The Service Excellence Program (SEP) employs a community-focused approach to identify and address pain points and administrative barriers. The program works with representatives from across Faculties, divisions and departments to ensure solutions are designed with, not for the community and aligned with the goal of creating a culture of service excellence at York.

SEP’s previous and current initiatives share a common goal and purpose to:

Improve service quality and consistency

Ensure service providers are equipped with the right knowledge and expertise to deliver services that are easy to access, simple to understand and consistent across divisions.

Embed a culture of service excellence

Embed a culture of service excellence in which staff are accountable for and committed to ensuring every service delivery experience meets or exceeds expectations

Simpler, faster, more efficient services

Improve the York experience with process changes that help the community achieve their objectives in a simpler, faster and more efficient manner.

The program is currently comprised of two teams:

Process and Service Improvement Team
Project and Change Management Team

These two teams work in parallel – ensuring alignment across initiatives and delivering on York’s vision of service excellence.

SEP in action

Read about how the Service Excellence Program (SEP) and Human Resources (HR) teams worked together to improve the hiring process.

12-Steps to an improved hiring process

In 2021, SEP and HR completed a series of improvements to save faculty and staff time and effort when hiring. The changes make it easier for hiring managers to post and fill vacant roles sooner. Here is the process in 12 steps:

First, the SEP team identified sponsors to support the improvements taking place in HR – Mary Catherine Masciangelo and Jane Goodyer. In change projects, a sponsor is a leader who supports the change and is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the change realizes its intended benefits. Once sponsors were identified, SEP and HR joined together to create one integrated team for the duration of the project.

With strong sponsorship, it was time for consultations. The integrated team created a list of key stakeholders, including both local and central HR leaders to identify pain points and potential opportunities. With the input of key stakeholders, opportunities were prioritized based on complexity and estimated impact for the community.

Once the opportunities for improvement were selected, the team created a recruitment working group that consisted of local and central stakeholders to co-create key solutions. Working as a team, SEP, HR and the working group created the streamlined Job Summary and Evaluation Form (JSEF) and 20 pre-rated job summary templates.

Aligned with York’s vision for Service Excellence and ensuring solutions were designed with, not for, the team moved on to testing their solutions with the community. Feedback was used to iterate and improve the design.

To support the resources being developed with the working group, the team also collaborated with central HR (Compensation and TAD) to develop the CPM job creation guide. This guide was designed to answer common hiring questions and reduce confusion in the process for hiring managers.

Following community testing, SEP launched the streamlined JSEF and CPM job creation guide.

With two of three improvements completed, the team turned their attention back to the pre-rated job summary templates. They reviewed HR data to determine the initial list of CPM job summaries. The final selection included 20 summaries that covered the most common jobs across all units, such as Executive Assistant, Human Resources Business Partner (HRBP) or Communications Manager.

Once the roles were selected, SEP and HR created a job standardization working group to develop pre-rated CPM job summary templates. This group was comprised of local and central stakeholders to ensure representation at different levels.

To test the pre-rated CPM job summary templates with the community, the program introduced a feedback mechanism on its website. Feedback was collected on a rolling basis and incorporated accordingly.

With all 20 CPM job summary templates finalized, the team created the CPM job repository Sharepoint site and an accompanying demo video to show managers how to best leverage the repository. Advance notice was sent to managers to ensure they would feel prepared at the time of launch.

In November 2021, SEP and HR jointly launched the CPM job repository with 20 pre-rated job summary templates. The new repository reduces up to five to seven weeks of time in the job creation and evaluation phase, making the hiring process simpler and faster.

As part of continuous improvements, HR develops new roles and collects feedback on an ongoing basis. New summaries are added as they become finalized.