'Passion' of UW's new HR executive

Janet Passmore is at Waterloo “to make a difference”, she says, and although she doesn’t have details to offer yet, she knows the direction and talks passionately about it.

“People care an awful lot about this place,” she said in a conversation over coffee a few days ago, adding that she now has a new way of putting her own enthusiasm for Waterloo into practice.

Passmore (left) started work July 1 as associate provost (human resources), a slightly restructured position in UW’s senior administration. She’s taking over from long-time HR executive Catharine Scott, who is retiring.

She’s a UW graduate (from applied health sciences) and has had a career in insurance and human resources. As then provost Amit Chakma summed it up in a memo in June announcing her appointment, Passmore has had “25 years experience in building traditional operations and innovating and implementing new concepts at Clarica and at Cowan Insurance Group where she served in executive roles, including as President and CEO at Cowan.”

As she moved through that career, she served for a while on the Waterloo Advisory Council, which represents employers of UW co-op students and graduates, working with administrators and the staff of the co-op and career services department. In 2004 she was asked to join the university’s board of governors, a role from which she had to resign this summer in order to take the associate provost’s job. As a board member she served on the Audit, Executive, Governance and Pension & Benefits Committees, serving as chair of P&B since early this year.

“Now I’m in a different role,” Passmore said this month — meaning that she’s now an employee of the university, not primarily an alumnus taking a share in UW’s governance. And that brings up an obvious question: why make the move?

“Waterloo has always had a very special place in my heart,” she said. “It was one of those serendipitous things,” an idea that apparently came up in conversation with Chakma and UW president David Johnston. The associate provost’s job was advertised last spring, and announcing the choice of Passmore was one of the last things Chakma did before leaving his UW role on June 30.

When she talked with the president and provost about what she might be able to do in Needles Hall, she says, “a major part of the conversation was about the vision of the university . . . the Sixth Decade Plan.” That’s the complex and ambitious ten-year plan, approved in 2006, that summons Waterloo to “the excellence required to make it a premier global competitor”.

The university will get there, if it does, with effort from staff and faculty all across campus, as well as alumni and other partners. “It’s not just an intellectual understanding,” says Passmore, “it’s the emotional as well — it’s the will. . . . How we enable our people is going to be how we enhance the results of the organization. They thought I could contribute to that!”

For example? The university has to have the right “people policies” to encourage movement towards its goals, she says. The routine work of a human resources department isn’t so routine when it has to include “an anticipational element” that prepares for, say, hiring employees who will live and work outside Canada.

In short, Passmore asks, “What does an HR function need to look like to enable the University of Waterloo to be the best that we could possibly be?”

Her administrative responsibility is for the HR department, housed in the General Services Complex, and the office of organizational and human development, housed in Hagey Hall of the Humanities. But as a member of UW’s executive council, she also has a university-wide leadership role. (Her biggest assets? “My passion and commitment for the people on campus. If I don’t have that, I’m in the wrong job!”)

Passmore doesn’t know some of the specifics of what she’ll be doing because, oddly, she hasn’t yet met her boss — and that’s because he hasn’t started work at UW himself yet. Feridun Hamdullahpur will become the university’s provost on September 1, and once he arrives, Passmore says she’ll “begin to map out” aspects of the work in consultation with him.

Meanwhile, she’s getting to know people across campus (“phoning people up, to get a sense of the fabric of this place”) and “spending a fair amount of time” with the staff in the HR department, where she reports that “everyone has certainly rallied around.”

There’s a big hole in that department, she notes, since the mid-July retirement of David Dietrich, a 38-year staff member who had been serving as director of pension and benefits, one of the two directors’ posts within HR. Passmore said she isn’t going to recruit for that job immediately, and will spend some time on pension and benefit issues herself, something she’s equipped to do because of her service on the board of governors P&B committee. A “pause”, she said, will give her time to assess just how Dietrich’s shoes need to be filled.

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The pattern on the face of Engineering 5, the new building on land that was formerly parking lot B on the east side of campus, isn't metal and isn't really three-dimensional. "The pattern is made with what's called fritted glass," says Daniel Parent, director of design and construction services. Dots are etched onto the glass panels, "to give the impression of shapes jutting out while maintaining a flat plane." Credit for the design, he says, goes to Andrew Frontini, who's heading the E5 project for architectural firm Shore Tilbe Irwin & Partners. Work on the building continues, and sections of the overhead bridge that will link E5 to Engineering 3 will be hoisted into place Monday. A stretch of the ring road will be closed for the day.

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Parking, shipping, teaching, funding

I was on the north campus briefly yesterday and spotted earth-moving machinery at work behind the Columbia Icefield, on the west side of Hagey Boulevard. An inquiry or so later, I had the explanation: a crew is putting in a gravel parking area for use by work crews involved in the multiple main-campus construction projects that are now under way or soon will be. Some construction workers have been using parking lot B, but space there is now at a premium. On the same trip north of Columbia Street, I was in the Optometry building and noticed that the Eyeopener Café, on the main floor of the bright and glassy new wing, is open for business this week, serving optometry clinic visitors as well as staff and faculty members in the optometry school. So add the Eyeopener to the recent list of food services outlets that haven't closed for the rest of August.

Here’s a memo that went out yesterday from Joel Norris, assistant manager of UW’s central stores: “Over the past many years, when products, documents and other items needed to be shipped off campus, a Shipping Order form was filled out and used to assist with the completion of the shipping process. In March 2009, Faculty and Staff departmental Administrative Assistants and Financial Advisors were informed that the university was replacing the current paper Shipping Order form, with a web based shipping system called UW/Go-Logix. Since that time, the roll out has been underway and most of the departments have switched to and are using the new system. Departments that have not registered and switched to the new system will need to do so before September 1, as the old carbon paper Shipping Order forms will no longer be accepted. The new UW/Go-Logix web based shipping system will be the university’s accepted processing system. Central Stores has provided information on our website. Please note that this project has been in the rollout phase for five months and full implementation must be completed by September 1.”

Two UW staff members will receive project funding this year from the Educational Developers’ Caucus, the Canada-wide organization has just announced. In reading the project titles, it helps to know that SoTL is “scholarship of teaching and learning” — that’s because one of the grants is coming to a team headed by UW’s Svitlana Taraban-Gordon for work on “Mapping Canadian SoTL Initiatives with a Focus on Graduate Students”. The other project, headed by Nicola Simmons, is “Mapping the Canadian ED Landscape: Demographics and Practices of Post-Secondary Educational Development Centres (Phase II)”. Taraban-Gordon and Simmons are both staff in UW’s Centre for Teaching Excellence.

The spring term’s last issue of the Iron Warrior included a report from Jay Shah, director of the Waterloo Engineering Endowment Foundation, about this term’s WEEF grants to support the quality of education for engineering students. “Funding council had some very tough decisions to make,” he writes, “as a total of $252,666 was requested and only $85,000 was available to allocate.” Among the eventual allocations: $8,695 for lab computers in the school of architecture; $13,100 for upgrades to a computer-aided teaching room in chemical engineering (a project whose backers had asked for $52,000); $2,850 for the Clean Snowmobile Team; and $2,000 for the Micro Aerial Vehicle Team.

CAR

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