Taxpayers must hold city hall accountable for its culture

City hall staffers work for us, and they will be more effective when they’re happier

According to a disturbing new report by City of Edmonton auditor David Wiun, almost 20 per cent of city staff feel they’ve been victims of workplace harassment or bullying.

Of those, only 36 per cent reported the alleged abuse. As an investigation this week by my Postmedia colleague Elise Stolte revealed, many employees have lost faith in a complaints system which, they say, does little or nothing to stop abusers, and which brings down means of retribution on those who speak up.

“It sounds terrible,” said Michelle Inness, a social psychologist and a professor of organizational behaviour at the University of Alberta’s School of Business. Inness’s specialty is the study of workplace aggression.

She’s rarely heard about a workplace as dysfunctional as city hall appears to be.

“It seems that this is pervasive in the culture. It’s not a few rogue people. It’s systemic,” Inness said.

“It’s extremely troubling. One in five people are saying that they are experiencing bullying, aggression and harassment, things most adults understand to be unacceptable behaviour. That’s abysmal.”

Given the city employs more than 14,000 full-time equiva- lents, that means some 2,800 employees are claiming they’ve been assaulted, harassed or made miserable by a supervisor or a colleague.

I don’t want you to just feel sorry for them. I want you to remember that those 14,000 work for you and I. We are their employers — and their clients. And when this municipality’s public service is this dysfunctional, we don’t get value for our money.

Workplace harassment leads to more sick-day claims, more disability claims, more wrongful-dismissal suits.

“The losses to an organization are substantial,” Inness said. “Harassment is related to lower levels of productivity and higher levels of turnover.”

And harassment culture spreads through an organization when people watch managers or colleagues bully with impunity.

“We emulate the behaviour that is modelled to us,” Inness said. “The trickle-down effect is really common. Negative and toxic behaviour gets passed along when people see that aggressive behaviour is let go, or even rewarded. Also, when we feel stressed and pressured ourselves, we can’t be at our best. So we respond with aggression, as we’re habituated to.”

And in a large bureaucracy, the problem can be difficult to solve.

“In any bureaucracy, you have lots and lots of layers of management, and lots of departmentalization ,” Inness said.

Inness’s colleague, Andrew Luchak, a professor of strategic management at the U of A School of Business, agrees the city’s corporate culture will be tough to fix.

“Power becomes very diffused in a larger bureaucracy,” he said. “There’s a decoupling between management policy and management practice and, as the organization grows, it’s harder to hold people accountable.”

Bullying is even more corrosive, he said, if employees don’t see complaints are handled fairly.

“When people don’t feel there’s an adequate form of redress, it sows seeds of cynicism and distrust. People who are victimized need to feel their voices are heard and that people are held accountable for their conduct.”

The city, he said, could start with more specific performance audits to determine which departments are facing the biggest problems. They could examine their recruiting and hiring systems to see if there are better ways to screen out emotionally unstable people. And critically, he said, the city, its human resources department and its unions need to work together to create a complaints system staff feel they can trust.

An external hotline, he suggests, would be a good place to start.

“People need some kind of mechanism to restore their faith.”

But symbolic changes alone won’t cut it, Luchak said: “Only once you start to hold the hierarchy responsible for the health and safety of those they supervise can you address these issues.”

And there we have the crux of the matter. If the city’s most senior managers — and its elected mayor and councillors — don’t address this matter seriously, there will be no sea change. A problem this systemic, this culturally ingrained, doesn’t get fixed overnight. And it doesn’t get fixed at all if city leaders deny and minimize and obfuscate.

As voters, as citizens, we have the right to expect our public service will serve us without making workers miserable and without wasting public time and money.

Who will hold the hierarchy responsible? That’s up to city workers. And it’s up to us, their bosses, too.