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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
WORKPLACE
Avoid the awkward office party. Employees prefer cash
If you ask Canadian workers whether they’d prefer a holiday party or an extra cash bonus, eight out of 10 will choose the money every time
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IT IS THAT time of year again. Halloween is in the rearview mirror and remarkably, Christmas decorations are already starting to pop up in shop windows and office displays. This may come as good news to the party planning committees who, at many workplaces, will be looking ahead to the annual holiday bonanza, ready to throw an absolute rager to cap off the year.
Except most Canadian employees don’t want anything to do with a holiday party. Instead, most would be happier if the party committee simply took the cash and divvied it up amongst the employees, a new survey from Employment Hero has found.
Asked whether they would prefer a cash bonus versus a party, a whopping 81 per cent of full-time Canadian workers take the cash, with only 13 per cent wanting a party. When looking at the younger workers, the ratio tilts further, with 84 per cent of those between 18 and 34 wanting the cash. (Those over 55 were the most party-receptive, but even then, the cash preference rates fell only to 76 per cent.)
“Holiday parties are a great way to bring teams together, but employers shouldn’t confuse a celebration with recognition,” said Employment Hero’s Chris Pinkerton. “A party might build connections, but it doesn’t necessarily make someone feel valued for their work throughout the year.”
Cash, on the other hand, does. Or it at least makes the wallet feel a bit more appreciated — not exactly the same thing, but hey, not unwelcome either.
But in the great debate over parties versus cash versus holiday gifts, you might want to give the gift another look. In a 2012 experiment, students hired to catalogue books at a German library got either a surprise seven-euro bonus or a gift-wrapped water bottle worth about the same. “The cash bonus didn’t have any effect on the speed or accuracy with which the students did their jobs,” wrote Slate’s Ray Fisman, while the bottle crowd’s pace jumped 25 per cent.
The gifts, it turned out, improved productivity more than cash. Offered the choice, 80 per cent still took the cash, so the mighty dollar remains king. But even there, you can do more to make it personal: The best results of all, the survey found, came — for whatever reason — when researchers gave participants money folded into an origami shirt.
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WORKFORCE
Are you sure you should be cutting those roles?
The AI boomerang: Why companies are rehiring the people they cut
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DON’T COUNT THE humans out just yet. Sure, we may need to take breaks now and then, might care about pesky things like labour laws and our bones and gristle can tire — but as some companies are finding out, we are not yet fully replaceable by AI counterparts.
According to a new report from talent-assessment vendor SHL, backed by a growing amount of anecdotal data, some employers that tried to cut workers in favour of AI replacements are now looking to get those workers back.
SHL surveyed around 2,000 workers in the U.S. and UK and found that around 16 per cent said they had, at one point, been replaced by AI and later asked back by the same employer, in a phenomenon SHL calls “AI rebounding.”
In Canada, a separate survey by Robert Half found that 34 per cent of hiring managers who cut roles after adopting AI have since had to reinstate them, suggesting that AI boomerang hires are a real phenomenon as companies figure out what can and can’t be done by AI.
“Two years ago, we said, ‘Would this happen?’ and now we’re saying, ‘Yes, it is happening in real time,’” said SHL’s global senior vice president of product and design, Lucy Beaumont, speaking to the Associated Press. “Maybe their shareholders love that they did this right-sizing motion... and then they have to turn around and quietly, with their tail between their legs, admit that they weren’t ready for that or they shouldn’t have done that.”
A number of executives are admitting this is more or less an accurate description. “We moved really fast, [but] the technology wasn’t quite there yet,” said Maria Colacurcio, CEO of pay-intelligence platform Syndio, speaking to Business Insider.
One re-hired Syndio employee, Jonathan Vidales (now a global account partner), said he “wasn’t ready to go” when he was laid off, and added that returning felt like “sneaking back into the house after I got kicked out.”
Amazon, too, is reportedly trying to recruit back workers it previously laid off, though a spokesperson said that rehiring former employees is “a normal, long-standing part of how we recruit.”
Some analysts agree it is hard to tell exactly how widespread this phenomenon is, but also agree that having to backtrack on earlier automation plans is something many companies are now doing. “Early AI adoption helped automate certain routine tasks, but many organizations underestimated how much human judgment, context and oversight those roles require,” says Deborah Bottineau, managing director at Robert Half.
Possibly the most notable example of this in the past year or so is the Ford Motor Company, which backtracked and hired 350 veteran engineers earlier this year, some of them former employees who were being brought back after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.
“Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Ford’s Charles Poon.
And lo and behold, all that human flesh and brain matter has had a clear payoff for Ford. Pointing to things like lowered warranty and recall costs, Ford CEO Jim Farley said the rehires are “contributing to literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost.”
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Terry Talk: Less talking, more listening
| In this week’s Terry Talk, Ahria Consulting CEO Terry Gillis takes on a problem that shows up in politics and in the workplace: everybody wants to be heard, but nobody seems to be listening. Leaders run surveys, engagement assessments and town halls. They ask for feedback. Then they spend half the meeting explaining why the feedback isn’t quite right. You can disagree without dismissing. You can change your mind without losing credibility. You can lead without having all the answers. Maybe that’s exactly what leadership needs right now: less certainty, more curiosity. Less talking, more listening. | | | |
CAREERS
Here comes the 60-year career
As people live longer, healthier lives, the traditional 40-year career will become a thing of the past. Hope you like work, kids!
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IF YOU THINK working for 40 years before retiring sounds long, what about 50? What about the idea of a 60-year career?
With longevity researchers convinced that people have much higher chances of living longer (with at least one saying that someone born within the last five years has “a 50 per cent chance of living to be a hundred”), the idea of careers that extend well into one’s 70s, or even their 80s, is no longer that farfetched.
A recent Wall Street Journal piece built around gerontologist John Rowe, himself 82, laid out what that career might look like. The old three-act model (school, work, retirement) is cooked, it argues. In its place is something messier, full of pivots, reinventions and time off “built in rather than treated as failures.”
In Canada, the data shows careers already getting longer. StatsCan reports that labour force participation among those 65 and older hit a record 15.2 per cent in 2025, and the average retirement age is now a record 65.4 years. But a long career is a choice for some and a necessity for others: in 2022, almost half of working Canadians aged 65 to 74 were doing so by necessity, StatsCan found.
“When we are talking about the 60-year career, we are talking about educated people at higher income levels,” Rowe said. “They have more assets and opportunities.”
In other words, knowledge workers, and affluent ones at that. And as WSJ pointed out, employers make it harder with age: they “rarely offer sabbaticals or internships for older workers,” and landing a traditional corporate role late in a career “remains notoriously difficult.”
Others are on board. Lynda Gratton of the London Business School noted we encourage adventure at 20 but discourage it at 40 and 50. Michael Clinton, author of Longevity Nation, told Yahoo Finance the window for taking chances is longer now. “At 60, you can start a new career for 10 or 20 years if you choose to,” he said. “You can become an entrepreneur. You can go back to school. You can start a creative life and become a painter, writer, whatever. It’s this enormous gift of additional time.”
But if you’re not convinced, and would love to just put your feet up, rest assured you’re not alone. Denise Taylor, a career psychologist, has watched the 60-year-career talk pile up and questions the motives, and whether those pushing it realize that 60 years of exploration and discovery could also mean 60 years of toil.
“I keep hearing this phrase everywhere, from politicians, economists, career advisors, pension experts, all talking about the 60-year career as if it’s a self-evident fact of modern working life,” she wrote. “But nobody seems to define what they actually mean.”
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DOWNSIZING
Going to the dogs
It appears everyone and their dog received a letter from Parks Canada
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TOUGH TIME TO be in the federal service. Workforce adjustment letters are going out all the time. Cuts seem to be constantly looming. And when Mark Carney takes us out for a walk he only pretends to throw the tennis ball…
Our apologies. It seems like the dogs momentarily took over the writing of the newsletter — specifically, working dogs that had a role in Parks Canada’s canine search and rescue program, who (we imagine) are very unhappy about the decision to end the program.
In an effort to trim about $145 million from its budget over the next three years, Parks Canada has sent letters to 2,917 (human) employees across the country to inform them their jobs are “impacted by workforce adjustment.” The cuts are expected to eliminate about 500 full-time-equivalent positions, close 13 park-warden detachments and scale back visitor program, outreach and camping services. As well, the search-and-rescue dog program at Banff National Park — the only such program in Canada — has been discontinued.
A couple of months ago, the last remaining search and rescue dog, Leroy, retired after seven years; a new dog, reports CBC, had gone through a couple of months of training only to have the program cut.
Human search and rescue workers aren’t thrilled. “It’s very much, let’s be super careful here,” former Banff dog handler Mike Henderson told CTV, criticizing the cuts. “We have a really unique resource, and we should be really careful about just getting rid of it because once it’s gone, it doesn’t come back.”
Much like the human workers affected by federal downsizing, the dogs are a casualty, and critics point out the program had just trained a replacement and outfitted a new vehicle before the plug was pulled.
“When experienced workers leave, we’re losing a lot of institutional knowledge that goes out the door with that,” said Krysty Thomas, PSAC’s regional executive vice-president for the Prairie Region. She was ostensibly talking about the human workers at Parks Canada, but you can imagine the same sentiment could apply to the dogs as well.
Other former dog handlers and parks wardens told media the work is only getting busier, and that fewer people and no dogs to do it is a worry. “It’s getting busier every year,” said retired warden Scott Ward, who worked as a dog handler until 2000. “The calls are going up. The visitor safety people are way busier now than they were in my era.”
“Why’d we get rid of it now?” asked Henderson. “You’re cutting a piece that’s not obsolete. It’s got 55 years of success, and we keep on proving ourselves. It’s not like we sat on our laurels or were hyper expensive at any time.”
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