Zoran Postic: Vaughan Innovators invites staff ideas while building trust

Back in 2018, the City of Vaughan received an award in recognition of its innovative approach to traditional procurement and service contracts. While some may have settled for that recognition, the award started Zoran Postic thinking. In fact, he calls it his “a-ha moment.”

Postic, Vaughan’s deputy city manager of public works, discussed the moment – and the resulting change in philosophy for the city – during a sit down with Municipal World CEO Susan Gardner ahead of the 2019 Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference in Quebec City.

Creating a Safe Environment for Presenting Ideas

Reflecting on the procurement and contract initiative, Postic notes, “This was sort of a top-down type of initiative; we really never engaged our staff, which is an important piece to make sure we hit on our service excellence initiatives. I started thinking, we’re talking about this contract, we’re out there posting about it, we’re all proud of it. But … our staff, they said, ‘You never asked us.’”

That moment of insight led to the creation of a Dragon’s Den-style event. In it, staff were asked to bring forward their ideas, “in a safe environment.”

The focus was to be around improving citizen experience or reduce municipal costs.

The original intent was to get three teams from three different parts of the city’s transportation services, parks and forestry operations department to buy in. They ended up getting 12 teams and almost 50 participants, with the program now being adopted across the organization.

Employee Engagement Builds through Trust

Over time, what is now called Vaughan Innovators has continued to evolve and grow. For Postic, the ideas themselves aren’t even the most significant revelation.

“When I see people put themselves out there, putting their ideas out there, to me that’s important. It shows they are growing; shows they trust us. It shows they are learning, are sharing their ideas,” he said. “That, to me, is the piece about building trust, which is really important if we are going to have the organization that is going to deliver on the things we need to do.”  MW

✯ Municipal World Insider and Executive Members: You might also be interested in the article: Promises and pitfalls of employee engagement. Note that you can now access the complete collection of past articles (and more) from your membership dashboard.

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