Web 2.0 harkens new age of transparency for employers
Restaurant reviews, product reviews and recommended articles. The online world is rife with sites that let visitors rate pretty much anything under the sun. But candid commentary on employers is still largely absent on the Internet.
That might change with the appearance of websites such as RateMyEmployer.ca. With the tag line, “Who said background checks and pre-employment screenings should be reserved for employers only?” the website has garnered ratings on 1,400 employers in Canada since debuting in January.
Comments on the site are captivating in the way that overheard gossip is engrossing. One hears from anonymous commentators about bad management, hostile work cultures, inadequate pay, incompetence rewarded and good work unrecognized.
But there are plenty of positive comments as well. Raters also write of pride, fair treatment and potential for advancement. Indeed, employers on the list of the 10 highest rated organizations tend to be those found on other, more controlled employer rankings such as Canada’s Top 100 Employers or Best Employers in Canada.
Manuel Francisci, president of jobWings Careers, the Montreal-based job boards company behind RateMyEmployer.ca, said the goals of the site are two-fold. The first is to drive up traffic to the company’s many niche job boards, including jobWings.com and HRjob.ca.
The second is to respond to a growing tendency among the new generation of jobseekers to carefully consider how well they would fit in at a company.
“With Generation Y jobseekers, they’re not continually going to the job boards to look for a job. They’ll start by asking themselves where they want to work and if they’ll have a cultural fit with that employer,” said Francisci.
The best way to get information on what it’s like to work for an employer is to give employees a forum to share that information anonymously, he said. To try to make sure the comments represent the range of opinions out there, the company keeps track of the IP addresses of the raters. Someone wanting to rate an employer more than once would have to do so from a different computer each time.
“Plus, when it’s time to write their comments, the wording they use will often give them away,” said Francisci. “Other raters will often call them on it.”
As to be expected of any forum for feedback, the negative comments outnumber the positive, Francisci acknowledged. On a scale of one to five, the average score overall is 2.72.
“But it’s a good thing that there are positive marks and positive comments because, if it’s not balanced, then it would be boring,” he said.
And employers unhappy with how they’re perceived can request a special space on the site to post a reply to the comments, said Francisci. So far, not a single employer has asked to do so.
But one particularly aggrieved company did ask that all references to it be removed from the site, including all the ratings and comments about it.
“Because the law on Web 2.0 is not all that clear, we are asking a court to issue a declaratory ruling on that request. It’s a question of freedom of expression,” said Francisci. The ruling is expected this month.
However the court comes down on the issue, Francisci said employers had better get used to the public’s expectation for transparency in the information age.
“As an employer, if you don’t allow for transparency, you’ll create suspicion that you’re a bad employer. And you no longer can be a bad employer and think people won’t know it. People are talking on the Internet.”
The fact sites such as RateMyEmployer.ca or Jobvent.com exist speaks to a power imbalance in the workplace, said Mark Federman, a Toronto-based consultant and academic who published McLuhan for Managers — New Tools for New Thinking in 2003 and is now studying organizations of the future.
“There is, predominantly, not a safe environment for workers to honestly and openly speak their minds,” said Federman. “These sorts of employer review sites are a first step and should be taken as useful guidance by management as a way of surfacing issues that have no other outlet, and as a signal to create such safe venues of conversation within their own organizations.”
At Telus, the Vancouver-based telecommunications giant that has garnered a lot of negative commentary on the site, spokesperson Shawn Hall said he doesn’t consider the feedback representative of how employees feel about working there.
“That’s just one website. We get more accurate results with the twice annual ‘pulse check’ surveys we do to see what employees think. Based on that feedback, those comments (on RateMyEmployer.ca) would be on the extreme end,” said Hall.
He added, however, that Telus constantly trains its managers in people management skills, because if people are not satisfied with a boss the chances of them quitting are far greater.
That might change with the appearance of websites such as RateMyEmployer.ca. With the tag line, “Who said background checks and pre-employment screenings should be reserved for employers only?” the website has garnered ratings on 1,400 employers in Canada since debuting in January.
Comments on the site are captivating in the way that overheard gossip is engrossing. One hears from anonymous commentators about bad management, hostile work cultures, inadequate pay, incompetence rewarded and good work unrecognized.
But there are plenty of positive comments as well. Raters also write of pride, fair treatment and potential for advancement. Indeed, employers on the list of the 10 highest rated organizations tend to be those found on other, more controlled employer rankings such as Canada’s Top 100 Employers or Best Employers in Canada.
Manuel Francisci, president of jobWings Careers, the Montreal-based job boards company behind RateMyEmployer.ca, said the goals of the site are two-fold. The first is to drive up traffic to the company’s many niche job boards, including jobWings.com and HRjob.ca.
The second is to respond to a growing tendency among the new generation of jobseekers to carefully consider how well they would fit in at a company.
“With Generation Y jobseekers, they’re not continually going to the job boards to look for a job. They’ll start by asking themselves where they want to work and if they’ll have a cultural fit with that employer,” said Francisci.
The best way to get information on what it’s like to work for an employer is to give employees a forum to share that information anonymously, he said. To try to make sure the comments represent the range of opinions out there, the company keeps track of the IP addresses of the raters. Someone wanting to rate an employer more than once would have to do so from a different computer each time.
“Plus, when it’s time to write their comments, the wording they use will often give them away,” said Francisci. “Other raters will often call them on it.”
As to be expected of any forum for feedback, the negative comments outnumber the positive, Francisci acknowledged. On a scale of one to five, the average score overall is 2.72.
“But it’s a good thing that there are positive marks and positive comments because, if it’s not balanced, then it would be boring,” he said.
And employers unhappy with how they’re perceived can request a special space on the site to post a reply to the comments, said Francisci. So far, not a single employer has asked to do so.
But one particularly aggrieved company did ask that all references to it be removed from the site, including all the ratings and comments about it.
“Because the law on Web 2.0 is not all that clear, we are asking a court to issue a declaratory ruling on that request. It’s a question of freedom of expression,” said Francisci. The ruling is expected this month.
However the court comes down on the issue, Francisci said employers had better get used to the public’s expectation for transparency in the information age.
“As an employer, if you don’t allow for transparency, you’ll create suspicion that you’re a bad employer. And you no longer can be a bad employer and think people won’t know it. People are talking on the Internet.”
The fact sites such as RateMyEmployer.ca or Jobvent.com exist speaks to a power imbalance in the workplace, said Mark Federman, a Toronto-based consultant and academic who published McLuhan for Managers — New Tools for New Thinking in 2003 and is now studying organizations of the future.
“There is, predominantly, not a safe environment for workers to honestly and openly speak their minds,” said Federman. “These sorts of employer review sites are a first step and should be taken as useful guidance by management as a way of surfacing issues that have no other outlet, and as a signal to create such safe venues of conversation within their own organizations.”
At Telus, the Vancouver-based telecommunications giant that has garnered a lot of negative commentary on the site, spokesperson Shawn Hall said he doesn’t consider the feedback representative of how employees feel about working there.
“That’s just one website. We get more accurate results with the twice annual ‘pulse check’ surveys we do to see what employees think. Based on that feedback, those comments (on RateMyEmployer.ca) would be on the extreme end,” said Hall.
He added, however, that Telus constantly trains its managers in people management skills, because if people are not satisfied with a boss the chances of them quitting are far greater.
