of influence on that thing” — in HR, Juliano found something different.

“I realized I could actually carry a big initiative that’s going to have important impact on people. I can carry it from beginning to end,” he says. “And there is a lot of satisfaction with that piece. And so I’ve always liked that part of it and stuck with it.”

Developing leadership for a complex municipality

One clear theme from this work has been the central role of leadership amid changes in technology. Calgary’s structure adds to the challenge.

“The organizational structure at this place is very matrix‑like,” says Juliano. “Even when we’re talking about something like transit or water utility or something like that, we don’t have that all in one place.

“And so leadership is working in new ways that they never have before,” he says, including more cross‑functional collaboration and matrix leadership.

Juliano also highlights the need to maintain engagement and belonging. The city has “extremely high engagement rates” and “extremely low turnover rates,” even in public sector and against other municipalities, he says: “We compare very, very favourably.”

To sustain that position, HR is emphasizing wellness-related and belonging-related initiatives, alongside the integration of performance and succession, learning and development, and career paths.

Modernizing HR while running efficient shop

Internally, HR is also under pressure to evolve its own systems at the City of Calgary, says Juliano.

“We are, as is typical in public sector, not exactly on the leading edge of process and technology internally,” says Juliano. At the same time, “that same pressure to be efficient in this kind of demanding, low-tax environment is really heavy on HR and other kind of support services.”

Process improvement projects are underway, and the city is working with IT on a major enterprise resource planning roadmap. The planned changes will affect the core system that handles HR, finance, supply and other basic functions, he says.

Calgary is building the design for that capability in‑house and anticipates migrating many major systems over the next few years.

All of this is happening with a relatively lean HR headcount. Juliano says the HR team is in “the low 300s” meaning the function operates on “the efficient side.”

Decade‑long people and culture strategy

Alongside the technology work, Calgary is developing a long‑term people and culture strategy that reaches well beyond annual plans. The planning horizon is more than 10 years, he says: “What does our workforce need to evolve, to be successful in that kind of timeframe, when the city becomes more than two million people? That’s the goal.”

The strategy will guide big changes in terms of recruitment and competencies expected from employees and leaders, says Juliano, who expects it to affect “the whole talent management system, end to end,” including development, performance, rewards and succession.

“We’re actually at the phase where translating those needs into the budget asks: ‘What are we going to fund over the next four years?’ is the big question coming up in the next few months for us,” says Juliano.