National Gallery staff give brass low marks in survey
Not even one in five employees of the National Gallery of Canada feels that its senior management makes effective and timely decisions, suggests a confidential internal survey, conducted in February and obtained by the Ottawa Citizen.
“There is a high level of employee dissatisfaction with decision-making at the highest levels,” says the survey, conducted for the National Gallery by national career coaching and counselling company CareerJoy. Responding to the statement “Senior management makes effective and timely decisions,” just 16 per cent of respondents agreed, while 27 per cent were neutral and 57 per cent disagreed.
The CareerJoy survey of employee engagement was conducted several months before controversy
erupted about the gallery’s plan to sell the Marc Chagall painting La Tour Eiffel. The Gallery had intended to sell the work, one of two by the celebrated FrenchRussian painter in its collection, for as much as $9 million U.S. to raise funds for an intended acquisition. Throughout April, that decision and its aftermath prompted public outcry. The decision was reversed April 26 by the gallery’s board of trustees, and this month the Chagall work was withdrawn from auction after an anonymous donor paid an undisclosed amount to Christie’s, the auction house, on the gallery’s behalf.
The February survey, which asked gallery staff to consider more than a dozen statements, also gauged staff confidence in senior management.
Only 45 per cent of respondents said they had confidence in senior management’s leadership “to achieve (the gallery’s) stated goals and priorities,” while 20 per cent were neutral and 35 per cent disagreed.
The survey received responses from 202 gallery employees, who together make up 72 per cent of the institution’s staff. The report notes that respondents are well distributed throughout the gallery ’s organization chart, and that the survey sample is diverse in terms of respondents’ ages and the number of years that they have worked at the gallery.
The survey results also revealed strong dissatisfaction with senior management’s communications within the institution. Only 46 per cent of respondents agreed that there is “open and honest twoway communication” between management and staff, and only 31 per cent agreed that “essential information flows effectively from senior management to staff.”
Similarly, just 50 per cent agreed that the gallery “clearly communicates its vision, mission and goals to all staff.”
Despite the dissatisfactions with senior management, 88 per cent of respondents still affirmed that they liked their jobs, and 84 per cent agreed they had a sense of satisfaction from their work. Seventy-five per cent agreed they would recommend the gallery as “a good place to work.”
Josée-Britanie Mallet, senior media and public relations officer for the gallery, said: “We view the employee survey as a tool for improvement. It revealed that there are some very strong drivers of engagement; it also showed there are some areas that need attention.
“We are working through the results with our employees to prioritize the areas for improvement and will develop an action plan together,” Mallet said.
For their part, a majority of survey respondents were not confident about followup by senior management. Given the statement “I believe that senior management will try to address concerns raised in this survey,” 45 per cent of respondents disagreed, 26 per cent remained neutral and just 29 per cent agreed.
Mallet did not address specific questions pertaining to decisionmaking and communications by senior management. Nor did she say whether the gallery’s board of trustees had been made aware of the survey.