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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
WORK FROM HOME
Remotely speaking
Despite challenges, the numbers tell a tale ― Canadians want flexibility when it comes to where they do their jobs
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EVEN IF THEIR employers continue to turn the screws on RTO (the Ontario government was the most recent to do so, ordering public servants back to the office four days a week starting this fall and then full-time in January), Canadians still love remote work. Seventy-six per cent of people who work remote or have worked remote told Angus Reid recently that they would prefer it as the main way of working.
But the survey also found that even five years on, core problems of isolation, loneliness and a lack of separation between work and personal lives remain.
Social isolation and the bleeding of work into personal life were named as the biggest challenges, Angus Reid reported. For younger workers, social isolation is a problem experienced by a 56 per cent majority. For women, these sentiments “are particularly acute,” said Angus Reid; for young women, the rate of experiencing work-related sense of isolation hits 43 per cent.
“We were able to solve the problem of the pandemic and the need for social isolation by creating sustainable structures that got the work done,” said Dalhousie University researcher Michael Ungar. “But I wonder if we’ve discovered that there were other systems that weren’t being successfully dealt with, whether it’s the psychological, the social, the inspirational, the team building.”
If you or someone you’re close with works remote, you might see signs of this. Virtual happy hours? A thing of the past. It’s way more common to take meetings with your cameras off now. Everybody is basically perma-Zoom-fatigued these days, getting their work done (often very well) but doing so alone in a room. “We’re not seeing people connecting online like we used to,” observed Lakehead University health science professor Kara Polson. “That sense of community has sort of faded with everybody kind of going about life, business as usual.”
What to make of the vigour with which many Canadians still fight for WFH then?
To Allison Vendetti, founder of Moms at Work, it isn’t really about working from home, but about a sense of control that many employees feel they’ve lost in recent years. “To say that work from home is comfortable and possible, and the best option for everybody is wrong,” she told Rabble. “But people are screaming that they want choice. People want choice so they don’t feel pigeonholed into the things that they’re being forced to do.”
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LEADERSHIP
A memo for the ages
AT&T CEO John Stankey sent a lengthy memo to employees following up on their recent employee survey. It’s become a test case for leaders ― and the state of employer loyalty
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AS A CEO these days, you pretty much never want to discover that a memo of yours has gone viral. And you really do not want your lengthy, complainy memo (in which you griped about the results of the employee survey) to go viral. But alas, that’s where AT&T’s John Stankey found himself this month.
You can read the whole 2,500-word memo here, but it has a lot of people in the business world talking. Yes, Stankey caught the usual flak for a memo that tells employees to get on board with RTO or quit ― but others saw in it something else, too: a kind of map to how CEOs are thinking about employer-employee loyalty these days.
In the memo, Stankey wrote: “I understand that some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an ‘employment deal’ rooted in loyalty, tenure and conformance with the associated compensation, work structure and benefits,” but stated that the company had “consciously shifted away from some of these elements and towards a more market-based culture ― focused on rewarding capability, contribution and commitment.”
To some, it was a significant admission that employer loyalty is dead. Aki Ito, in Business Insider, called it “the clearest attempt yet by a major CEO to rewrite the terms of the workplace in contemporary corporate America.” Ito has written in the past that declining employee loyalty was a two-to-tango situation. “But I have never heard the head of a large corporation actually admit that.”
Others aren’t buying it. “Breaking the loyalty contract takes two to agree. One person can’t really just decide it’s dead,” said Smith School of Business leadership professor Julian Barling. “If other people still are driven by, so to speak, the old model, if one party believes it and the other party just breaks it, the organizational research shows that the consequences are really negative.”
The memo itself is a good Rorschach test. You can see what you want to see in it. “I think there was good intention in the memo to try to clarify where the organization was,” Ivey Business professor Mary Crossan told HR Reporter, but added that “you can’t grow yourself back to health by cutting costs, it just doesn’t work.”
But Stankey still became the social media donkey of the week in some circles over this, and there’s a lesson there, too: It’s not always a good idea to hit send on your unvarnished thoughts regarding the employee survey ― something you as the employer are paying your employees to fill out so that you can hear from them.
“He would have been far better advised to pick a few things that he really wanted to emphasize and just send it, and then maybe send another one a month or a week later,” said Barling. “It borders on the incomprehensible.”
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Terry Talk: The power of unplugging
| Feeling overwhelmed by tech? From phantom phone vibrations to constant alerts, it's easy to lose touch with what really matters. In this Terry Talk Short, Ahria Consulting president & CEO Terry Gillis explores the power of unplugging and how silence can spark creativity, intuition and authentic leadership. As summer winds down, challenge yourself to disconnect and reconnect ― with your thoughts, your story and your presence. | | | |
HEALTH & SAFETY
The new workplace safety issue
As smoke from wildfires becomes a fact of life, safeguarding outdoor workers becomes a growing concern
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WITH WILDFIRE SMOKE blanketing many parts of the province this summer, Ontario has been experiencing some of the worst air quality in the world. For many, it’s not much more than an annoyance ― an outdoor workout shelved or just a situation where you need to slow it down a bit.
But if you or someone at your company works outside, it’s becoming a growing issue that workplace health and safety professionals are having to learn to navigate.
The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) is currently doing research into the kinds of air quality experienced in outdoor work environments, and say they are canvassing workplaces to collect heat readings as well as talk to employees about their work environments, ahead of what sounds like a push later this year to lobby for improved workplace safety regulations in Ontario.
“When we go to (the legislature) in November and people are like, ‘Well, I don't know what the big deal is because it's freezing rain right now,’ we actually have data to capture what was happening this summer,” OFL president Laura Walton told the CBC. (They might look to Canadian sports unions for inspiration: in 2023, the CFL and their players’ association agreed to a third-party air quality measurement protocol.)
Part of the issue, the OFL acknowledges, is that it is such a new one. Workplaces are just starting to understand how ambient wildfire air quality concerns affect them and their labour force, and many will only now be trying to figure out how to communicate to their employees about risks and guidelines. Few workplaces want to send people out into unsafe air, but many are likely to be caught flat-footed by how quickly the issue has become a yearly reality.
Western University professor emeritus Michael Lynk told the CBC he expects unions to start pushing this as a central issue in the coming years. Workers generally have the right to refuse unsafe work, which includes refusing to work in poor air quality, but unions (like those that represent municipal outdoor workers) would be keen to set defined policies. The City of Toronto, for one, has a policy of rescheduling work to cooler times in the day when possible, and has an indoor air quality policy for its office spaces.
Because the issue isn’t likely to go away, Lynk told CBC he wouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of model replicated in a variety of workplaces. “Just the threat of possibility of (refusing work), which is lawful under health and safety law," he says, “is usually enough to encourage or nudge employers to take union concerns seriously.”
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CULTURE
Meet Clanker, the internet’s new favourite slur
A Star Wars-inspired insult is making the rounds online and in real life, as critics use it to mock robots, AI systems and even the people who rely on them
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LIKE THE LUDDITES before them, humans displeased at the creep of AI and robots into everyday life are fighting back. How, might you ask?
So far, mean names. Enter ‘clanker,’ a niche term from Star Wars lore, which came into the internet’s vernacular earlier this year and has become quick shorthand for folks frustrated by soulless automation.
“Sick of yelling ‘representative’ into the phone ten times just to talk to a human being?” asked one U.S. lawmaker on X, promoting his own legislative efforts to protect workers from displacement. “My new bill makes sure you don’t have to talk to a clanker if you don’t want to.” Another X user posted: “Genuinely needed urgent bank customer service, and a clanker picked up.” You get the picture.
Linguists and technologists were fascinated by it ― not because they were surprised that people don’t like AI in certain contexts, but because it seemed like humans had organically created a term that is both humanizing and dehumanizing towards technology at the exact same time.
“What we’re doing is we’re anthropomorphizing and personifying and simplifying the concept of an AI, reducing it into an analogy of a human,” linguist Adam Aleksic told NBC News. Nicole Holliday, a linguist at Berkeley, suggested it was a human way of creating things that exist outside of AI’s reach. “Slang is moving so fast now that an LLM trained on everything that happened before it is not going to have immediate access to how people are using a particular word now,” she said. “Humans on Urban Dictionary are always going to win.”
But Aleksic also echoed a concern raised by others that having a slur for AI or a robot isn’t much better ― if it is at all ― than having slurs for other people. “Slurs are othering,” Holliday told Rolling Stone. “When people use these terms, they’re in some ways doing so as a self-protective measure.”
Aleksic compared it to any number of other racial slurs, at least in the structure of how it’s used. “It’s drawing on historical ways that slurs have dehumanized,” he said. “Something requires a degree of anthropomorphization, of personification, for a slur to work.”
But work it has, though ― Google Trends data for the term clanker peaked in early August. It has resonance, even if there’s some concerning undertones there. “A lot of lives are being changed because of robots, and me personally, I see it as a stupid way of fighting,” a young content creator told NBC News. “But there’s a little truth to it as well.”
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