Technology plays a huge role in just about any endeavour, and that holds true with the administration of corporations and how they go about their day-to-day business.
It’s not just limited to correspondence, financial spreadsheets, word and number processing, and the creation of snappy graphs and other visuals for presentations. Technology also has a significant role in the area of property and employee management and supervision.
It may sound a little Orwellian, a bit Big Brotherish, as in the novel 1984, and it kind of is, but it’s also kind of necessary given the number of employees and the number of tasks those employees are charged with carrying out.
Likewise, the presence of technology can make a person accessible all hours of the day and night, and that can be abused, so it’s important to have a policy by which an employee has a right to successfully “disconnect” from work. That when the bell goes off at 5 PM, or whenever the bell goes off, employees can feel secure in knowing that employment expectations cease before you even make it to the parking lot. In cases where that’s not tenable, there needs to be legitimate reasoning behind an employee needing to work beyond the bell, or be accessible beyond the bell. This is important for employees to know, and even more important for supervisors to know.
Both of these issues have been brought up as part of CAO Raybone’s pro forma review of bylaws on the books, some of which need to be reviewed regularly as mandated by legislation. These are two of those, two of the latter bylaws that require periodic review and reaffirmation.
No substantive changes were made, or were proposed, to the two bylaws that articulate and enforce these two things, the monitoring of employees and the right to disconnect. The only changes on record involve changing contact information to reflect the fact that the CAO is the go-to contact for these two bylaws. This reflects the fact that we have a new CAO, and also the fact that the Clerk’s office is no longer involved, sliding the responsibility over to the CAO as well.
As to employee monitoring, although it sounds menacing, it does have at its heart things like employee safety and verification, and there’s really not much to quibble about regarding those two things. Unfortunately, human nature can be a real impediment to getting your job done, and the refined practice of screwing the pooch can waste hundreds of thousands of dollars pretty quickly, depending upon the size of the venture.
A case in point was the City of Toronto, where public works crews tasked with cleaning and maintaining city parks were found to be spending an awful lot of time in mall parking lots and less and less of it in or around city parks. All this at a time when the public was complaining about parks not being tended to. This is the kind of thing we’re talking about.
Simple employee accountability.
GPS tracking, dashboard cameras, monitoring of electronic email and software usage, all of these things work towards keeping employees accountable to their jobs. It’s not to be used a s a weapon, but rather as a means of verification. And honestly, any employee who toils in good faith shouldn’t have cause to fear these technologies, unless they’re spending an inordinate amount of time in a mall parking lot with a dog.
As to the right to disconnect, we all know the world doesn’t stop at 5 PM, and the Town of Renfrew doesn’t stop either. Sometimes stuff happens after hours, sometimes bad stuff, stuff that needs to be attended to immediately so as not to risk additional damage or service disruption. There’s a protocol for these types of things, a protocol that allows a municipality to send out a crew or individual to tackle the crisis in a timely manner. That just makes sense.
But that’s different from your supervisor having a brilliant idea while chewing on their asparagus, then phoning you or emailing you to engage you in that brilliance after hours, but then getting mad when you don’t respond. This is an abuse directed towards the employee, and while probably not intended to be such, it still is.
There’s a bell for a reason.
There’s no real enforcement regime for this, other than I suppose the grievance process. Failing that, the policy articulates a situation where supervisors and employees both require notification and education around these points, and where or who to go to if things are perceived to be not working within the spirit of the bylaw. Bylaws are notoriously weak when it comes to their enforcement, so the policy challenges all employees, whether supervisors or the grunts in the field, to be cognizant of the policy, and jointly respectful of it.
This respect is needed for two important reasons and two important goals: the health and well-being of the employees, supervisors included, and the adherence to and compliance with provincial legislation.
It also makes for a happier, and healthier place to work.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 