Archive for the ‘employees’ Category
World Cup Fever and Employee Productivity
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The FIFA World Cup is one of the few events capable of diverting the world’s attention from the BP oil spill. I’m sure for many it’s a relief not to have a world-class disaster as the focus of their attention during every waking moment. In that regard, even for non-soccer fans, the World Cup is a welcome diversion. Of course, for many, it’s much more than that. It’s an obsession. It’s also a month-long diversion from other obligations.
Here’s a story about how businesses are dealing with the ways in which World Cup fever is affecting employee productivity. By Susan Krashinsky and Iain Marlow, for the Globe & Mail: The World Cup in the workplace – no keeper can stop it
[A]t its call centre in Brampton, the Canadian telecommunications giant [Rogers Communications] has wheeled in four giant projection screens to allow employees to catch World Cup games.
In Brampton, Rogers has opted to face head-on the possibility of lost productivity during this global sports event. Almost all World Cup matches will take place during regular work hours in North America. Rather than pretend employees won’t be focused on the tournament, Rogers is supplying the screens – some playing silently for those taking calls, and one that will sit in the cafeteria, volume cranked up….
Two main ethical questions arise, here. One: what do employees owe their employers? The other: what do employers owe their employees? Alternatively, we can combine the two into the single question, ‘How should an important-but-time-consuming cultural event like the World Cup be integrated into the workplace? Obviously, cases will differ. In an Air Traffic Control tower, where distractions could be fatal, no one (hopefully) is going to make an argument for installing a big-screen TV to watch whatever game is on. On the other hand, if you happen to work in a sports bar, the question is again kind of trivial but for the opposite reasons.
Setting aside those extremes, what about your average, middle-of-the-road office environment? Clearly any sensible solution has to involve a formulation of shared expectations. Managers and employees need to come to an understanding about how (as opposed to “whether”) employees are going to check in on World Cup games. In principle, any mutually-agreeable solution is ethically acceptable. But I would think really wise managers would find ways to turn employees’ interest in the World Cup into a benefit, rather than a liability. The most obvious way is by using the World Cup as part of various morale-boosting activities. More subtly, companies might draw on sports analogies — analogies that should be particularly vivid during the World Cup — in order to create training activities, perhaps ones that provide lessons on teamwork and courage. Indeed, they could even draw on the world cup to create training activities that focus on ethics, building on the analogy between sports and business as two competitive domains that can and should be productive endeavours, but that are more likely to be so when played within the boundaries of a well-thought-out set of rules.
Would Life Be Better Without Bosses?
I would never, ever, fire my boss. To be fair, as a university professor I don’t really have a “boss” in the usual sense, but I do answer to a Dean and a VP and President. I’m super-glad that they’re there, mostly because I’d rather have bamboo slivers shoved under my fingernails than do the sorts of work they do to keep the university working.
But maybe I really am a special case. Could other organizations do without bosses?
Over at the Huffington Post, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis have written this: The Cure for Layoffs: Fire the Boss!
In 2004, we made a documentary called The Take about Argentina’s movement of worker-run businesses. In the wake of the country’s dramatic economic collapse in 2001, thousands of workers walked into their shuttered factories and put them back into production as worker cooperatives. Abandoned by bosses and politicians, they regained unpaid wages and severance while re-claiming their jobs in the process.
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Well, with the world economy now looking remarkably like Argentina’s in 2001 (and for many of the same reasons) there is a new wave of direct action among workers in rich countries. Co-ops are once again emerging as a practical alternative to more lay-offs….
Klein & Lewis then go on to describe recent cases of workers taking over, in places from Argentina to France to Poland to the U.S.
Klein & Lewis leave 2 crucial questions open:
1) Sometimes layoffs happen for bad reasons related to mismanagement; but sometimes they reflect changes in demand for a product. How does a worker takeover of a factory solve a lack of demand?
2) Bosses aren’t arbitrarily inserted into organizations. They’re hired or appointed to do the work of structuring the organization, and coordinating and motivating employees. Are the cases Klein & Lewis talk about really doing away with managers?
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the notion of employee cooperatives is not exactly radical. From what I understand, they’re legal just about everywhere and indeed most modern economies have legislation in place specifically to foster their establishment. There’s nothing much discouraging their establishment, but they just haven’t sprung up much. Why? For an excellent analysis of various ownership options (including shareholder ownership, employee ownership, supplier ownership, and customer ownership), read: The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann.
(p.s. Here’s my review of Klein & Lewis’s movie, The Take.)
Discriminating Against the Non-Blind
Discrimination takes many forms, many of them hurtful and insidious. But discrimination is not always bad: in the broadest sense of the term, it just means to tell different things apart. But of course usually when we use the term, we’re referring to illegitimate discrimination, aimed at persons, based on irrelevant characteristics. For most purposes, discriminating based on race, sex, sexual orientation or physical characteristics is wrong. But even there, there are exceptions. Being able to see, for example, is a genuine necessity (what lawyers call a bona fide job requirement) if you’re a pilot. Could being unable to see ever be a bona fide job requirement. That’s a question recently faced by the Canadian charitable foundation known as CNIB (formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind).
Here’s the story, from the Toronto Star: Debate stirs over hiring of sighted CNIB head
When John Rafferty looks out the window of his modest third-floor corner office at CNIB’s Bayview Ave. headquarters, he can see the trees of a wooded ravine.
This is why an advocacy group calls his hiring “a step backward.”
This is why he speaks of “my unique challenges” and “taking time to understand” and being “extra careful.” This is why the leader of another charity says a genial man with a sterling resumé who left a lucrative private-sector job to occupy this corner office would, “in a perfect world,” be somewhere else.
This is John Rafferty’s burden. He can see. Rafferty’s predecessor, Jim Sanders, was blind. So was his predecessor, so was his predecessor, and so was every top executive in the 91-year history of CNIB, formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Rafferty, 43, is its first “sighted” president and CEO.
Summarizing briefly: there’s debate within the blind community (and in particular among various charities that work on behalf of the visually impaired) about whether being visually impaired is a bona fide job requirement to head up an organization like CNIB.
It’s interesting (and perhaps good) to see that there’s a healthy debate over this issue within the community. On one hand, everyone wants CNIB to do well, and doing well means having the very best leadership possible. If Rafferty is as good as CNIB’s hiring committee thinks he is, he could do a lot of good for the organization and the people it serves. Then again, it’s very difficult to measure (especially from the outside) the symbolic value of an organization having a leader who shares a crucial characteristic with the people it serves.
(p.s., Note the interesting similarities & dissimilarities between the story above and the one in this blog posting from January: “Smokers Need Not Apply”, about a job posting by an anti-smoking organization.)
The Business Ethics Blog 