Notes from the Field

“Our mission,vision and values are front and centre.  We celebrate the values. We talk about positive examples at every staff meeting.  We stay fixated on mandate.  We set critical indicators that enable us to measure mandate accomplishment.”

“In all of our sites we have our vision, mission and values publicly posted in a large format so that they remain at the forefront of our work.  At the same time, as we are making decisions at a variety of levels we continually come back to what our values, mission and vision would say in terms of helping us to work through a situation.”

“One very important value we try never to lose sight of at ATN is respect for ourselves and our clients.  We are proud to say that we value each and every learner as an individual and believe that there is a job out there for anyone who wants it.

We practice an “open door” policy for our clients, allowing them to return to us for months or years after initial intake, even when their formal involvement in our programs has ended. Over the past fifteen years this has resulted in a constantly increasing ATN “family” of clients who return when they need help, or just to share a success story.  This approach is sometimes more time intensive, but extremely rewarding for both staff and clients.”

“We have a staff person/team responsible for the website – this way all communication and updates can be done in a “just in time” manner rather than only changing the site quarterly or monthly.  Clients comment on how they use our site regularly and this is a huge marketing piece for us – most business comes by way of the website.”

“We provide cross training for staff interested. This ensures we have folks to move in to positions if vacated or programming changes they have the skills to be part of another program. We provide 3% of salary for staff development. We recognize successes at staff meetings. We have a “you rock” box that staff anonymously put accolades in and I read them at our staff meetings. We do a staff retreat annually (1 overnight) bring in trainers and generally have a good time.”

“We have found involvement in organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary, and sales and marketing groups, has really improved our overall business. All of the business communities know who we are and call on us for their hiring needs. Our job fairs have increased and all our frontline staff are recognized.  We also participate in fundraising golf tournaments, corporate events, etc.  We sponsor many of the
above as well.”

“Market analysis was critical to the creation of one of our fee-for-service businesses, our EVIDENCE program evaluation consulting service. We were about to invest several $000 in developing a business, so we needed to make sure it would be viable and we needed to make sure we knew where the most likely demand for the service would come from. The Market Analysis involved several tools including a \"5 forces\” analysis - to determine the main forces affecting the field we were going in to (the consulting industry) and an \"industry analysis\” - to determine the key business models that existed and which were most effective. We ended up with a service that became very successful very quickly and that avoids many of the pitfalls common to other organizations in the consulting business. We generated the content of the analysis through literature reviews and key informant interviews over about 18 months.”

“We did a survey on how people heard about us, and we found out that it was mostly through word of mouth.  Clearly, our staff was doing such a good job that it was spreading by word of mouth.  The survey was simple but its results were used for all staff to see the big impact they were having.”

“Working within Job Connect we are required to write a business plan every year – we complete this activity with staff and dedicate a whole day to this. It is important for us to review what we completed the previous year and look at the positives and the negatives of those
various initiatives.”

“We started with one location and one program and now have many locations.  We’ve seen lots of changes in how we do bookkeeping. At first, I just did the books, then set up the books and turned them into computerized books.  When we grew it was entirely different, and we now have four people just doing the books. I don’t know if what I did was innovative or if it’s standard, we just did what makes sense.”

Three years ago we initiated lunches for all youth service deliverers. The mandate being to share information, prevent duplication of service and identify gaps. We are still hosting these lunches once each quarter and have 30 to 40 participants. Not bad for a small community of 22,000 people.”

“The key to any successful partnership that Job Skills has formed in the past nine years… has been compatibility of mission and vision as well as the type of organization, i.e. not for profit.  Corporate ‘sponsor’ partnerships have been utilized on an ‘event’ basis, not for supplementing program funding.”

“Creativity and play go hand in hand… our best board meetings are those when there is a lot of laughter.  Creative ideas can seem silly at first, but this is often just the first step to something exciting.”

“We often start with concept papers and distribute draft ideas before we invest a lot of time into program development.  It provides a good option to explore interest without taxing resources.”

“Our strategic plan is on a placemat, which we have available at staff, senior management and board meetings, particularly as we are working through challenging situations.  It helps us to evaluate activities/decisions within the context of our plan.”

“Sharing our feeling of successfully achieving goals set the previous year is a great boost for Board and staff and volunteers.  We developed a blueprint 20 years ago for the direction of the Agency as our vision.  It was in the form of a schematic.  We always take a look at it as a benchmark of how far we have come and congratulate ourselves on our achievements.”

“Over the past years our Board has reviewed various governance styles.  What has worked best for us is a flexible Board willing to help out in whatever style is appropriate at the time.  In the beginning when we were smaller, it was useful to have the Board more involved in various activities that might be considered more operational.  However this was always at the invitation of the Executive Director and not at the direction of the Board.  With more maturity as an organization our Board has evolved into a more governance board however they are very active in areas appropriate to their position.”

“We don’t necessarily want doctors and lawyers on our Board – we want visionaries.”