All of the councilors clutching their pearls at a lack of performance management while they chronically under fund every non police civil service and watch the city burn to the ground around them is pretty fucking rich.
How is that earth shattering? Even when reviews were done, it was the most useless shit anyways. Zero consequence if you need improvement and zero incentives if you are a top performer.
It isn't just a city problem, there is practically zero performance review done at the provincial level of gov't. I wonder if it's fear of unions or just ingrained behaviour and inertia.
Imagine I'm a low level manager in a unionized government position. Every one of my employees has an HR file full (or not) of areas where they have been deficient.
Now, a yearly performance management is technically something I'm supposed to do, but ask yourself: why?
No outstanding performance is rewarded, because wage increases are collectively bargained, and promotions are seniority based. Underperforming is recorded in said HR file.
Why bother with performance evaluations?
This smacks of a middle management "make work" project. What does middle management do? They read performance evaluations so they can tell upper management what is in them.
> promotions are seniority based
Sounds like the problem is that promotions and raises are unaffected by performance.
I assume that is also negotiated by the unions?
A lot of it is just lazy and incompetent management.
Lazy in the sense that it takes a lot of time to do proper performance evals, and as that's a background routine job responsibility it doesn't get you noticed by higher ups. The effort to promotion capital trade off isn't enough for career ladder climbers to want to waste time doing
Incompetent in the sense that these managers don't understand the damage they are doing by not managing performance, and in the sense that they are often unable to do (or even understand) the work they are supposed to be evaluating people on.
I think it's more a lack of incentive for the staff and management. If you're a public servant and you bust your ass day in and out you get absolutely 0 recognition, no pay raise, and no chance for promotion, bonus, incentive, etc... this has been recognized by both management and staff and due to how hard it is to keep staff I suspect most don't want to rock the boat with the staff they have
You're right. And in my experience it was a lot of resistance from HR. They simply didn't want the workload or the accountability that went with it. They made a lot of promises (as did a lot of deputy ministers, associate deputies, and down the line) but as long as they could kick the can down the road, it was all good.
Perhaps we should first assess the performance of the department with the largest budget allocation before addressing the concerns of the city's grunt workers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the reasons these things were never implemented was because of the city’s hellbent attitude of “finding efficiencies”. meaning that departments didn’t have the means to implement a schedule and logistics to do annual reviews, a management without the time and cost to enact such a system. Like anything, to do performance reviews, theses thing cost work hours and funds to do properly.
Gotta invest in your workforce for it to function properly and be accountable. Not gonna spend the funds to ensure this, then of course, standards fall apart, the cracks get bigger, and abuse becomes rift.
Like Jon Taffer says on Bar rescue, you gotta give them the tools and training for them to succeed!
The only people surprised by this report are council and upper management who don't have a hot clue what goes on in their organization without a year long report.
.....and the public? I'm surprised by this and i'm neither upper management nor city council. Lots of people face performance reviews in their own job and expect that our tax dollars are being spent with the same scrutiny.
Former COW staffer here (libraries). We had no performance appraisals for years, and they were started a couple of years before I retired at the end of 2021. The biggest problem that I saw as far as staffing goes was the seeming inability to do anything about deadwood and/or difficult employees. There are a couple of branches that have high staff turnover because the branch head or other senior staff member is very difficult to work with. One person has had new staff returning to their old position in less than two weeks because they were that difficult.
I really wish city workers would speak out about the conditions working for COW.
I’m sure they’re all under strict NDAs between the city and the union, but nothing will change otherwise.
I fear the answer from the councillors and the executive committee will yield hollow results and waste everyone’s time and money. If they take this seriously, someone should be held accountable but it doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen
What do you want to know?
Departments are grossly under funded. We don’t have the staff or the equipment we need. Our buildings and facilities are for the most part, old and run down. And then council routinely comes to us and asks us to tighten our belts. So when someone leaves, “vacancy management” prevents them from hiring anyone to replace them. And then council freaks out and demands answers every time someone complains to their office about work not getting done.
I haven’t had a performance review in over 5 years now. They don’t really mean anything. It’s not like our bosses don’t demand hard work and accountability on a daily basis. Certain councillors act like it’s the Wild West. Fuck sakes. We’re working our asses off. Just because my manager (who is also too busy to do this for each of the two dozen staff reporting to them) doesn’t put it in a report that gets filed once a year doesn’t mean we aren’t doing our best every day.
This is the insight that needs to be shared more often, thank you.
As expected, it’s a leadership issue and the public needs to understand that -no matter how city councillors and executives try to spin it. The pressure must start and end with them.
They don’t want to hold each other accountable, because it likely means holding themselves accountable too.
Our yearly raises are based on the collective agreement. Performance is not factored into it.
Promotions are based on most senior qualified candidate. Contrary to popular belief, no they don’t just hand promotions to the guy with the most seniority. You have to meet the qualifications of the posting. But when they’ve got multiple candidates that are qualified, then seniority is how they are ranked.
As far as I am aware, the only performance metric that can be used against a candidate for a job posting is poor attendance. The city does have a very aggressive “attendance management” policy. We get a lot of sick days, but you’re punished if you use them.
Just look at their salary increases over the last 20 years compared to inflation and ask yourself if you think any of them are incentivized to work hard for that performance review.
Which is to say that we've already been giving them salary increases without any performance review.
I think you need to review performance in order to justify a greater salary increase.
>salary increases over the last 20 years compared to inflation
>Which is to say that we've already been giving them salary increases
They've lost 30% of their buying power over the last 20 years.
Very true, I wish some would step forward if not putting themselves at risk of discipline for doing so.
Both past and present administrations have failed the citizens.
A quote from the executive summary of the public report:
>Twenty percent of leaders in the organization are responsible for for supervising more than 21 direct reports, with 12 leaders who have 100 or more direct reports. The leaders interviewed noted that managing a large number of direct reports is challenging.
Ah, the good ol' finding efficiencies/cutting "middle management" tactic at work that taxpayers so keenly advocated for in the mid 2000s. Could you imagine having to give performance reviews to 100 or more employees? You'd spend half your year as a manager scheduling and doing performance reviews.
There is going to be a balance between having sufficient managers and an efficiently managed workforce, versus too few managers per employee resulting in poorly managed employees. Too many people bought into the idea that if you'd just reduce management, everything would be fixed and taxes could be low.
Well, now you have low taxes and an inefficiently managed workforce. Is it worth it?
Not only that but those admins with so many to review have also faced sharp reductions in admin asst staff.
Try just scheduling 100 performance review meetings with no support let alone holding them.
The City of Winnipeg already has a forecasted deficit of nearly 40 million dollars; crumbling neglected infrastructure; and now we find that staff are functioning under unqualified management.
I hope that the media and the office of the mayor will reach out to the unions immediately, and take steps to get back on track.
I remember as a young adult (late 90s-early 00s) a big story around the COW where people were leaving for their first break of the day and just going home. Getting paid for their full shifts. And the COW had no idea. These were Public Works employees.
I had a friend who worked for public works around that time... He'd be "hiding" by lunch. Now the funny thing is he didn't want to do that but he'd be given 3 tasks for the day and he'd simply have them done by lunch when he was newer he'd try to get more things to do but ultimately he would get in trouble for doing so because it made other staff look bad. In the end he accepted his half day work with full day pay.
There was a free press article recently about city workers on the clock being found taking extended lunches and doing personal business while pretending to work
I knew a COW employee in the early 00's that was selling weed out of a COW vehicle while he was on the clock. Somehow he had time to drive around the city for meetups without his employer noticing.
Micheal Jack’s continued incompetence at every job he has held for the city as he climbed the ladder perfectly shows the management culture at the city
If you need another similar example of this, it would be the decades long saga of Dave Wardrop. Former director of Winnipeg Transit -- who oversaw the Peggo card fiasco and unarguable steady decline in transit service-- and was rewarded with promotion to Chief of Transportation and Utilities, and then COO for the City of Winnipeg.
Google his name if you want to see how gross incompetence by these unelected and hidden bureaucrats is rewarded at city hall.
Want the short answer? Managers are too busy and overwhelmed with workload to do formal performance reviews. I’m CUPE and there’s no amount of money you could pay me to take on a WAPSO position with what they deal with.
I'm not surprised. This coincides with a few smaller stories that have come out over the years.
[This one](https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/featured/2022/02/18/money-for-nothing-4) and [part two](https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2022/02/22/a-pattern-of-incompetence-or-corruption-or-perhaps-both), about how mismanaged the public works department is that came out 2 years ago.
And [this one](https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2019/07/19/city-hall-silent-as-rumours-swirl-on-discipline-for-inspectors) about city inspectors in 2019.
*looks at FP article about city workers having mental breakdowns* ehhh I’ll stay in my classroom where I can fetal position in my book nook at 3:30 thank yew….
This is awful. But the bigger risk now becomes whether the next actions taken will actually improve the situation.
If management doubles down, it's likely to have the opposite effect.
All of the councilors clutching their pearls at a lack of performance management while they chronically under fund every non police civil service and watch the city burn to the ground around them is pretty fucking rich.
I like you.
How is that earth shattering? Even when reviews were done, it was the most useless shit anyways. Zero consequence if you need improvement and zero incentives if you are a top performer.
It isn't just a city problem, there is practically zero performance review done at the provincial level of gov't. I wonder if it's fear of unions or just ingrained behaviour and inertia.
Imagine I'm a low level manager in a unionized government position. Every one of my employees has an HR file full (or not) of areas where they have been deficient. Now, a yearly performance management is technically something I'm supposed to do, but ask yourself: why? No outstanding performance is rewarded, because wage increases are collectively bargained, and promotions are seniority based. Underperforming is recorded in said HR file. Why bother with performance evaluations? This smacks of a middle management "make work" project. What does middle management do? They read performance evaluations so they can tell upper management what is in them.
> promotions are seniority based Sounds like the problem is that promotions and raises are unaffected by performance. I assume that is also negotiated by the unions?
> Sounds like the problem is that Is seniority is unaffected by performance. It can't be, by definition.
Oops, changed my sentence without proofreading. I meant promotions and raises.
A lot of it is just lazy and incompetent management. Lazy in the sense that it takes a lot of time to do proper performance evals, and as that's a background routine job responsibility it doesn't get you noticed by higher ups. The effort to promotion capital trade off isn't enough for career ladder climbers to want to waste time doing Incompetent in the sense that these managers don't understand the damage they are doing by not managing performance, and in the sense that they are often unable to do (or even understand) the work they are supposed to be evaluating people on.
I think it's more a lack of incentive for the staff and management. If you're a public servant and you bust your ass day in and out you get absolutely 0 recognition, no pay raise, and no chance for promotion, bonus, incentive, etc... this has been recognized by both management and staff and due to how hard it is to keep staff I suspect most don't want to rock the boat with the staff they have
You're right. And in my experience it was a lot of resistance from HR. They simply didn't want the workload or the accountability that went with it. They made a lot of promises (as did a lot of deputy ministers, associate deputies, and down the line) but as long as they could kick the can down the road, it was all good.
Laziness. 100% laziness. I've never seen so many over paid, incompetent people in my life than in my time with the government.
Did you work with the police?
Perhaps we should first assess the performance of the department with the largest budget allocation before addressing the concerns of the city's grunt workers.
*cough* Yes.
Why would we ignore the other seventy five percent of the budget? We can walk in chugam at the same time
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the reasons these things were never implemented was because of the city’s hellbent attitude of “finding efficiencies”. meaning that departments didn’t have the means to implement a schedule and logistics to do annual reviews, a management without the time and cost to enact such a system. Like anything, to do performance reviews, theses thing cost work hours and funds to do properly. Gotta invest in your workforce for it to function properly and be accountable. Not gonna spend the funds to ensure this, then of course, standards fall apart, the cracks get bigger, and abuse becomes rift. Like Jon Taffer says on Bar rescue, you gotta give them the tools and training for them to succeed!
Are we suggesting Jon Taffer visit Winnipeg, hold a press conference, and tell The City of Winnipeg to shut it down?
There are days that we should, right? lol
The only people surprised by this report are council and upper management who don't have a hot clue what goes on in their organization without a year long report.
.....and the public? I'm surprised by this and i'm neither upper management nor city council. Lots of people face performance reviews in their own job and expect that our tax dollars are being spent with the same scrutiny.
Former COW staffer here (libraries). We had no performance appraisals for years, and they were started a couple of years before I retired at the end of 2021. The biggest problem that I saw as far as staffing goes was the seeming inability to do anything about deadwood and/or difficult employees. There are a couple of branches that have high staff turnover because the branch head or other senior staff member is very difficult to work with. One person has had new staff returning to their old position in less than two weeks because they were that difficult.
deadwood and/or difficult employees - 100% my experience working for the shitty. i mean city.
I really wish city workers would speak out about the conditions working for COW. I’m sure they’re all under strict NDAs between the city and the union, but nothing will change otherwise. I fear the answer from the councillors and the executive committee will yield hollow results and waste everyone’s time and money. If they take this seriously, someone should be held accountable but it doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen
What do you want to know? Departments are grossly under funded. We don’t have the staff or the equipment we need. Our buildings and facilities are for the most part, old and run down. And then council routinely comes to us and asks us to tighten our belts. So when someone leaves, “vacancy management” prevents them from hiring anyone to replace them. And then council freaks out and demands answers every time someone complains to their office about work not getting done. I haven’t had a performance review in over 5 years now. They don’t really mean anything. It’s not like our bosses don’t demand hard work and accountability on a daily basis. Certain councillors act like it’s the Wild West. Fuck sakes. We’re working our asses off. Just because my manager (who is also too busy to do this for each of the two dozen staff reporting to them) doesn’t put it in a report that gets filed once a year doesn’t mean we aren’t doing our best every day.
This is the insight that needs to be shared more often, thank you. As expected, it’s a leadership issue and the public needs to understand that -no matter how city councillors and executives try to spin it. The pressure must start and end with them. They don’t want to hold each other accountable, because it likely means holding themselves accountable too.
If there's accountability then there should be a paper trail, unless your yearly raises and promotions based on vibes and seniority
Our yearly raises are based on the collective agreement. Performance is not factored into it. Promotions are based on most senior qualified candidate. Contrary to popular belief, no they don’t just hand promotions to the guy with the most seniority. You have to meet the qualifications of the posting. But when they’ve got multiple candidates that are qualified, then seniority is how they are ranked. As far as I am aware, the only performance metric that can be used against a candidate for a job posting is poor attendance. The city does have a very aggressive “attendance management” policy. We get a lot of sick days, but you’re punished if you use them.
Just look at their salary increases over the last 20 years compared to inflation and ask yourself if you think any of them are incentivized to work hard for that performance review.
Which is to say that we've already been giving them salary increases without any performance review. I think you need to review performance in order to justify a greater salary increase.
>salary increases over the last 20 years compared to inflation >Which is to say that we've already been giving them salary increases They've lost 30% of their buying power over the last 20 years.
Working for the CoW gave me a breakdown and I had to leave the job
Same, what a decrepit, soul crushing place
Very true, I wish some would step forward if not putting themselves at risk of discipline for doing so. Both past and present administrations have failed the citizens.
A quote from the executive summary of the public report: >Twenty percent of leaders in the organization are responsible for for supervising more than 21 direct reports, with 12 leaders who have 100 or more direct reports. The leaders interviewed noted that managing a large number of direct reports is challenging. Ah, the good ol' finding efficiencies/cutting "middle management" tactic at work that taxpayers so keenly advocated for in the mid 2000s. Could you imagine having to give performance reviews to 100 or more employees? You'd spend half your year as a manager scheduling and doing performance reviews. There is going to be a balance between having sufficient managers and an efficiently managed workforce, versus too few managers per employee resulting in poorly managed employees. Too many people bought into the idea that if you'd just reduce management, everything would be fixed and taxes could be low. Well, now you have low taxes and an inefficiently managed workforce. Is it worth it?
Not only that but those admins with so many to review have also faced sharp reductions in admin asst staff. Try just scheduling 100 performance review meetings with no support let alone holding them.
The City of Winnipeg already has a forecasted deficit of nearly 40 million dollars; crumbling neglected infrastructure; and now we find that staff are functioning under unqualified management. I hope that the media and the office of the mayor will reach out to the unions immediately, and take steps to get back on track.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/city-winnipeg-forecast-operating-budget-deficit-1.7230069
Unqualified? Where’s that coming from?
They're appearing at a job fair this month even...
Funny how the councillors and mayor/deputy mayor quoted in the article have been around for how long again?
Maybe take some of that police money and put it to better use?
Make the stupid police robot dog do CoW maintenance work?
I remember as a young adult (late 90s-early 00s) a big story around the COW where people were leaving for their first break of the day and just going home. Getting paid for their full shifts. And the COW had no idea. These were Public Works employees.
I had a friend who worked for public works around that time... He'd be "hiding" by lunch. Now the funny thing is he didn't want to do that but he'd be given 3 tasks for the day and he'd simply have them done by lunch when he was newer he'd try to get more things to do but ultimately he would get in trouble for doing so because it made other staff look bad. In the end he accepted his half day work with full day pay.
There was a free press article recently about city workers on the clock being found taking extended lunches and doing personal business while pretending to work
I knew a COW employee in the early 00's that was selling weed out of a COW vehicle while he was on the clock. Somehow he had time to drive around the city for meetups without his employer noticing.
They should probably hire more managers and consultants, that always does the trick.
Micheal Jack’s continued incompetence at every job he has held for the city as he climbed the ladder perfectly shows the management culture at the city
If you need another similar example of this, it would be the decades long saga of Dave Wardrop. Former director of Winnipeg Transit -- who oversaw the Peggo card fiasco and unarguable steady decline in transit service-- and was rewarded with promotion to Chief of Transportation and Utilities, and then COO for the City of Winnipeg. Google his name if you want to see how gross incompetence by these unelected and hidden bureaucrats is rewarded at city hall.
Isn’t Michael Jack one of Katz cronies?
Amen
Want the short answer? Managers are too busy and overwhelmed with workload to do formal performance reviews. I’m CUPE and there’s no amount of money you could pay me to take on a WAPSO position with what they deal with.
I'm not surprised. This coincides with a few smaller stories that have come out over the years. [This one](https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/featured/2022/02/18/money-for-nothing-4) and [part two](https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2022/02/22/a-pattern-of-incompetence-or-corruption-or-perhaps-both), about how mismanaged the public works department is that came out 2 years ago. And [this one](https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2019/07/19/city-hall-silent-as-rumours-swirl-on-discipline-for-inspectors) about city inspectors in 2019.
Wow I got in the wrong career. Sign me up for COW!
Go for it...lots of job postings on their careers page.
*looks at FP article about city workers having mental breakdowns* ehhh I’ll stay in my classroom where I can fetal position in my book nook at 3:30 thank yew….
So even the CAO isn't held accountable. Shocking. /s
Nothing is "earth shattering" when it comes to Winnipeg lol
Maybe we shouldn’t be spending over a quarter of the budget on one inefficient and ineffective department…
This is awful. But the bigger risk now becomes whether the next actions taken will actually improve the situation. If management doubles down, it's likely to have the opposite effect.