Barbara Walker, CHRP
HR manager
City of Whitehorse

Barbara Walker is the manager of human resources for the City of Whitehorse, Yukon. She holds an MA, Leadership from Royal Roads University and has held her CHRP since 2010. She is passionate about strategic leadership and is focused on bring organizational values alive in the workplace.

Over my working career work place diversity has evolved from dialogue about valuing visible minorities in the workplace towards our current struggle with valuing the observable and unobservable differences among employees. It remains easy to hold the ethnocentric view that everyone around us has the same word view, but in so doing we miss out on huge opportunities. Learning about the strength of our differences and building on our shared values creates opportunities for improving the customer experience, internally and externally. At the city, one of our diversity challenges is met by valuing the differences and strengths in generational abilities, needs and ambitions.

A current example of diverse attitudes is the degree of comfort across generations with the rise of social media in our employee and external customer groups. The City is adapting our business processes to enable electronic transactions and electronic inclusion into public and organizational policy decisions to bridge the divide between generational cultures.
When we provide opportunities for feedback by all generations, we are better able to design tools, processes and products that will meet the needs of all of our citizens.

Lynda Gerty
director of engagement
Vantage Point

Lynda Gerty is the director of engagement at Vantage Point and co-author of The Abundant Not-for-Profit: how talent (not money) will transform your organization. With over 15 years of leadership experience, Lynda thrives on harnessing the power of talented people to move causes and organizations forward. She has enjoyed previous adventures in grassroots community organizing, the travel industry and electoral politics—and is currently engaged as a board member with ArtStarts and HFBC Housing Foundation.

At Vantage Point, we intentionally attract, engage and integrate people with a broad diversity of talent and expertise into our workforce. As a not-for-profit organization, our unique competitive advantage is our ability to pay talented people with meaning. Last year, our eight salaried employees worked alongside almost 200 knowledge philanthropists (in 235 different customized roles) as one integrated talent team. Together these people contributed passion, talent and expertise to further our mission.

This diversity of experience, skills and perspectives exponentially increases our impact in the community. Each time we connect with a new knowledge philanthropist, our team is invigorated by their unique perspective, insightful questions and innovative ideas – and our increased capacity to make new ideas happen. Our employees thrive on the daily opportunity to work with and learn from professionals and experts in a range of fields. And the greatest benefit of engaging with the diverse brilliance of our community is that it replaces not-for-profit scarcity with possibility.

Andrew Woods
HR consultant
Lexxon

Andrew Woods, MBA is a professional speaker, university lecturer, trainer and author of BOOM! engaging and inspiring employees across cultures. He has provided leadership, management development, cross-cultural communication, innovation and creativity workshops for over 400 companies in 16 countries. He is co-chair of the BC HRMA Fraser Valley roundtable on career advancement and volunteers as a business mentor for S.U.C.C.E.S.S. and Canadian Youth Business Foundation.

Accepting people for ‘who-they-are’ and embracing cultural and individual differences is crucial in today’s globalized economy. At Lexxon we embrace cultural diversity across the organization. Our training team has a wealth of international and local training experience which provides depth, cultural sensitivity and the ability to train individuals using multi-modal techniques to ensure a uniform message across cultures and training with lasting quantifiable results.

Switched on businesses rely on their people to work together as a functioning team, but subtle and deeply ingrained beliefs and values often interfere. Most of us aren’t aware that we have prejudices that get in the way of open relationships. Transforming and re-framing a ‘them’ to an ‘us’ mentality breaks down invisible barriers within an organization. The organization evolves into a culture of Increased trust and improved morale—which helps ensure better teamwork, higher productivity and increased profits. We see this both in our organization and those of our clients.

Gena Amulung, CHRP
HR and employee benefits
Capri Insurance Ltd.

Gena Amulung, BMgt, CHRP is human resources and employee benefits at Capri Insurance Ltd. based in Kelowna. With 10 year’s experience in a variety of industries in both Alberta and British Columbia, her background in customer service and employee benefit programs has allowed her to expand her HR experiences into the insurance industry.  The current HR role is relatively new to Capri and she is excited by the opportunity to contribute to a vibrant workplace.

Capri is one of the largest Insurance brokerages in the interior of British Columbia consequently we service a diverse clientele. It’s important to us to hire a workforce which reflects the community we serve in terms of gender, ethnicity and age. As an added benefit, clients are serviced by friends and neighbors who understand their specific needs.

Employees describe working at Capri as being part of an extended family.  New employees receive a company orientation where they learn about the Capri’s culture from our CEO.  We enjoy successfully built programs that encourage and reward employees who contribute back to the workplace by bringing forward new processes or ideas to create a better workplace.

Participation in wellness campaigns and community charities allow employees to share interests and create bonds that extend beyond the workplace.  Activities are employee lead. They choose the method and means to support diversity and strengthen our Capri family.

Brenda Wagner
director of HR
Axis Family Resources

Brenda Wagner obtained a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology in 1989 and Post Baccalaureate in Human Resources Management in 2005. She has worked supporting adults with autism and developmental disabilities, in a management role with Axis Family Resources, as an HR coordinator at Finning, and returned to Axis as director of HR in 2007. Axis Family Resources is a multi-service social services agency that has served children, youth, adults and families since 1992.

The greatest benefit of diversity is the opportunity to learn about different approaches to situations, building stronger relationships, better understanding of people and a more accepting staff group.

Axis Family Resources is a social services Agency that supports the diverse people and staff we serve in many ways.   We hire staff of all ages, gender, sexual orientation, staff who have struggled through challenges that many of our youth/families are going through, staff with different cultural, experiences and educational backgrounds.

We celebrate people’s differences and work within their skills and abilities to achieve their goals.  Our staff review cultural awareness on an annual basis and encourage those who want to be involved in and maintain their culture or differences in their lives.  We have an annual Team Day and this years’ theme coincidentally is Diversity.  Each Region creates fun activities for staff to participate in while they learn how diversity in the workplace makes for a stronger workplace.

(PeopleTalk Fall 2013)