surveys

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…)

Bill C-377: New Information on “The Bill That Nobody Wants”

Two researchers have uncovered some new and very troubling information about Bill C-377, the proposed Canadian law that would impose exceptionally rigorous financial reporting requirements on unions. “The bill that nobody wants”, as it was called in the researchers’ lecture last week, is now the center of an even more appalling story of misinformation and deception – a story that should concern not only anyone who cares about Canadian unions and workers, but also anyone who cares about the integrity of Canada’s democratic legislative process.

The first version of this bill was introduced in the House of Commons in 2011 as Bill C-317, and the Speaker of the House dismissed it as being out of order. The bill was then re-introduced in the House as Bill C-377 – a private member’s bill sponsored by Member of Parliament Russ Hiebert. It was approved in the House of Commons and sent to the Senate. The Senate refused to vote on it, and returned a heavily amended version of the bill to the House in mid-2013. The House returned the original, unamended bill to the Senate, where it is currently being debated again. It’s extremely unusual for private members’ bills to make it this far in the federal legislative process, or to be on Parliament’s agenda for so long. So what’s really going on here? (more…)

The Fraser Institute’s (Not So) Rigorous Data Collection Methods

I’ve written a couple of posts about the questionable research and data collection methodologies of the notoriously right-wing Fraser Institute. But today I have to take my hat off to the researchers over at Press Progress, who discovered that the Institute was (more…)