organizations

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

This week, Barry Biffle, the CEO of Frontier Airlines in the US, gave a speech at a private event in which he said “we got lazy in COVID” and called post-COVID working from home “silliness”. Biffle is certainly not the only CEO to speak out against employees working from home, but his characterizing workers as “lazy” drew a considerable amount of criticism.

It’s an interesting time in a lot of workplaces. Full-time working from home was an emergency response to an emergency situation (although we should remember that between 60% and 70% of jobs cannot be done remotely), and as such, the pandemic experience of fully remote work shouldn’t be considered an example of how remote work can be optimally structured and operated. However, even in that emergency situation, some at-home workers discovered that they liked features of remote work such as (more…)

Not Recommended

Organizations that are run by elected boards of directors, or boards of elected executives, often struggle with either getting members to run for election, or getting the right members to run for election. Depending on the type of organization, directors or executives are expected to be responsible for many different functions – and for some organizations, like co-operatives, the directors also have important legal and financial obligations.

One strategy to address this issue is for the board to recommend candidates for election. The nomination process is usually still open to any member who wants to run, but the board, or a subcommittee of the board, identifies the skills most needed on the board, and recommends the candidates it feels has those skills.  This sounds like a good way to ensure a functional and effective board, and it’s often suggested as a strategy by governance experts, but in reality it can be highly problematic.

When Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) was sold to a corporate owner in 2020, without the board consulting the membership, one of the criticisms of the sale focused around the board’s practice of recommending candidates for election. It was alleged that this practice resulted in the board being composed of “targeted professionals” that led the co-op away from its core mission and purpose and resulted in a more corporate mindset that limited the board’s approaches to the co-op’s financial challenges.

If you look at the publicly posted minutes and election results of organizations that use the practice of recommending board candidates, you’ll immediately notice two things:

  • Recommended candidates are almost guaranteed to be elected, and
  • Voter turnout for board elections is generally very low

For example, Vancity Credit Union, which has more than 500,000 members, has had turnout rates of between three percent and seven percent in its last five board elections. And in all of those elections, all of the recommended candidates have been elected, with the exception of one year when there were more recommended candidates than vacant positions.

From an organizational theory perspective, the process of the board recommending board candidates can lead to groupthink. The board identifies the skills it needs, but that identification is based on its own inherently biased perceptions of “fit”, which can result in the recommended candidates being similar to those already on the board. This in turn  can lead not only to a limited range of approaches to problems or issues, but also to implicit pressure on board members to conform to the dominant mindset, even if they disagree.

What can boards do to avoid these problems?  Here are three simple suggestions:

  • Don’t recommend candidates. If the board has identified skills or qualities that it feels it needs, that information can be presented to the voters, and candidates can be encouraged to present their own information to demonstrate that they have those skills or qualities. Voters, rather than the board, can decide whether a candidate is a good “fit” for the current composition of the board.

 

  • Don’t pre-screen candidates, beyond ensuring that they meet the basic qualifications needed for board membership. (For example, BC’s Societies Act, which governs not-for-profit organizations, specifies that directors must not be employees or contractors of the organization, must be at least 18 years old, and must not be an undischarged bankrupt.) Discouraging candidates who don’t “fit” may mean discouraging valuable counter-perspectives or different points of view.

 

  • If the board establishes a subcommittee to participate in the nominations process – for example, by identifying or encouraging potential candidates – the majority of the subcommittee’s members should not be board members. If the board has enough members on the committee to control its decision making, then the subcommittee is neither independent nor impartial.

On a larger scale, an organization that has a consistently low turnout rate for elections can also benefit from looking at whether that too is a problem. Research on union members’ participations in elections has suggested that quality may be more important than quantity; in other words, that it’s better for the organization to have a smaller turnout of informed voters than a larger turnout of less-prepared voters.

However, if an organization recommends board candidates, and those candidates almost always get elected, over time voters may feel that their vote has no impact, and be less inclined to make the effort to vote. And that may lead to larger issues of lack of member involvement and participation, which can have long-term negative effects on the organization – no matter what qualities or skills are represented on its board.

Sorry

Happy New Year!

It seems a little odd to start a new year of blogging (my 11th year) with an apology. I had planned to start posting again in mid-January and life got in the way, and I’m sorry for the unexplained delay. However, I’m beginning on a positive note by recommending an excellent book that I’ve just finished reading – and it just happens to be about apologies.

Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy have been running the site SorryWatch for more than a decade – I first discovered their work through the very entertaining SorryWatch Twitter account. Over the years, they have used SorryWatch to (more…)

Vocational Awe

Earlier this week, US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Tweeted a photo of himself visiting an elementary school classroom, with the caption “Teaching isn’t a job you hold. It’s an extension of your life’s purpose”.  Numerous responses to the Tweet pointed out that teaching is indeed a job, and that characterizing it as “your life’s purpose” is questionable.

One of the more liked responses to the Tweet said: “No. It’s a job. When we view it as some sort of holier than thou calling, it makes it easier for those in power to justify paying us crap salaries because “we signed up for it” or expecting martyrdom because “That’s the life of a teacher” or “it’s for the kids””.

Some of the other responders to Cardona’s Tweet mentioned a concept called “vocational awe”. This is a term that was new to me. I looked it up, and I was extremely impressed. “Vocational awe” is relevant to many occupations, and I honestly can’t believe that I never encountered it in several decades of teaching and research about work and workplaces. That says a lot about the limited and biased ways in which work and organizations are understood.

The term “vocational awe” originated in an essay by librarian Fobazi Ettarh. She defines it as:

the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique….I would like to dismantle the idea that librarianship is a sacred calling; thus requiring absolute obedience to a prescribed set of rules and behaviors, regardless of any negative effect on librarians’ own lives.

Ettarh characterizes the negative effects of vocational awe on the worker this way: (more…)

Unionizing Starbucks

Just a few years ago, if someone had said that more than 200 Starbucks outlets in North America would be unionized, the response would have been something like this.  Yet here we are, just after Labour Day, and….more than 200 Starbucks outlets are unionized, including several in Canada. These unionizations are remarkable not just because they’re happening, but also because the successful unionization campaigns look nothing like what unionizing efforts are supposed to look like.

Starbucks is a huge and very wealthy international corporation, so it has lots of resources to oppose unionization in its “stores”. With many of its locations in the US, it benefits from US labour laws that are generally less union-friendly than in Canada – for example, captive audience meetings are banned in Canada but permitted in the US – so US employers tend to be more successful at resisting unionization. And because of how Canadian and US labour laws are structured, unionizing a company like Starbucks, with multiple locations, generally means the union has to run an organizing campaign at each individual location, rather than being able to unionize all of them at once. (In 2021 Starbucks had over 1300 locations in Canada and nearly 9000 locations in the US, in addition to licensed outlets operated in partnership with other retailers.)

Most traditional union organizers would look at this situation and say that it would be just too difficult and too expensive to organize unions at Starbucks, and that any attempt to do so would probably fail. To have any chance at success, a union would have to be very experienced, and have skilled organizers and major resources, to combat the extensive anti-unionization campaign and anti-union tactics that Starbucks would undoubtedly roll out. Also, because the food service sector tends to have high rates of employee turnover, most large unions have avoided organizing workplaces in that sector, because of the very real possibility that workers supporting the union might leave or be fired before the union is formally recognized.

So it’s incredible not only that there are now so many unionized Starbucks locations, but that (more…)

Just Say No

In every workplace there are tasks that aren’t enjoyable to do, or that aren’t part of formal job descriptions but are important for building positive relationships and community. However, research has shown that these kinds of tasks – which some researchers have labeled “office housework” –  tend to be done more often by women and by members of demographic minorities. It’s also been suggested that doing these tasks can have a negative impact on the careers of those who regularly take them on.

The new book The No Club: Putting A Stop To Women’s Dead-End Work, by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart,  is a very thoughtful analysis of this phenomenon. Coincidentally, I came across the book when I was thinking about how “office housework” functions in academic workplaces. I recently left an academic job, but I still regularly get requests to (more…)

The Weight of a Name

When an organization is hiring someone to fill a job, it’s very difficult to avoid bias in the hiring process – because, at some point, the hiring decision is subjective. The applicants for the job may have very similar qualifications and experience, which then usually leads to assessments such as how well each applicant would “fit” within the organization. “Fit” is a subjective assessment, and when subjective assessments become an exercise in “how much is this person like the people that are already here”, that’s when unintended or explicit bias can affect the hiring decision.

Numerous studies have shown that hiring decisions can be biased by factors like the ethnicity of the applicant’s name, their appearance, and their social class. Now, two economists, Qi Ge and Stephen Wu, have published a very interesting research study of another possible source of bias in hiring: how difficult it is to pronounce the applicant’s name.

The data that these researchers used for their study was taken from (more…)

Fact-Checking Card-Checking in British Columbia

In April, the British Columbia government introduced legislation that would change the Labour Relations Code and allow automatic certification in union organizing campaigns. This change would make it much easier for unions to become the legal workplace representative for employees. The usual pro-business pro-management organizations – Chambers of Commerce, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Business Council of BC – are complaining that this change would “weaken the democratic right for workers to exercise choice through a secret ballot”.  The Business Council has also sent a letter to BC Premier John Horgan with a lengthy list of complaints about the legislation’s potential impacts.  And the “non-partisan” Fraser Institute has called the proposed legislation “unfair to workers”.

At best, these statements are misleading. At worse, they reflect an implicit belief that unions can only hurt businesses’ operations and profitability – a belief which is also highly inaccurate.

To understand why these statements are so troubling, it’s useful to know what automatic certification is. When a union (more…)

“It’s Beyond Frustrating”: Why Athletes are Still Being Abused

The Olympics are supposed to be an exciting and enjoyable experience, for athletes and for spectators. But for figure skating fans, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing could best be characterized as stressful and depressing.

After the team event – the first skating event on the schedule – it was revealed that 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, the favourite to win the women’s event, had previously tested positive for a banned drug intended to treat chest pain. After an emergency hearing by the Court for Arbitration in Sport, Valieva was allowed to continue competing, but the medals in the team event were not awarded. Valieva ended up placing fourth in the women’s event, and her teammate Alexandra Trusova, who came second, had an emotional meltdown at rinkside, shouting that she hated skating and would never go on the ice again.

While watching all of this drama and turmoil unfold, I couldn’t help but think that for almost 30 years we’ve known there were problems in the sport of skating. In 1995, sportswriter Joan Ryan’s book Little Girls In Pretty Boxes painted a terrible picture of abusive coaching, unhealthy training practices, and incredible stress placed on young figure skaters and gymnasts. Thankfully, as an adult skater, I got into the sport when I was old enough to be in control of what I did. But it’s no secret to anyone who follows skating that, even after well-documented investigations like those in Ryan’s book, there are still very significant problems within the sport.

So I decided to get in touch with Ryan and see if she would be willing to be interviewed about whether anything has changed, 30 years after her whistleblowing. She kindly agreed, and we talked this week. Here’s a transcript of our conversation.

 

Fiona McQuarrie [FM]: What’s your take on the doping scandal at the Olympics?

Joan Ryan [JR]: The Washington Post asked me to write an op-ed on that a couple of weeks ago, and, you know, I wrote this book 27 years ago now. There has been change on the gymnastics side, unfortunately because of Larry Nassar, and because of the gymnasts themselves. They have risen up like an army, and they are the ones that are going to make sure it finally changes. That’s the only reason I have any hope that it’s going to change now after all these years.

I haven’t followed figure skating as closely over those 27 years, but the US skaters certainly seem healthier to me. I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but clearly the total destruction of two of the three Russian figure skaters is a clear sign that it’s dysfunctional. There’s clearly (more…)

I See You: The Effects of Representation

Many organizations think that being inclusive is simply an issue of hiring members of underrepresented groups. But people hired on that basis are not going to stick around if they feel isolated or that they stand out, or that they’ve been hired just because they’re “diverse”. One very important element in inclusivity is representation; people want to see others like them, and also want to see those other people being respected and valued.

Part of a new study by a group of US researchers looks at the effects of representation in a place that isn’t often examined: the readings that students are assigned in university courses. There has been plenty of discussion over the past few decades about “the canon” in various academic fields and what determines whether a work is a “classic”  that all students should be familiar with. The researchers investigated whether the gender balance of assigned readings in a political-science course – the number of readings written by men and the number of readings written by women – affected female and male students’ self-efficacy: their confidence in their own ability to succeed. The study looked at (more…)