organizations

Letting the Sunshine In

How much light should a “sunshine list” shine?

Public sector compensation disclosure lists – “sunshine lists” – are lists of individuals in public sector jobs that are paid more than a certain amount. These annual lists usually include the person’s name, the public sector organization they work for, their job title, and their annual earnings for that fiscal year.  In Canada, five provinces have some version of a legislated “sunshine list”: Alberta, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick. (Other provinces publish salary information in their public accounts, but don’t produce a single comprehensive list.)

The reasons for publishing these lists usually involve “accountability” and “transparency” – but recently there has been pushback from some of the workers included on the lists. (more…)

Sigh…..

Mansplaining Event at PayPal via Francine Lipman (@Narfnampil) Feminist Law Professors

via Mansplaining Event at PayPal — Feminist Law Professors

Book Publishing and False Economies

The North American book publishing industry has been disrupted in the last couple of years. Publishers’ revenues are dropping for a number of reasons:  different publishing formats, the increased ease of self-publishing, and upheavals in distribution and sales channels. And in any business, when revenues decrease, one of the first strategic responses is usually to reduce production costs. For book publishers, that can mean reducing the costs of editing or proofreading in the book production process. But cutbacks in those areas can be a false economy, if those cutbacks significantly affect the quality of the finished product. And this week I received a review copy of a book that perfectly illustrates that dilemma.
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Feedback at Work

Giving feedback – to employees, peers, or even bosses – is a tricky but essential process in almost every organization. It’s important to let people know how they’re doing in their work, but it’s often difficult to figure out the best way to tell them, especially if there are problems with their performance.  And we all know organizations that loudly proclaim how much feedback and improvement are valued in their workplaces, but that don’t actually do much to make those processes happen.

My friend Allison Manley has recently starting hosting a podcast for Palantir.net, the web design, development and strategy firm where she works. The most recent episode of the podcast has a fascinating discussion on the topic of feedback. Allison talks with Colleen Carroll, Palantir’s director of operations, about Palantir’s commitment to having a “culture of feedback” and how the company actually makes that happen. What I found particularly interesting about this discussion is that it doesn’t repeat any of the usual clichés about feedback, like “focus on the problem, not the person”, and that it emphasizes the role of the sender of the feedback – a part of the process that often gets overlooked. Here are some of Colleen’s thoughtful insights into what makes feedback work. (more…)

Universities, Governance, and Conflict

It’s been a turbulent time recently in British Columbia’s post-secondary education system. In August, Arvind Gupta, the president of the University of British Columbia (UBC), suddenly resigned less than one year into his appointment. A UBC faculty member was criticized for a blog post she wrote about the resignation; that criticism resulted in an investigation which determined that UBC had failed to protect her academic freedom. After the report from the investigation was released, the chair of UBC’s Board of Governors stepped down from his position. But then an inadvertent leak of documents by UBC reignited the controversy, and Gupta spoke out to say that he chose to resign because he felt he did not have the support of the board.

Meanwhile, in December, the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) announced that its new chancellor – the ceremonial head of the university – would be James Moore, a former federal Member of Parliament and federal cabinet minister. Moore’s appointment was opposed by the UNBC faculty association, UNBC’s two student associations, and two thousand signatories to a petition, including several members of UNBC’s Senate. They complained that Moore had been a key part of a government that had muzzled scientific research and ignored climate change, and that some of Moore’s own actions went against the values and principles in UNBC’s mission statement. Despite the assurances of the chair of the UNBC Board of Governors that the board was “listening” to these concerns, Moore’s appointment was finalized in January.

These events have generally been framed by the media as a “they said”/”they said” scenario, with two different narratives struggling to become the one that’s accepted as the truth. Presenting the conflicting points of view is important in understanding why these disputes have arisen. But the “they said”/”they said” perspective omits the contextual picture: specifically, (more…)

Employee Engagement Surveys (And Doing Them Well)

2015 was a really bad year for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). At the start of the year, business correspondent Amanda Lang was accused of being in a conflict of interest for her reporting on an issue involving the Royal Bank of Canada while having a personal relationship with a RBC executive. (Lang later left the CBC for a new job with Bloomberg TV.) Then radio host Jian Ghomeshi lost his job because of incidents that resulted in him being charged with one count of choking and five counts of sexual assault – and CBC management’s awkward handling of that situation led to the firing of two top executives. And then TV host Evan Solomon was fired after allegations that he exploited his work-related connections to sell high-priced artworks. (He found a new job on satellite radio and as a magazine columnist.)

There was one bright spot for the CBC in October when the decidedly anti-CBC Conservative party was defeated in the Canadian federal election. The potential for change in the CBC’s relationship with Canada’s federal government, which funds the CBC’s operations, was characterized by retired CBC journalist Linden MacIntyre as “the people that are the custodians of this publicly owned institution no longer seem[ing] to hate it” – but the CBC is still struggling with the fallout from the traumatic events that marred its reputation in the past year.

An external review of the CBC workplace was commissioned after (more…)

This is What We Lose

The new film Spotlight tells the story of an investigation by a team of reporters at the Boston Globe newspaper in the early 2000s. The reporters documented extensive child abuse by priests and brothers in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Their investigation also exposed a cover-up by church officials, who knew that widespread abuse had been happening for several decades but failed to do anything meaningful to stop it.

I saw Spotlight this week, and I highly recommend it. It’s a fascinating and engaging film. And as a former newspaper reporter, I thought the film very realistically depicted the work of reporting, especially in showing the amount of legwork and detailed research that goes into writing a major news story. It also illustrated the often-overlooked contexts within which news stories develop – in this case, the elites in Boston society that helped to keep the abuse hidden, and that also discouraged the Globe from pursuing the story.

However, as much as I enjoyed Spotlight, it also made me feel very sad – because (more…)

Business Professors and Activism: An Interview with Scott Behson

Being neutral in academic work is something that I think many academics struggle with. I came to academia from journalism, so my experiences in journalism might have given me a heightened sensitivity of the importance of neutrality in writing and research. But research can never be entirely neutral or unbiased – if only for the simple reason that we tend to focus on topics that we personally find interesting or important.

However, I’ve noticed that business professors generally seem to interpret being neutral as staying away from any kind of activism – unless it’s something “safe” like joining the local chamber of commerce. I have to admit that when I first started spending time with professors from other academic disciplines, I was slightly shocked that some of them did things like testify at legislative hearings in support of or against proposed legislation, or serving as board members for advocacy groups. I thought, isn’t showing your opinion that strongly going to affect your credibility? But I gradually realized that academics can, and should, use their expertise to benefit society – especially if they can help those in society that struggle to be heard or to be treated fairly.

My frustration about the relative lack of advocacy in my own academic discipline made me especially excited to discover Scott Behson’s work. Scott is an activist who works to promote more family-friendly workplace practices, especially those that affect fathers – and he is also a professor of management in the Silberman College of Business at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. Scott is the author of the book The Working Dad’s Survival Guide: How to Succeed at Work and at Home, which is an Amazon #1 best-seller in its categories, and which he describes as “the first book of its kind to provide advice and encouragement for working fathers, helping them to achieve success in their careers while also being the involved, loving dads they always wanted to be.” Scott is also a very active blogger, and has written for the Harvard Business Review Online, the Huffington Post, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears in media, including MSNBC, NPR and Fox News; has worked with Fortune 500 companies as a consultant; and has been a keynote speaker at major events. Scott kindly agreed to let me interview him via email about his experiences as a business professor and an activist, and how he balances those two roles. (more…)

Overflow and Too Much Research

 

Can there be such a thing as too much research? And if there is, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Two recent studies suggest that a lot of research is essential to the development of reliable knowledge. Replicating the results of other research studies is an important type of research, because that helps us figure out whether the original studies truly discovered something new, or whether those results were a fluke. And research studies that are variations on other studies – studies that change something from the original study, like an ingredient, or part of the study’s methodology – help us understand whether the results of the original study might apply in other settings or situations. So more research is definitely better than less research.

But another recent study has some very interesting observations on the effect of too much research on the researchers themselves. (more…)

The Dark Side of Workplace Wellness

The Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail newspaper recently ran an interview with the authors of a provocative new book, The Wellness Syndrome. The authors, Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer,  argue that the ideal of “wellness” has become distorted into a “dangerous ideology”. Promoting “wellness” as a virtue, they suggest, implicitly promotes discrimination against those who have difficulty being “well”, such as people with chronic weight or health issues. And framing “wellness” as an individual issue deflects attention from larger societal conditions, such as poverty, that have much more impact on an individual’s health than their individual choices. (For example, it’s hard to get regular outdoor exercise if you live in an unsafe neighbourhood, or to eat well if the stores in your area don’t stock healthy, affordable food.)

The authors’ perspectives make a lot of sense. And, I would argue, their take on the misuse of “wellness” is also applicable to many “workplace wellness” initiatives.  There are good employers with sincere intentions who run “workplace wellness” programs because they genuinely care about their employees’ well-being. But there are other, less admirable aspects to some of these programs. (more…)