Scotiabank’s staff ombudsperson tasked with helping resolve workplace conflicts
Sue Morris says she has a lonely job.
Life as a staff ombudsperson at Scotiabank means no lunches with colleagues, no chummy photographs with executives, and especially, no water cooler gossip.
She has to keep an emotional distance, because Morris has to constantly dispel the misconception that she’s anyone’s advocate.
“People tend to think an employee ombudsperson is an advocate for employees. In fact, we’re advocates for fair process,” said Morris. “We’re not advocates for the organization, for management, or for employees.”
The cornerstone of the practice being confidentiality, Morris can’t leave her desk without a careful scan of the surroundings to check for stray notes and phone numbers.
And the need to maintain confidence in her discretion is such that she couldn’t even offer hypothetical scenarios to describe the work she does day to day. Even the vaguest or most universal of situations could potentially cause someone at Scotiabank to wonder: “Was she talking about my case?”
In exchange for the socially ascetic life, Morris gets the opportunity to help resolve all manners of conflicts and misunderstandings among the bank’s 47,000 employees. Only she wouldn’t put it that way. Her job, she would say, is about keeping clear the lines of communication.
Scotiabank’s ombudsperson program, one of the longest standing in Canada, started in 1977. “The bank has a history of really fostering two-way communication and really wanting to learn from employee experiences, and they were committed to providing a resource for employees to come forward without fear of retaliation and speak confidentially,” said Morris.
Morris sees her role primarily as a sounding board, someone to bounce ideas off of and to help sort through the options.
“I think now, with so much emphasis on the self-management of employees’ careers, you’ll find that employees tend to think before they speak. So maybe before having a conversation with their manager or supervisor, or perhaps before talking to human resource, they want to talk it through with somebody unbiased,” said Morris.
As can be expected, the situations that are laid bare before her would typically involve difficulties with a colleague or a supervisor. Workload comes up time and again. As does anxiety about what the future looks like.
“Another misconception people have is they think the ombudsperson office is a last resort, or that everything else would have had to have gone wrong before they can use the service,” said Morris.
“That’s absolutely incorrect. We encourage employees to use the ombudsperson office at any point in the conflict resolution process, so perhaps even if they hadn’t spoken to their supervisor about the issue, we’re there to supplement the chain of communication.”
In situations of conflict, Morris’s approach is to bring about resolution at the lowest possible level, with minimal interference from third parties. That includes herself, in most cases. If a worker had a problem with his manager, Morris’s first tack would be to help the worker consider the options and find a way of raising the problem with the manager all by himself.
Taking as example the BMO employee who last year won damages after she had a burnout from chronic overwork, Morris said had the competitor bank had “a really integrated strategy around communication,” it would have lessened the likelihood of the situation reaching the legal arena.
“If that employee had worked here, she might have come to us at an early stage to say, ‘I’ve just been asked to take this assignment. I’m just sick about it. I’m not sure what I can do? Can I turn it down?’ And those are the kinds of questions people have,” said Morris.
But because her work is confidential, there’s little she can do to directly intervene. Even if the manager is intransigent, even if other staff reporting to him exhibit similar problems, all she can do is to approach the human resources person responsible for the whole division and ask, “When was the last time you did a training around accommodations and work-life balance?
It’s an approach that avoids “having any one individual singled out. Because the challenge, when you’re an ombudsperson, is you only hear one side of the story. If you don’t know the other side of the story, and if someone wants you to intervene, you have to be careful that you are doing the right thing. So you have to be creative.”
It’s a common tenet among many ethics consultants and experts that ombudsperson should be chosen from the ranks of the sage-like. Pick someone who has had vast experience in the company, but who’s on the way out, perhaps semi-retiring. These people are the least likely to be compromised by considerations such as their own personal advancement in the company, so goes the thinking.
But Morris doesn’t put that much stock in the idea. She just doesn’t see herself susceptible to conflict of interest.
“If you have to speak to someone about an issue, that’s the end of it. You don’t have a choice. You have to be a strong individual committed to the job. You have to sign a code of ethics and standards of practice that says you will surface everything. If you’re suggesting that there’s an ombudsperson who’s willing to compromise that, at the expense of an employee and for the betterment of their own career, that’s appalling to me,” said Morris.
“You come into the role with the commitment to really want to effect positive change. And you do that at any cost. If it’s to your cost, well, that’s unfortunate. But as an ombudsperson becomes more effective in marketing the business of ombudsing, then there’ll be more opportunity for an organization to embrace the role and accept that this is a way of doing business.”
Life as a staff ombudsperson at Scotiabank means no lunches with colleagues, no chummy photographs with executives, and especially, no water cooler gossip.
She has to keep an emotional distance, because Morris has to constantly dispel the misconception that she’s anyone’s advocate.
“People tend to think an employee ombudsperson is an advocate for employees. In fact, we’re advocates for fair process,” said Morris. “We’re not advocates for the organization, for management, or for employees.”
The cornerstone of the practice being confidentiality, Morris can’t leave her desk without a careful scan of the surroundings to check for stray notes and phone numbers.
And the need to maintain confidence in her discretion is such that she couldn’t even offer hypothetical scenarios to describe the work she does day to day. Even the vaguest or most universal of situations could potentially cause someone at Scotiabank to wonder: “Was she talking about my case?”
In exchange for the socially ascetic life, Morris gets the opportunity to help resolve all manners of conflicts and misunderstandings among the bank’s 47,000 employees. Only she wouldn’t put it that way. Her job, she would say, is about keeping clear the lines of communication.
Scotiabank’s ombudsperson program, one of the longest standing in Canada, started in 1977. “The bank has a history of really fostering two-way communication and really wanting to learn from employee experiences, and they were committed to providing a resource for employees to come forward without fear of retaliation and speak confidentially,” said Morris.
Morris sees her role primarily as a sounding board, someone to bounce ideas off of and to help sort through the options.
“I think now, with so much emphasis on the self-management of employees’ careers, you’ll find that employees tend to think before they speak. So maybe before having a conversation with their manager or supervisor, or perhaps before talking to human resource, they want to talk it through with somebody unbiased,” said Morris.
As can be expected, the situations that are laid bare before her would typically involve difficulties with a colleague or a supervisor. Workload comes up time and again. As does anxiety about what the future looks like.
“Another misconception people have is they think the ombudsperson office is a last resort, or that everything else would have had to have gone wrong before they can use the service,” said Morris.
“That’s absolutely incorrect. We encourage employees to use the ombudsperson office at any point in the conflict resolution process, so perhaps even if they hadn’t spoken to their supervisor about the issue, we’re there to supplement the chain of communication.”
In situations of conflict, Morris’s approach is to bring about resolution at the lowest possible level, with minimal interference from third parties. That includes herself, in most cases. If a worker had a problem with his manager, Morris’s first tack would be to help the worker consider the options and find a way of raising the problem with the manager all by himself.
Taking as example the BMO employee who last year won damages after she had a burnout from chronic overwork, Morris said had the competitor bank had “a really integrated strategy around communication,” it would have lessened the likelihood of the situation reaching the legal arena.
“If that employee had worked here, she might have come to us at an early stage to say, ‘I’ve just been asked to take this assignment. I’m just sick about it. I’m not sure what I can do? Can I turn it down?’ And those are the kinds of questions people have,” said Morris.
But because her work is confidential, there’s little she can do to directly intervene. Even if the manager is intransigent, even if other staff reporting to him exhibit similar problems, all she can do is to approach the human resources person responsible for the whole division and ask, “When was the last time you did a training around accommodations and work-life balance?
It’s an approach that avoids “having any one individual singled out. Because the challenge, when you’re an ombudsperson, is you only hear one side of the story. If you don’t know the other side of the story, and if someone wants you to intervene, you have to be careful that you are doing the right thing. So you have to be creative.”
It’s a common tenet among many ethics consultants and experts that ombudsperson should be chosen from the ranks of the sage-like. Pick someone who has had vast experience in the company, but who’s on the way out, perhaps semi-retiring. These people are the least likely to be compromised by considerations such as their own personal advancement in the company, so goes the thinking.
But Morris doesn’t put that much stock in the idea. She just doesn’t see herself susceptible to conflict of interest.
“If you have to speak to someone about an issue, that’s the end of it. You don’t have a choice. You have to be a strong individual committed to the job. You have to sign a code of ethics and standards of practice that says you will surface everything. If you’re suggesting that there’s an ombudsperson who’s willing to compromise that, at the expense of an employee and for the betterment of their own career, that’s appalling to me,” said Morris.
“You come into the role with the commitment to really want to effect positive change. And you do that at any cost. If it’s to your cost, well, that’s unfortunate. But as an ombudsperson becomes more effective in marketing the business of ombudsing, then there’ll be more opportunity for an organization to embrace the role and accept that this is a way of doing business.”
