With People Inc.

Employee Secretly Recording Others At Work Results in Termination

by | Feb 23, 2022 | Bullying, Compliance, Equity, Harassment, Human Resources, Labour Market Update, OH&S, Safety, Sexual Harassment, Welcoming, Workplace Respect

I enjoyed watching law and order/crime TV dramas as I grew up. There would be an episode involving a character secretly recording another from time to time.

Then a court would throw out the evidence. Justice denied! It made for heartbreaking yet exciting TV.

Just like many laypeople, that led me to, for a while, believe that recording someone in secret was illegal in every circumstance, or at least would be unreliable as evidence.

Then, inspiring high school and post-secondary educators introduced more nuance. They taught us that recording a conversation was generally not illegal if at least one person recorded is aware of the recording. Like most, I absorbed that into my psyche and moved on.

As an HR practitioner, I have not experienced an abundance of co-worker-to-co-worker covert recordings. When it came up for me, the admissibility of evidence of the recording was rarely the focus.

For instance, an individual recorded roughly 40 hours of his supervisor undermining and directing racial slurs toward him. We didn’t adjudicate the issue of whether the person should have been recording. Instead, the facts backed by the recording motivated us to fix the situation. Fixing the situation included confronting the superiors, firing the supervisor and getting our chequebook to settle the targeted employee’s grievance.

In other files, a person being harassed or intimidated or bullied records another in secret from time to time. In these files, the recording often will assist in credibility assessments when comparing competing testimony from the target and the bully. The necessity for these recordings makes sense, as bullies are sly and often tricky to gather objective evidence of the behaviour.

The legality of the recording is not the only factor to consider in the employment context. The appropriateness of the recording is also an essential factor. A recent BC Supreme Court Case added another nuance. Under this fact set, an employee extensively recorded private and personal conversations with co-workers and supervisors. Findings of fact did not substantiate reasons given by the employee to justify the excessive recordings. The court found that the secret recording activity violated the trust required for a functioning employee/employer relationship and was grounds for dismissal.

Take-Aways

Employers need to tread carefully and cautiously when considering covert recording discipline. Factors such as the extent of the recording and that the recordings included co-workers’ personal information contributed to the court’s decision. Also, the court did not substantiate the reasons the employee relied upon to justify the need to record.

Employers would be well served to get in front of this and consider setting expectations surrounding secret recordings at work by creating a policy.

We recommend legal advice if an employer intends to discipline or terminate an employee recording.

For employees, this feels like it should be a public service announcement. Many are under the impression they can record conversations without negative consequences. That is not the case. And, call me sentimental, but I have this strong preference that when employees behave in a manner that could put their job in jeopardy, they should be aware of that in advance. So govern yourself accordingly.

Is it better to be loved than feared? Supervision: Performance Management and Psychological Safety

by | Feb 7, 2022 | Bullying, Equity, Exclude, Harassment, Human Resources, Mental Health Moment, OH&S, Safety, Welcoming, Workplace Respect

We have the distinct pleasure of meeting supervisors and managers of every stripe through our work, including those with differing strengths, aptitudes, and experience levels.

Common aspects of the role that many supervisors wrestle with are how to encourage employees to honour the required professional boundaries of the relationship and how to influence employees to afford deference to their position of authority over their team.

Many supervisors go down the path of creating a defensive shell around themselves. This often takes the form of a persona.

That being the goal, there is a conscious decision to create a persona that projects dominance, strength, and, deliberately or not, fear.

In almost every case, such contrived personas are void of a willingness to be authentic and vulnerable with one’s team (something necessary to develop trust).

Under this scheme, assertiveness may be interpreted as aggression. Put more plainly, some supervisors, in playing their part, behave aggressively instead of assertively, whether they intend to or not and whether they even know it.

What happens under these circumstances? When crafting this persona, the supervisor chooses whether it is better to be feared than loved.

Today we revisit this classic question, albeit within the context of performance management, “is it better to be feared than loved.”

Perhaps the most prolifically cited author for the phrase, “it is better to be feared than loved,” is Machiavelli, as cited in “the Prince.”

Before going too far into that specific quote and chapter, we note the Prince, even after all these years, has some measure of controversy among academics. Many questions whether that writing is the most accurate account of Machiavelli’s perspectives.

When the Medici family came into power in Florence, Machiavelli lost his position in civil service. Some believe the Prince was, in a sense, a job application in which he was courting members of the Medici family to gain his position back within the bureaucracy. For Machiavelli’s more audacious statements found in the Prince, I tend to take them with a grain of salt – as I believe he was speaking to a more specific audience.

At the beginning of that chapter, Machiavelli starts by saying that leaders must be “considered merciful and not cruel,” and what is often omitted in the quoted statement is the portion that follows after the comma, which changes the meaning of the sentence significantly. The more fulsome quote is, “It is better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.”,“…if you cannot be both…”.

No, Machiavelli did not give blank-cheque permission to even the most pragmatic supervisors and managers to be cruel towards and feared by their team.

 In surveys, employers describe some of the traits most desired in their employees. We do not intend for this list is to be exhaustive. We have reduced it to those behaviours reliant on a certain level of cognitive functioning.

Employers want employees to know their strengths, employees who can think independently, solve problems, be innovative, be proactive, and be willing to learn new things.

The stereotypical Machiavellian approach to supervision presumably leads through fear and creates an atmosphere lacking psychological safety.

Employees put into a workplace that lacks psychological safety are more prone to experience a fight or flight reaction and may enter a state of hyper-vigilance, all of which can impair higher-level cognitive functioning.

Instinctively, they are more on the lookout for sabre tooth tigers than finding solutions to overcome the organization’s challenges. This would suggest that having supervisors and managers lead through fear is contrary to the organization’s interests in many situations. That is why it is better to be loved than feared – it is in your own self-interest, and in the organization’s interest.

We at Workforce Delivery throw out a challenge. Test our own leadership style. Consider whether there are improvements that we could make and decide what and how we might transition towards those improvements. Remember, it is better to be loved than feared by your team. Thank you for your time, and have a safe and enriching day.

Workplace Mental Health: Mental Health Moments and the #20PercentChallenge

by | Feb 7, 2022 | Equity, Exclude, Human Resources, Mental Health Moment, OH&S, Safety, Welcoming, Workplace Respect

Many organizations start off meetings with four or more people with a safety moment. Well over ninety percent of these focus on physical safety. Way too many focus on driving conditions (little quips about the commute on the way to work that morning), or the weather. Some safety moment cultures at work have lost their lustre and have turned into morning ice-breaker/socialization moments. If people haven’t tuned out of the conversation entirely, many tune out to the safety purpose of the topic or mindfulness called upon by the good and well-thought-out safety moment. Rarely, do people talk about psychological safety, health and wellness. For too long, our safety moments have avoided the topic of workplace mental health and mental wellness.

However, roughly 1 and 5 people in Canada will encounter a mental wellness or illness challenge in any given year. Imagine, having a risk factor present among the general workplace population at a frequency of twenty percent and not talking about it. Many safety professionals fail miserably in approaching behaviour-based and cultural transformations required to support psychological health and safety. That is because safety professionals are often process leaders, not thought leaders.

Work cultures lacking safety around mental health and awareness can negatively affect those coping with mental health and wellness challenges.

Corporate wellness programs serve otherwise healthy and well employees. Corporate wellness programs fail employees with mental health and wellness concerns and often isolate such employees further.

Telling a person who can barely get out of bed every morning to go for a jog or join a yoga class can further exacerbate someone who needs to start with mental health support.

We can do better by promoting and normalizing people accessing the resources they need through conversations about workplace mental health.

By age forty, 50% of the population will have had a mental health problem or illness. [ Fast Facts about Mental Illness – CMHA National]

Yet, we do not talk about mental health and wellness at work.

This avoidance to hold space and having these conversations must change.

 We need to combat the stigma and normalize the conversation. 

For this reason, we ask each of you to consider taking the #20percentchallenge.

Commit to 20 percent of safety moments per week on mental health and mental wellness topics.

Join the conversation at our Workplace Mental Health page for more resources.

Discuss.

#20percentchallenge

 

Lateral Violence: When the Oppressed become the Oppressors

Lateral Violence: When the Oppressed become the Oppressors

by | Jul 17, 2021 | Colonialism, Equity, Exclude, Harassment, Human Resources, Indigenous, Mental Health Moment, OH&S, Safety, TRC 92 (ii), Welcoming, Workplace Respect

When the oppressed become the oppressors.

Lateral violence is a form of bullying engaged in by those oppressed and lacking power. 

In a state of anger, fear and at times panic, feeling unable to confront the system that dominates them, they lash out and attack peers and those closest to them, often those also oppressed. 

It is a function of power or lack thereof, and individuals (often targets themselves), without recourse, lash out at whom they can. Unfortunately, the systemic lack of recourse contributes to the release of energy in an unproductive, at times harmful form. It involves a release of energy built up from toxic or traumatic experiences.

Lateral violence is a sad and retraumatizing phenomenon.

Root causes of this tendency include:

  1. colonization,
  2. oppression,
  3. intergenerational trauma,
  4. powerlessness and
  5. the ongoing experience of racism and discrimination.

Resolving this requires confronting it by outing it, naming the damage it causes and acknowledging whom it damages.

Create space for discussions on the topic in general. Engage peers to gain understanding and commit to eradicating the behaviour from the workplace.

Bullying & lateral violence – Creative Spirits

Strategies: 

  1. Out it.
  2. Confront It.
  3. Discuss its Causes.

Gain Freedom from It.

Discuss.

Take the #20percentchallenge

To learn more about our labour relations, human resources and recruitment firm, visit our homepage.

Job Readiness: Born Mainly from Positions of Privilege, What is it Now?

by | Apr 26, 2021 | Colonialism, Competition, Equity, Human Resources, Indigenous, Labour Market Update, Recruitment, TRC 92 (ii), Welcoming, Workplace Respect

Suppose we Googled the phrase “job-ready” and looked back to the content date stamped at just about 2000. The phrase was not as pervasive as it is today and is often referred to as:

  • machines and equipment that were job-ready[1] for the projects that needed them,
  • welfare recipients[2] and convicts who were job-ready[3], and
  • projects themselves being job-ready (i.e. ready for people; what we now refer to as “shovel-ready”).

Hence, the phrase was about:

  • the absence of, or remediation of, socioeconomic barriers to achieving a job,
  • about the scheduling function of projects concerning material and equipment, or
  • scopes of work developed enough to receive the workforce required to execute the work.

Between 2001-2005, industry stakeholders began to use the phrase more widely; it was about candidates for employment having all the required training tickets for safety-sensitive positions, usually in the industrial construction and maintenance sector.

In Alberta, this was born mainly from a place of privilege. During such time, building trade union members performed most heavy industrial construction and maintenance work in the Wood Buffalo and the Industrial Heartland regions. Each hiring hall had a multi-employer-funded training trust fund, indirectly paid for by major industrial clients through cost-plus funding arrangements with their contracted service providers. Despite this, the practice was that those members dispatched would spend the first 3-4 days on-site, on paid time, in safety training. Often the project and employer would be retraining members who would not disclose that they already had the certification in question.

Who wants to be out in minus thirty turning wrenches when they could be on paid time, sitting in a lovely warm classroom, drinking coffee, learning about fall arrest for the twentieth time?

Safety professionals certainly did not lose sleep over this waste; it meant more business for them. In the heavy industrial construction and maintenance sector, there is no business like the safety business.

Then, the ones paying the bill had enough.

Purchasers of significant industrial capital projects sent their auditors in, who began to ask questions.

If we have to pay to train everyone anyways, why are we also paying millions of dollars each year into training trust funds?

There was no good answer to this uncomfortable question, and it became an awkward conversation at the bargaining table.

The repetitive training and upload of the training responsibility to the industry’s best clients became, to some extent, a prevailing practice.

Employers needed to address the issue with the bargaining representatives of the members who took such liberties for granted for a long time. The Ironworkers, Carpenters and Labourers stepped up. They recognized they were in the business of supplying qualified, skilled tradespeople and construction professionals to the industry and ended the practice.

They readily agreed to dispatch their members “job-ready,” meaning they were pre-trained, supported by their training trust fund, and ready to go to work.

It took multiple rounds of bargaining for other unions to remove this waste; they would argue that their members were entitled to their entitlements. They instead invested in bricks and mortar of large and lavish training centres with the owner-funded unspent training dues.

If you treat your clients this poorly, any business person knows they will not be clients for long. This situation was no different.

Building trade unions have since lost market share; they no longer perform most of the work available in the Wood Buffalo and Industrial Heartland regions.

Now most workers participating in the industry are no longer dispatched through hiring halls and are no longer supported by funded training trust funds.

When this shift happened, site owners and employers maintained the practice of insisting workers be job-ready.

As a result, the industry downloaded the responsibility for training certifications onto the backs of working construction and maintenance tradespeople.

Now we have no problem with established journeypeople maintaining their safety certifications as part of what it means to be committed to their profession. We feel less comfortable about this within the context of newcomers and apprentices.

We also recognize that this practice, which came from a place of privilege, can have a disproportionate impact on members of groups of individuals who have not traditionally participated in the industry, such as women and BIPOC candidates.

Just one example, members of Indigenous communities living in remote communities do not have equal access to training resources as other candidates.

Workforce Delivery Inc constantly self-scrutinizes our processes, actively seeking to identify structural, systemic and institutional barriers and then apply measures and, at times, a positive bias to eradicate those barriers.

This is what it is like, to recruit right?

If you want to understand more about Workforce Delivery Inc’s recruitment services, contact us at [email protected] or visit us on our recruitment services page.

 

Respectfully submitted,

Sam Kemble

Chief Operating Officer, With People Inc.

[1] RIOT-The Scheduling Problem (berkeley.edu)

[2] How Are Families That Left Welfare Doing? (urban.org); Welfare-to-Work Block Grants: Are They Working? (brookings.edu)

[3] Recruiting and employing offenders (employabilityinscotland.com)

 

2020 Initiative and Industrial Relations List for With People Inc.

by | Dec 19, 2020 | Alcohol & Drug Policy, Bullying, Collective Bargaining, Colonialism, Competition, Compliance, Equity, Harassment, Human Resources, Indigenous, Labour Market Update, Negotiations, OH&S, Recruitment, Safety, Sexual Harassment, TRC 92 (ii), Workplace Respect

Inventory of service activities delivered to clients in 2020, a report by Sam Kemble

A Word from the Executive Operations Officer 

We diversified our client base and service offerings during the year, added capacity, strengthened our balance sheet, and improved our processes. We supported organizations to meet extraordinary and complex challenges through various service offerings.

We are inspired by our client’s character, understanding and compassion towards their employees, union partners, and stakeholders, all during a year that could strain any relationship. We are grateful to continue serving industries and enterprises in Canada.

We wish all well as we approach the New Year.

Respectfully submitted,

Sam Kemble

Executive Operating Officer

Industrial Relations – Negotiations

This year in industrial relations, we bargained collectively with various Building Trade unions in Saskatchewan, CUPE in Edmonton, Unifor in Windsor, and UFCW in Edmonton. Also, we engaged in First Nation Mutual Benefits Agreement Negotiations West of Edmonton.

Industrial Relations

We continue to deepen our service and experience in general industrial relations through grievance administration, progressive discipline support, collective agreement interpretation, group lay-off and bumping-process support, coal-to-gas transition supports, recall list administration, temporary layoff supports, arbitration case management, contracting out, severance liability included in a temporary layoff context, right to refuse unsafe work in a COVID-19 context, pension plan and health benefits and insurance administration, and common employer and successor employer analysis.

Policy Development

We engaged in robust alcohol and drug policy development and costing models, participated in public policy creation and review through the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, and developed several policies and practice documents in employment administration.

Training

Ongoing training and workshops were developed and delivered, covering performance management, labour and employee relations, industrial relations, anti-harassment, bullying and violence. Work continues to migrate these modules to an online delivery format for broad and safe accessibility.

 

Recruitment

Significant time has been invested in enhancing our craft recruitment process, including modules for equity hiring and onboarding. We supported clients to develop a 48-hour rule hiring process to coincide with hiring hall scenarios. Cost models have been developed and simulated for craft sourcing, recruitment and onboarding for numerous multi-year projects. Our firm provided direct recruitment support for a plant south of Edmonton, a shutdown near Regina, road construction in Calgary, a pipeline in BC, a plant west of Edmonton, an institutional project in Terrace, recruitment for project administration in Northwest BC, a manufacturing facility south of Edmonton, several residential projects in the Greater Vancouver area, an infrastructure project in Lloydminster, and a roadbuilding project in the Greater Vancouver area.

We have adopted a positive bias into our recruitment process that prefers Indigenous, BIPOC and women candidates.

COVID-19

2020 brought the need to support clients with Covid-19 response measures, including service for essential service employees, implementing masking, hygiene, and physical distancing policies while restructuring work arrangements through staggering shifts and rotating site presence protocols. Various sick and other leave provisions required interpretation within a pandemic context. We also ensured rights and obligations to refuse unsafe work were adequately adhered to within a COVID-19 context. The pandemic also brought unique factors requiring a considered review of human rights and employment statute-protected accommodations, including leave and work accommodations. Many employers also found it necessary to navigate both the in and the out-of-work-from-home transitions.

We are grateful for the opportunity to be of service during such challenging and dynamic times. 

Industrial Relations – Operations / Execution

We engaged in front-end engineering and design (FEED) support for significant capital projects’ workforce delivery and the management component. We increased our forecasting and costing analysis capacity and conducted field execution productivity studies, developed project costing studies, and conducted labour posture comparison studies for construction and maintenance. We developed and supported wall-to-wall craft recruitment models. 

Justice and Social

We provided Jordan’s principal policy, advice, and advocacy within our social justice portfolio. We developed Treaty-based education agreements and policies.

Together with expert volunteers, we are about to release an employer mental health and wellness practice document.

We commenced service to the Board of the Colbourne Institute for Inclusive Leadership.

As a firm, we are taking an aggressive approach to positive bias recruiting to ameliorate disadvantaged and historically disadvantaged groups’ inequities.

 

With People Inc. Internal Capacity

In 2020, the firm increased recruitment, project controls, human resources and data science capacity.

We made investments in achieving a CPHR Certification, investigative report writing training, first aid training, and Principles of Health and Safety Management.

We afforded access to professional coaching to staff to increase career development and the strength of our team.

We created an operational contingency reserve for our operations to de-risk the potential for Covid-19 to impact our staffing levels. We also adopted an accounting policy to carry a fully funded severance liability on our balance sheet.

Throughout 2020 we continue to develop apps for release in 2021, including a force ranking app – 90% complete, a witness credibility app – 70% complete, a quantum of discipline review app – 70% complete. Also, we rebuilt our workforce applicant tracking and onboarding system – 70% complete.

In the ongoing interest of advancing awareness and education in human resources and employee and industrial relations, we maintained our educational Blog, Podcast, and Video Channel (hosted on YouTube).

Visit our homepage for more information about our human resources and industrial relations firm with offices in Edmonton, Alberta, Prince George and Victoria, British Columbia.