What Canada's Political Parties Can Learn From Environics

 
 

I've been pitching variations on this theme to political people for years: train your staff, motivate your staff properly and when parting ways, keep the relationship going.  I keep hearing the same sorts of answers back:

 

   "Politics isn't stable - if you want stability, join the bureaucracy."

   "Staff are transient, so we don't want to invest too heavily in them."

   "Members are elected and it's not the role of Parties to tell them how to train/maintain staff."

   "This is politics. Everyone wants in, so individuals are disposable."

 

To recap, there's no point in training the people who support Legislators, advice legislation and interact with the public, the press and other elected officials because retention isn't the goal.

 

There is a remarkable opportunity right now - the training exists, there are models out there to copy and with the constant headline-grab due to the mistakes of staff who have only ever received political training, there's a pressing need for political parties to internalize the message of this article and the best practices of some Private Sector role models.

 

Oh - and those that do are going to find it a lot easier to motivate the best work from loyal team members, too, meaning better outcomes.  I'd think that's something Parties would be after, but what do I know.

 

Companies shift strategies to retain employees

 

When Deane Code arrived a year ago to start her job as a senior consultant at Environics Communications Inc. in Toronto, she found her new business cards waiting at her desk. She also knew what her new co-workers looked like and how to get to their offices, thanks to a “family tree” that arrived in the mail a few days earlier, with staff photos and a map of the office.

Companies must show a willingness to allow people who don’t have a job title of manager or executive or whatever to take on leadership roles, management professor Ed Lawler says. Getty Images

Stacey Marson had a similar welcome to her new job at LoyaltyOne, a customer insight and strategy firm. Before she started as a co-ordinator of business-to-business public relations and corporate marketing, she got a phone call from her new boss, and a package of information – including a book written by the company’s chief executive officer.

 

The cost of replacing mid-level employees is now estimated to be 1.5 times their annual salary – factoring in recruiting costs, hiring time and training. So it’s not surprising that employers are eager to make sure newcomers quickly learn their roles and feel comfortable with the company, increasing the chances of them becoming stable, long-term employees.

 

Many companies are paying more attention to the ways they can make new hires feel confident, from providing seminars that help them understand an organization’s structure and their place in it, to pairing them with mentors who can take them for coffee and answer informal questions.

 

LoyaltyOne, which employs 1,500 staff mainly in Toronto and Mississauga, introduced its program for employee orientation (“onboarding” in human resources jargon) two years ago. It comprises eight 60- to 90-minute small-group seminars, with additional online elements, and covers everything from benefits to marketing to customer care.

 

The program is designed to be completed over about six months. Employees sign up online and fit the monthly seminars around their regular work schedules.

 

Diane Dowsett, LoyaltyOne’s assistant vice-president of talent management and the driving force behind the program, said the format evolved after surveying staff and finding they wanted face-to-face interaction, shorter sessions rather than half-day events, and scheduling flexibility.

 

The company used to offer orientation in a two-day “boot camp,” but Ms. Dowsett said spreading the information out over a few months makes it easier to absorb.

 

“Joining a company is like learning to speak a new language: In the beginning, the words wash over you and you understand one in five, but over time if you have repeated exposure and people willing to make the effort, you become fluent pretty fast,” she noted.

 

At Home Depot Inc., employee orientation is propelled by the company’s focus on the store level. Store employees receive two days of orientation (in person and online) as well as 35 to 40 hours of training about specific products in their department. And head office staff are required to put in 24 hours at a store in their first three months, including at least a four-hour shift in the first 30 days.

“Everything we do at Home Depot is around supporting store associates because they are front line with the customers,” said Kim Forgues, vice-president of human resources, noting that the practice came about as a way to connect support staff with the stores.

 

“It really gave me an understanding of what’s happening in the stores and how I can help people in the stores provide the best customer service,” said Erika Botond, a manager of public relations and communications for Home Depot, who was hired about a year ago and completed her training in the paint department.

 

New hires value the opportunity to interact with their colleagues. At Environics and Home Depot, a buddy system pairs new and established employees. Environics also hands out a quiz that forces new employees to interact with co-workers across the company to answer questions such as “Which Environics employee met Taylor Swift backstage at a concert?”

 

Employees also want to hear from their managers. At LoyaltyOne, such feedback prompted Ms. Dowsett to incorporate a “graduation” session about the company’s vision and culture, led by the CEO. “People love the fact they get access to the CEO and all of our business leaders so quickly and so it’s a really good opportunity for them to foster engagement,” she said.

 

“Employees come in and do their job for eight hours without being able to see the bigger picture of what they’re looking toward,” LoyaltyOne’s Ms. Marson noted, adding that the orientation program “creates a united work force going forward to the same goals.”

 

Another thing new employees seek is feedback and a bit of personal attention. “I circle back with all new hires, whether or not they’re on my team, four to six weeks after they start,” said Josh Cobden, senior vice-president at Environics.

 

Mr. Cobden, who was hired 16 years ago, recalls a time when the company – which now has 120 employees and offices in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Washington – was small enough for the whole staff to take new hires out to lunch.

 

Given the expense of hiring and training a new employee, companies are finding that paying close attention to a newcomer right from the start pays off with an engaged, long-term staff member.

At Home Depot, for example, Ms. Forgues notes that a 90-day “check-in” with new employees resulted in a 15-per-cent decrease in turnover in the past year.

 

“The type of people we hire are high performers, who put pressure on themselves to demonstrate that hiring them was the right decision,” Mr. Cobden noted. “But what they don’t know is that we put as much pressure on ourselves to prove that joining us was the right decision.”

Blizzard on Skills, Training and Contract Negotiation

Mitchell said Keung had negotiated the all-expense-paid PhD in her employment contract with the ministry -- that it met all ministry guidelines and when she moved to eHealth, the deal went with her.

 

I find this kind of thing fascinating. 

 

In ranting a bit about eHealth and publicly paid PhDs, Christina Blizzard scratches the surface of some more complex and highly relevant questions:

 

What do we want in Public Employees?

 

Does Blizzard have a point when she says the public shouldn't be paying for the education of a public servant?  It's a more complex question than it appears on the surface.

 

Chief Operating Officer is a significant position; traditional wisdom suggests that the person who holds that office has to be organized, focused and a little bit aggressive to get the job done.  The sort of people who fit this profile are competitive, self-motivated, driven; the theory is that if they're hungry for their own power/title/wealth, they'll work extra hard on behalf of their company to achieve it.  You determine this kind of profile in the interview/contract negotiation process by how confident they come across and how effective they are in forcing you to give them what they want. 

 

In the Private Sector, additional education is frequently included in contract negotiations; to ask for it is an indication of a desire to keep going, not settle, which suggests the right stuff for an employee.  And were this a discussion about Private Sector employment, it wouldn't even be a story.

 

But this is the Ontario Public Service.  More to the point, it's eHealth, which has a demonstrably troubled history.  People on the political right constantly refer to eHealth as an indication of why you have to run government like a business to get the efficiencies and end product that public sector/union safety cushions theoretically provide.  Government needs to function like a business to be competitive and attract the right talent that would otherwise go to the Private Sector.  Right?

 

But if you want to compete with the Private Sector and in practice, senior Private Sector positions go to the aggressive folk who want lots of money, expect personal value-add (including education) to be part of their contract and want control over their work, then doesn't the Public Sector have to compete with the same carrots to attract that talent?

 

Of course, you can easily argue this is further evidence that the Public Sector has no business offering services to the Public, that Private is entirely the way to go.  Do your homework, then ask yourself - would you really want MGM Resorts International running Ontario's hospitals or online health services?  I would imagine not.  Yet gaming is a high-profit industry that attracts those confident, aggressive, take-no-prisoner types who we apparently want to woo to senior Public Sector positions.  So is Goldman Sachs.  So was Lehman Brothers.  When you dig around, there are actually a lot of Chris Mazza types in the Private Sector, too.

 

This before even touching the mandate differences between traditional Private Sector vs Public Sector operations - ie, narrow scope of service targeting specific markets vs creating an equitable playing field for everyone.  It's a church/state division, though we tend not to look at it that way.

 

There's fair bit of cognitive dissonance here, but that's for another post.

 

Next:

 

Is training something you do and move on from?

 

With this column, Blizzard implies that staff should come fully-formed, fully-trained and ready to do a job in perpetuity.  Or rather, the job at the time; I read into this the implication that if a given employee isn't independently able to measure up to changes in a position, we should cut them loose and replace them. 

 

Yet the cost of retraining and the institutional stress that comes with shifting senior people is proven to reduce efficacy over the duration of the shift.  If you look at the Public Service, again, I'm sure Blizzard would agree that in times of political uncertainty, there's a real hesitancy on the part of bureaucrats to enact anything, knowing they might have to undo their work and head in a completely new direction as soon as the next election roles around. 

 

I don't know a thing about Alice Keung, but from Blizzard's article alone, it's clear she's been with eHealth for some time; that means she knows the corporate culture, system and team, meaning she'd have an easier time facilitating a transition than would an outside player brought in.  It's fair to argue eHealth could use a culture change, but at the same time, I don't think it's fair to criticize an organization for trying to retain talent and using education to help accommodate promoted employees to maximize their potential in new roles.  It's more efficient to promote inhouse than to bring in outsiders; if efficiency is your sole goal, then training existing talent has to be part of your mandate. 

 

Training shouldn't be a four letter word in any sector.

 

This ties in to the broader economic transformation going on - whereas my parents both had the same jobs for their whole lives, the majority of us will be cycling through careers our entire working lives, with retirement increasingly a frill rather than an expectation. 

 

Scratch that - we might not even be looking at traditional careers anymore, but working on a project-by-project basis.  This means that training will be an ongoing requirement for a growing segment of the population - a costly one, too, if everyone has to go back to college or university to succeed.  Second Careers is a great program, but it's not designed for that kind of volume.  There's a change happening in education with, much like healthcare, an emphasis on using the Internet to offer more options to a broader audience.

This ties in to the ongoing debate around whether "extra" curriculars are truly extra, but we don't want to connect too many dots all at once, do we?

 

Christina Blizzard is a traditionalist and she writes to the Sun Chain's audience, so you can't blame her for being consistent.  By focusing on disgust at surface problems, though, she's ignoring the structural challenges facing our economic, education and public service systems (which, worth noting, eHealth is meant to help address).  She's missing the opportunities, too.

 

The opportunity here is to have a broader debate about what training means, who and how should it be paid for and how the Public Service can recruit the best Private Sector talent without using public dollars to deliver the same kinds of perks Private Sector entities don't mind paying to get the most assertive talent.  It's going to be tricky and it will never happen if the various Parties at the table are focused on aggressively pursuing their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

 

As Premier Kathleen Wynne might say, this is a conversation worth having.