Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Be a Team Player and Get Shafted Quietly?

If you’ve agreed to pay your personnel according to a given arrangement, you stick with it. But what if you decide to shaft your team and ask them to be nice little team players and take it quietly?  What does that say about you?

That’s basically what’s happening at the organization where I work. And it’s wrong.

My workplace is unionized, though I myself have been in and out of the ranks of “staff” and “management”.  There are collective agreements in place.  One of the elements in the agreements is payment for overtime.  If that is the agreement you have with your people, that is what you ought to honour. But the unspoken culture on this point (amongst others) is don’t-ask-don’t-tell.

All unionized staff are eligible for overtime compensation.  But these are office folks, not Teamsters.  So they work the overtime hours, but either nobody tells them they’re eligible for overtime pay or they are pressured not to say anything about it.  Demand overtime pay and you’re not a “team player”.  I hate that term, by the way.  But only team players get the opportunities that lead to promotion.  So shut the f*** up, get back in line, and keep working quietly.

That’s pile of pure, steaming manure fresh from the bull’s back-end.  And I’m saying this as someone who’s been in a managerial position, and someone with at least some business sense.

If you have an agreement with your people, you honor it.  Not doing so is a clear, unequivocal statement about how closely senior management really takes to heart the oft-repeated mantra, “Our people are our most valuable asset.”

You show you value your people by respecting them.  Part of how you respect your people is by honoring your word and keeping your agreements with them.

Sometimes this let’s-pay-‘em-as-little-as-we-can-get-away-with game gets ludicrous.  In this case, it involves a member of my crew and it’s getting me angry.  One of my summer students from this past summer still has not been paid for her overtime hours.  Payroll is citing technicalities and passing me off to HR; HR is saying this is a Payroll matter and bouncing me back to Payroll.

I checked with HR before making an agreement with my crewmember. Now that agreement is not being upheld by the bureaucratic machinery, and it’s reflecting poorly on me and on the organization.

The organization says it wants to recruit and retain young talent, to win the cream of the crop in the war for talent.  This is one helluva way to do the exact opposite.

The organization neither keeps its word to its unionized personnel nor keeps its word to its summer students whom it says it wants to attract.  The latter is an example of bureaucratic ineptitude, which you have to admit every large organization exhibits – but the objective is to try to eliminate them.  The former, however, is manipulative, dishonorable, and reflects piss-poor character.

Yes, the organization I work with is one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers.

A Good System Sees Quickly & Talks Fast

Kingston is a leader. The City of Kingston, and the KFLA Public Health Unit have a system that sees quickly, talks fast, and heads off health problems faster than anyone else in Ontario. I’ve been dealing with flu assessment centres in Ontario these past few weeks, and Kingston was a leader all the way through.

When the pandemic H1N1 (pH1N1) virus and public awareness came front and center, the health system was inundated and overloaded. Primary care and hospitals saw people rushing to them like they do Walmart on Black Friday in the United States. Thankfully nobody was trampled, but the system took time to respond. It took time to set up flu assessment centers to take some of the surge in demand off the emergency departments and local doctors’ offices.

The question when a fire starts in your kitchen is not so much “will it be put out?” Of course it will be – either by you early on, or by the fire department after half your house has been scorched like a butter-coated marshmallow held over an industrial furnace. The really important question is “when will it be put out?”

So it is with health emergencies. Of course things will return to normal. Eventually. The question is when, and after how much cost and damage. Sooner is better than later – better for the system, better for the public, better for the taxpayer, and like it or not, better for politicians too.

I learned today that Kingston has something called the Syndromic Surveillance System. They see a spike in respiratory cases in the local Emergency Departments, or a spike in gastointestinal cases. Even before confirmed lab results come in, before the Province itself knows, they see patterns developing across the Kingston area.

They saw flu assessment demand go up before anyone else did. That’s why they set up and activated their flu assessment centres before anyone else did. In fact, they’ve peaked, gone back to normal, and have shut down their assessment centres even as other regions are still playing catchup and only now setting up their assessment centres.

Kingston came, saw, conquered, and left the playing field before the others even stepped onto the field.

And it wasn’t a one-time fluke. They did this with an E.coli outbreak some time ago too. They saw something happening, and like Bruce Lee, responded with lightning fast reflexes. They may even have made funny sounds and have had subtitles while doing so, I don’t know.

How do they do this? The see things quickly *and* they talk fast. Thanks to the Syndromic Surveillance System – which is a system of observation, reporting, and communication, not some technology package you can buy – they see patterns across hospitals and communicate ASAP with the local public health unit. They see what’s happening, and involve the people with the authority and pursestrings to develop an area-wide response.

You and I see things as individuals, yes. Unless you’re wearing superdark sunglasses at night and are listening to your iPod. But usually we see things. That’s kinda cool, but it’s not enough.

The system itself has to see. Not just one or two people. Not even a whole department. Emergency departments at hospitals have said, “We’ve been going nuts handling people with flu-like symptoms for 2 weeks before you guys even mentioned starting up assessment centres.” Well, why didn’t that message make it out beyond their walls?

You gotta see quickly, *and* you gotta talk fast. Seeing without talking quickly to the people who can do something for you is worth about as much as subtitles to an illiterate audience.

Think about the systems around you. Think about the systems you’re part of. Yeah, that includes your family and friends. How fast does the system see new developments? How quickly does one part of the system talk to another?

Think about it and do something about it before that fire starts in your kitchen, that emergency happens in your community, or that unspeakable horror called a Paris Hilton appearance happens.

I’ll bet dollars to donuts that Kingston would respond before Paris Hilton got within 250km of the city.

Pandemic pressure squeezes out all kinds of people

We have some very dedicated and conscientious physicians and pharmacists out there – but we also have some who are still driven by dollars and cents.  I’ve had an interesting experience with the Province of Ontario’s response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic these past few weeks.  I’ve seen some of the back-end of how the health system is responding to the situation.  That’s because I’ve been manning the phones at one of the Province’s telephone support lines, and I’ve seen and heard a few things either directly or through my colleagues.

The Province has purchased a huge whackload of Tamiflu antiviral medication, and it is giving it for free to anyone who needs it because they (a) have H1N1 – which is every frickin’ person out there right now who has flu (seriously) – and (b) are at risk of complications from the flu because of underlying health conditions, etc etc.  Some pharmacists are very conscientious and ask if they should really be filling prescriptions for patients who come in for Tamiflu, but whom they know have no health issues that put them at risk of complications.  On the other hand, some pharmacists ask if they have to use the government stock and give it for free when the patients have a drug plan that will pay for the drug from the pharmacy’s commercial stock.  They still want to make a few more bucks off this.

Is this wrong?  No, I don’t think so, but I think the aroma has a hint of stink to it.

Now what about physicians?  Yes, there are many hardworking physicians in our system who deserve kudos and our appreciation.  There are also those for whom it’s about the dollars and about showing them the money.  I won’t say what doctors are making at the Province’s flu assessment centres, but it’s a fair bit.  It makes what unionized auto workers at GM make working on overtime look like chump change, though.  Well, we’ve come across doctors who won’t work at the flu assessment centres simply because it’s not enough money.  It’s more money in one hour than many people make in a day, but it’s not enough.

You decide for yourself what that shows, and what you think about that.

I’ll just close by saying all of this reminds me of something I heard from a family friend.  Actually, he’s almost a relative.  He’s a lawyer – maybe that says it all, I don’t know.  When we asked him to help us on a legal issue, he told us “My rate of $600 an hour is a bargain.”  If that’s what he’s charging to family, I’m curious to find out what he charges Joe Schmoe off the street.

There are good doctors out there.  There are good pharmacists.  Maybe there are good lawyers too, but then again maybe fairies are real.  In any case, pressure reveals a lot – and in the case of our medical system, the pandemic pressure squeezes out all kinds of people.