Gender-based analysis plus

Institutional GBA Plus Capacity

Shared Services Canada (SSC), has been integrating Gender Based Analysis Plus (GBA Plus) into programs and services since 2016. In 2021-22, SSC launched a GBA Plus Centre of Expertise with 1.75 full-time equivalents working on GBA Plus related activities. 

SSC is currently undertaking several initiatives to advance GBA Plus capacity in the Department. This includes:

Other Initiatives:

Accessibility

During the 2021-22, SSC’s Accessibility, Accommodation and Adaptive Computer Technology (AAACT) Program continued to provide a wide range of adaptations, alternate approaches, tools, training, services, resources, and adaptive computer technologies for public service employees with disabilities or injuries. Demand for AAACT’s services increased significantly this year and is expected to rise again in 2022-23. 

The Lending Library Service pilot project led by SSC expanded in 2021-22 to be available to all public service employees with disabilities, illnesses or injuries (both determinate and indeterminate) who remain at work when experiencing the short-term or occasional effects of an illness, disability or injury. Launched in early 2020, the pilot was initially designed to meet the needs of short-term public service employees such as students and casual workers who required workplace accommodations due to an illness, disability or injury. The Lending Library aims to address barriers that delay access to specialized services and workplace adjustments for employees by providing quick access to short-term accommodations, adaptive technology, and services. This project is funded in partnership with the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat through the Centralized Enabling Workplace Fund. 

In 2021-22, SSC began preparing its first Accessibility Plan in order to meet the legislative requirements of the Accessible Canada Act. The plan will not only focus on SSC as an employer but also as the information and communications technology service provider to the Government of Canada. SSC’s Accessibility Plan will also focus on identifying accessibility barriers and outlining the actions and initiatives geared toward eliminating barriers and/or building accessibility from the ground up. In 2021-22, SSC engaged in activities to eliminate barriers and incorporate accessibility at the Government of Canada enterprise level:

Human Resources and Workplace

In addition, the Human Resources and Workplace Directorate has developed tools over the past several years to improve diversity and inclusion practices within the Department. Notably in 2021-22, initiatives impacting the executive cadre have been undertaken. Examples include but are not limited to:

EX leadership

 EX Performance and Talent Management

EX Succession Planning

 Human Resources and Workplace has also developed key performance indicators to assess the implementation and impact of the above mentioned initiative.

Recruitment

Several years ago, SSC developed recruitment targets for underrepresented groups in SSC’s workforce. There are currently 6 groups in total: visible minority, Women in IT, Indigenous People, Regional workforce, Persons with Disability, Students.

Recruitment targets
  Q1‌ Q2‌ Q3‌ Total‌ Targets‌
Visible Minorities‌ 47‌ 64‌ 74‌ 185‌ 150‌
Indigenous Persons‌ 12‌ 5‌ 10‌ 27‌ 23‌
Regions‌ 94‌ 91‌ 86‌ 271‌ 143‌
Women in IT‌ 38‌ 43‌ 28‌ 109‌ 104‌
Persons with a Disability‌ 6‌ 16‌ 18‌ 40‌ 102‌
Students‌ 268‌ 250‌ 174‌ 694‌ 804‌

Source: Human Resources Dashboard, Q3 2022

By the third quarter of 2021-22, SSC had reached 4 out of 6 recruitment categories.

SSC is working to increase the number of persons with disabilities within the Departmental workforce. Strategies being used include:

Section 2: Gender and Diversity Impacts, by Program

SSC, as a centralized Information Technology (IT) service provider, primarily delivers services to public servants and to its partners across the federal public service. 

Initial discussions have taken place with stakeholders within SSC regarding the development of data collection and analysis tools to report information on departmental programs, in order to measure future results. 

Although the discussions are ongoing, several programs were identified as having particular GBA Plus implications and as such have been outlined below.

Cyber Security

The secure remote access (SRA) initiative under the Security Program at SSC is one example of how SSC has been maturing its approach to GBA Plus and has collected and analyzed GBA Plus data to consider associated implications. The SRA initiative supports the IT requirements for GC Public Servants to work from home or other locations within Canada, and has been a pivotal part of how the GC has been able to maintain operations throughout the global pandemic.

As part of its ongoing delivery and evolution of this service, SSC collected and reviewed relevant data to enable considerations of the use of SRA services from a GBA Plus lens. Supporting the business lines, a (newly created) SSC GBA Plus Center of Expertise identified potential GBA Plus data in the form of the Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) and the associated Federal Public Service Workplace Mental Health Dashboard. The Dashboard is an evergreen tool and additional data sources will continue to be identified and integrated into the Dashboard over time. The Dashboard includes a Power BI tool which lists scores for 10 of the 13 psychosocial factors (for example, perceptions of organizational culture, perceptions of senior leaders and their articulation of their expectations) for 2019 and 2020 based on PSES results. 

Leveraging these data sources and tools, certain interesting trends and patterns were identified and considered. For example, in 2019, the PSES showed that 76.4% of public servants reported experiencing civility and respect, and the psychologically health score was 67.4%. Psychologically healthy workplace is a workplace that promotes employees’ psychological well-being and actively works to prevent harm to employee psychological health due to negligent, reckless or intentional acts. In comparison, in 2020, the overall score for civility and respect rose to 79.5% (SSC scored 82.7% in 2020) and psychological protection increased to 71.1% (SSC scored 76.6% in 2020). While these trends are extremely limited in scope (only two years without consistent baselining) the collected data has allowed SSC to begin to consider potential GBA Plus related factors both in terms of providing enabling IT services, and considering its own hybrid work strategies. In addition to looking to expand the data collections strategy for the SRA program, SSC will continue to monitor feedback through the PSES in order to ascertain the impacts, including those identified through a GBA Plus lens, of the SRA service. 

Enterprise Service Design and Delivery

Architecture program has a mandate to provide innovation and architecture oversight across SSC’s services, transformation plans and projects. As part of this function within SSC, the architecture team translates SSC’s strategic business requirements into a set of guiding principles and reference architectures that describes the current and target vision of the enterprise to meet partners’ and the Government of Canada’s strategic objectives – known as the Enterprise Architecture (EA) Principles.

Architecture principles are short statements that are used to encapsulate key intentions of the Enterprise, and guide thinking concerning the development of SSC’s architecture and the alignment of initiatives to our desired target. These principles are intended to be used in conjunction with strategic goals and outcomes, GC-wide policies and standards, and should be aligned with business outcomes and government priorities.

In 2021-22, SSC re-vamped its enterprise architecture principles to include GBA Plus considerations. In particular the “Understand Customer Needs” principle was amended to ensure that initiatives support accessibility, bilingualism and GBA Plus principles. The purpose of explicitly integrating GBA Plus considerations into SSC’s Enterprise Architecture Principles is to ensure that all new projects, proposals, services or initiatives at SSC apply a GBA Plus lens by default and design. SSC is currently tracking the percentage of reviewed projects at each project management gate from an architecture lens perspective, and this data collection will include the application of EA Principles – including a GBA Plus lens.

As EA Principles are a key way to support change consistently across the organization and are often used in enterprise architecture as an initial test to determine if an initiative is likely to be aligned with the enterprise direction, the explicit integration of GBA Plus considerations into those principles will have a broad affect on SSC activities. At SSC, EA Principles are used in project management, service design, solution architecture to ensure that a project outcome is aligned to GC priorities and are used to develop project proposals, business cases and provisioning contracts.

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