Calgary police taking action to address employee concerns raised in 2015 internal survey
CPS said before they were able to begin working on improving morale they had to dig into the underlying causes

Metronews.ca
Sept. 2, 2016
Lucie Edwardson

The Calgary Police Service (CPS) said they’re very cognizant of concerns expressed by their members in the 2015 Calgary Police Commission (CPC) internal employee survey, and they’ve taken steps towards improvement.

On Wednesday, Metro reported on a survey conducted into member satisfaction showing that roughly half (49 per cent) of respondents disagreed that morale at CPS was ‘good’, an increase of 12 per cent over a similar 2014 survey.

Supt. Nina Vaughan  talked to Metro Thursday about the survey results and said they’ve addressed the results by initially finding out what drove the declines in many of the force's satisfaction rankings.

“First thing we did was present all of these results to our senior leaders and talk about ways to improve engagement and help them understand what that means so they knew where the areas of concern were for our employees,” she said.

Vaughan said before they were able to begin working on improving morale they had to dig into the underlying causes. 

“Some of the things indicated as impacting morale were leadership and workload,” she said.

One of the ways Vaughan said CPS responded to these factors was beefing up frontline staffing.

Vaughan noted the addition of 48 officers to the frontline to help reduce workload as well as the redeployment 43 bodies back to the frontline from other positions.

The superintendent said they’ve also instituted a new policy around tenure and how much time an officer has to work on the frontlines before they can specialize.

Officers must now work on the frontlines for five years before transfer to a specialty area and there's a tenure policy that rotates people through specialty areas more frequently so that officers on the frontline can have greater access to opportunities.

"We’re bringing the expertise from those areas back to the street," Vaughan said.

“These initiatives are helping CPS stabilize issues brought up by frontline officers, keep bodies on the street and keep the work volume manageable."

In addition, Vaughan said they’re working at addressing leadership concerns as the survey showed that 50 per cent of respondents disagreed that actions and directions of senior leaders indicated that CPS cared about employees - an increase of 10 per cent over 2014 numbers.

“We have an entire leadership training program that has three different levels that employees can go through,” she said. “Leadership is evolving in terms of what people want in a leader and so we’re always trying to make sure that those leadership development opportunities exist and that they’re relevant and timely.”