Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER June 1, 2015 8 NEWS 190 Reasons Membership with the Canadian Payroll Association is essential. Canada's 1.5 million employers count on payroll professionals to annually pay $865 billion in wages and taxable benefits, $290 billion in statutory remittances, and $163 billion in benefits - all while complying with 190 regulatory requirements. Start enjoying your membership today at payroll.ca Member Benefits Include: ✔ Unlimited access to the Association's #1 service, Payroll InfoLine This member service answers over 38,000 inquiries per year. ✔ Member pricing for Professional Development Seminars and Webinars Over 20 topics covered in seminars across Canada. ✔ Payroll Resources at payroll.ca and printed publications l Legislative Compliance Rates Sheet l Payroll Best Practice Guidelines & Checklists l Timely legislative updates via electronic e-Source TM 90 of Canada's top 100 companies count on the Canadian Payroll Association membership for their payroll compliance knowledge Picking up the pieces after a workplace scandal Post-Ghomeshi CBC highlights importance, challenges of rebuilding employee trust, culture BY LIZ BERNIER THERE'S A fairly predictable for- mula workplaces cycle through in times of crisis: Initial response, investigation, reporting and recommendations. It's the pattern CBC followed in the aftermath of the Jian Ghome- shi sexual harassment allegations, and it's one countless other orga- nizations have followed. But after the recommendations have been written and resolutions made, that's arguably when the real work begins — rebuilding culture. Rebuilding workplace culture and trust after a crisis has been largely a neglected topic, said Lau- ra Williams, founder and principal at Williams HR Law in Toronto. But it's also a critical one when the workplace has been through some kind of trauma, such as a harass- ment investigation. "People have given you feed- back and, to the extent that the feedback warrants action, you can even further derail the cul- ture and the sense that this is a workplace that employees feel engaged in because you've got an incident, you've got some ap- pearance of the incident being addressed through a workplace investigation, now you've got in- formation — what are you going to do about it?" After a situation, employees need to see action and follow- through, said David Couper, founder and CEO of David Couper Consulting in Los Angeles. " ere's a disconnect between the values that the company is saying are important and what they've actually done," he said. "They've got to do something pretty significant to show that they understand that's wrong, and then take steps to (address it)." Fallout and restoration Any workplace will face a number of common challenges after such an incident, said Williams. " ere's the impact or trauma, if you will, on any workplace environment that's just a function of the event happening itself… and this manifests in terms of the trust that is lost. So there's mistrust — the employer credibility can be impacted insofar as employees feel that the employer hasn't done everything that it ought to have done in the circumstances to pro- tect employees." at can have a signifi cant im- pact on culture because employ- ees may feel fearful, she said. "(Employers) have to be inten- tional now in regards to 'What do we need to do so that we regain credibility as the employer, and so that we don't have a signifi cant loss of trust within the employ- ment relationship?'" Beginning to rebuild that trust can have a diff erent start- ing point depending on what the work culture was like to begin with, said Williams. "Usually, in most cases, there has to be some transparency from leadership with respect to what is going to be done or what has been done, and what ongoing steps will be taken (to resolve the issue)," she said. " e number one key thing that has to be in place is communication, and specifi c communication with respect to acknowledging the impact, and also a plan going forward." It would be eff ective if senior management made an eff ort to hold town hall meetings with people, said Couper, in talking about what's happening, what they value and what the values are for the organization — and getting feedback from that. "And then training their manag- ers to have similar conversations with smaller groups of people, and then really taking a temperature check of the whole organization," he said. "If it's happened in one area, it's possible it's happened in other areas. So you want to really see where else is a problem." Depending on the culture, an employer might leave certain as- pects of the restoration exercise to the employees so they can gener- ate ideas, said Williams. "It could be employee working groups, striking committees that are going to actually come up with some solutions, or at least maybe identify what the impact has been. And certainly there might be some team-building exercises that, depending on the environ- ment, might be appropriate." Employers should also consider bringing in a neutral third party with expertise on the issue, said Williams. "Eff orts to bring in a third party that specializes in these areas goes a long way as well because it shows the employee base that the employer cares about how they feel at work." CBC recommendations For its part, the CBC has a num- ber of recommendations from the report by investigator Janice Ru- bin on which to base its restora- tion eff orts, said Lise Lareau, vice- president of the Canadian Media Guild (CMG) in Toronto, which represents workers at CBC. Several of the recommenda- tions were initially suggested by the union, particularly those around training, she said. "We've taken some steps since the incident — not since the re- port but since the incident itself — about how to make sure people on the fl oor are better trained to spot this stuff and to act accordingly. So we really wholeheartedly agree that better training is required on both the union and management side to deal with this issue." e biggest hurdle for CMG, and most unions, is around com- munication and awareness when issues are going on, said Lareau. " ere's (a key task) that unions always want to do: To make sure that communications are such that we know what is going on ev- erywhere. And clearly what broke down in 2010 and in the years following is that so many of the missed opportunities that were identified in the Rubin report, they were missed opportunities for us too. For us not to know of, say, the Red Sky meeting… it tells me as a union leader, 'Wow, if we didn't know that people had a Red Sky meeting about this problem, and no one thought to call the union, there's a massive discon- nect," she said. "The union has to create a better network of informal and formal communications right through its workforce, Credit: Mark Blinch (Reuters) A man sits inside the CBC broadcasting centre in Toronto. The broadcaster is trying to heal from the Jian Ghomeshi allegations. Overworked, understaffed human resources at CBC? An added challenge at CBC is the Jian Ghomesi allegations came in the midst of extraordinary cuts to the workforce, said Lise Lareau,vice-president of the Canadian Media Guild in Toronto. "We're in a phase of extraordinary cuts — 3,000 over the last several years, 1,400 in the last year. And those cuts are also hitting at HR," she said. "Through the HR department, there's a churn like you would not believe. The churn in the HR department at CBC is enormous. So it's really hard in an era of massive layoffs to even have conversations with the right people." So how does HR even begin to repair trust and relationships in an era of massive cuts and departments run by skeleton staff? "People who would be normally engulfed in solving this problem, in coming up with better policies and better processes, are executing cuts," said Lareau. "HR people on the CBC side are sitting down in rooms, fi guring out how to eliminate 240 jobs over the next few months. And that's after hundreds of jobs over the last year." HR is completely swamped, so there's a whole other layer of diffi culty in trying to rebuild and address this issue, she said. "Their workloads have expanded so exponentially in this climate," said Lareau. "Having to execute cut after cut after cut is just so demoralizing — (it's) not what people get into HR to do." CBC > pg. 9

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