Hard-pressed bosses who had trouble recruiting talent before the COVID-19 pandemic are now scrambling to cut turnover, reduce employee stress and make their businesses magnets for talent.

Fortunately, there’s one solution to all three problems: converting your company to employee ownership. In an era when business success depends on having caring, creative employees, there’s no team like a group of peers who trust each other, set objectives together – and share the rewards.

In the U.S. and the U.K., enthusiasm for employee ownership is well established. In Canada, which has no special legal mechanisms to promote employee ownership, support is mainly theoretical. A survey last spring by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business found that 59% of business owners favour introducing policies similar to those in the U.S. and U.K., and 53% said they’d be more likely to sell shares to their employees if such policies are introduced.

The U.K. began prioritizing employee share ownership plans following a 2012 report, by the Yorkshire-based Employee Ownership Association, that said modern British business just wasn’t working: “Excessive profit-chasing, failures of accountability, low levels of employee engagement have damaged many British businesses, and undermine their capacity to deliver value to customers and high quality jobs.” By contrast, employee-owned firms emphasize quality of life, accountability and transparency.

Now employee ownership is growing fast. The White Rose Centre for Employee Ownership says the number of U.K. firms with employee ownership plans jumped 30%, to 730, between June 2020 and June 2021. With the pandemic pressuring businesses to become more innovative and resilient, experts expect another record year in fiscal 2022.

If you have employees who feel safe, honoured and respected, they’re going to give their best.

-Barbara Fagan-Smith of ROI Communication Inc.

The U.S. has long supported employee ownership through legislation that allows business owners to transfer shares to their employees, and be compensated over time through the earnings of the company. About 6,300 U.S. companies now have employee-ownership plans; 260 new firms make the transition every year. Surprisingly, the total number of companies with employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) has declined in recent years. But one observer tells Corporate Knights that’s because employee-owned firms have become popular targets for other companies trying to grow through acquisitions.

Toronto-based Social Capital Partners is heading a campaign to convince Ottawa that Canada needs more employee-ownership mechanisms, but change could take years. In the meantime, one San Francisco entrepreneur says business owners should do all they can to put their employees in charge. Barbara Fagan-Smith of ROI Communication Inc., which advises corporate clients on internal communications, says she founded her consultancy 20 years ago with an employee-first culture. “If you have employees who feel safe, honoured and respected, they’re going to give their best,” she says. She says converting to ESOP status last summer had immediate impact. As employees began thinking like owners, they took more interest in the business and identified more with its goals. They worked more confidently, collaborated more smoothly and started engaging with strategies and financial statements.

Ownership mythology says an ESOP’s first year can be a big growth year, and Fagan-Smith confirms that’s been the case at ROI, which recorded three of its best months ever in 2021 and hired 15 new people.

While business owners get paid over time for the shares they give up, Fagan-Smith says she could have made more money selling ROI to one of several consulting firms that offered to acquire it. She turned them all down, knowing no buyer could preserve ROI’s special culture.

Fagan-Smith says she’ll net less from the ESOP, but she takes more joy in knowing the organization she built will survive intact. And she’ll be there, too, working alongside her colleagues as one of 200 employee-owners.

The post Is employee ownership a better way for businesses to beat the Big Quit? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The financial crisis was only 12 years ago, but it seems almost everything has changed since.

At that time, policy was myopically concerned with two things. First, restoring liquidity in financial markets; central banks took unprecedented steps to do that. Second, bolstering aggregate demand through very large fiscal stimulus packages.

The crisis was devastating. But it and the policy responses did not seem all that complex. The fiscal stimulus was mostly of a conventional form. Lots of shovels-in-the-ground sort of thing. And it was almost all focused on the near-term. Indeed, Canada, like almost all other countries, dramatically swung to austerity just 24 months into the crisis aftermath, when the economy was still far from recovered.

Governments should, and appear to, have a lot more on their minds today.

Yes, there is some need to bolster aggregate demand for goods and services. But the pandemic has also hit aggregate supply hard, and that requires different approaches.

The focus is much longer-term now. There is a realization, at least in Canada, that we are slipping into a path of much lower potential growth, jeopardizing the well-being and the sustainability of the country’s finances as well as their ability to deliver needed public services.

There is also a realization that the historical sources of growth for Canada may not be there in the future. In 2008, Canada was years into a resource boom. It was dented by the crisis, but prices became strong again until 2014. Now we are in the sixth year of a depressed resource sector, and prospects for the future do not look so bright. Talk of peak oil supply has been replaced in this brief period by talk of peak oil demand. Canada’s powerful manufacturing sector had started to shrink by 2008, and it has continued on that downward trend, taking well-paying jobs with benefits with it.

Since the last recession, talk of peak oil supply has been replaced by talk of peak oil demand.

Even the environmental movement has become more sophisticated since 2008. An almost singular focus on greenhouse gas emissions has evolved into broader considerations of well-being, or the quality of life. And tangible evidence of the effects of climate change has heightened concern. There is less dogma around the idea that you can have growth or the environment but not both. Many now realize that with smart strategy both can be enjoyed.

These changes in context require a new perspective. We must find new sources of economic growth in Canada that promote or at least are compatible with environmental objectives. If this perspective can be put in the context of recovery from COVID-19, so much the better. But it goes much further than that. It is a perspective to deliver longer-term benefits to Canadians.

With our close economic relationship and physical proximity to the United States, a dark cloud of fatalism has hung over Canada the past four years, with many convinced that attempts at clean growth were futile given the apparent lack of interest in all things environment at the White House, even though actual developments were not as unfavourable as the rhetoric.

But now the clouds have been lifted, and our major trading partners in both the United States and Europe have adopted clean growth as their North Star.

Canada has all the ingredients to prosper in the clean economy, but it will take a lot more tangible action on the part of government and business if we are going to seize the opportunity.

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As YWCA and the Institute for Gender and the Economy’s newly released Feminist Recovery Plan for Canada suggests, we cannot make meaningful progress on economic recovery from this pandemic without rooting out and addressing racism in all its forms. This means undertaking the calls to action for equity and economic justice that BIPOC communities have been advocating for, such as ensuring access to decent work, bolstering BIPOC-led businesses and changing workplace policies and culture.

The essential work that has been fundamental to our crisis response throughout the pandemic is extremely gendered and racialized. Although BIPOC women are overrepresented in essential occupations and have been supporting us through this pandemic, they tend to experience precarious working conditions with limited benefits and low wages.

Take, for example, personal support workers (PSWs), many of whom work at nursing homes caring for elderly COVID-19 patients: a 2010 survey of these workers in Ontario found that 96% identified as women. Forty-two percent identified as racialized, nearly double the percentage of racialized people in the province. Eighteen percent identified as Black, compared to 4% of the population, and 5% identified as Indigenous, compared to 2% of the population.

PSWs are on the frontlines of our pandemic response, working around the clock. Yet they are severely underpaid and often work without protections such as paid sick leave or access to personal protective equipment. The tragic deaths of several PSWs from COVID-19 in Ontario, primarily Black and racialized people, as well as the increased spread of COVID-19 through long-term care homes is in large part due to poor conditions for workers. Their deaths highlight the dire consequences of institutionalized racism.

There are similar stories from migrant farm workers, caregivers and cleaners, among others, who have kept the economy running throughout the pandemic. BIPOC workers are routinely ignored and devalued across sectors, even though they make up a significant proportion of what economist Armine Yalnizyan refers to as the “essential economy.”

There cannot be economic recovery, much less prosperity, without addressing and remedying such inequities through policy.

It’s imperative to urgently address the state of precarious work disproportionately done by BIPOC and women workers. All jobs – especially essential jobs – must have better protections, such as 14 days of paid sick leave and paid family leave. To support those who have lost work, the YWCA and the Institute for Gender and the Economy are also calling on the federal government to increase Employment Insurance benefits to an 85% income-replacement rate for those who are low income.

BIPOC communities have been sharing for decades, if not centuries, what needs to change to make our society inclusive and equitable as we move forward. Recommendations put forth by groups such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the Parliamentary Black Caucus provide roadmaps. Some of those recommendations include increasing funding directed to training, mentorship and other employment programs for BIPOC communities, especially those who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic. Companies and governments should set procurement targets of at least 15% for BIPOC-led businesses and support their development, especially small businesses. A recent survey found that 80% of racialized founders lost contracts, customers and clients during the pandemic – the highest rate of all equity-seeking communities.

The corporate sector can play an important role by changing policies and practices that aren’t inclusive or supportive of BIPOC workers, as well as advocating for public policies that address the root causes of injustice and racism.

Social and economic conditions are deeply interlinked and contribute to health and well-being, or lack thereof. Inequitable conditions have created a perfect storm that has resulted in outsized negative impacts from COVID-19 on BIPOC communities. This pandemic has not only exposed but has deepened the social fault lines that were already present. While Canada needs to collect disaggregated data on the impacts of the pandemic on BIPOC, migrant and all other communities that face inequity and injustice, experts are noting that racism and health inequities are leading to higher rates of COVID-19 in Toronto neighbourhoods with larger Black populations. A recent survey found that high poverty rates among most racialized groups prior to the COVID-19 pandemic make them vulnerable to the financial impact of work disruptions.

Our Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Canada makes explicit that recovery policies must recognize how systemic racism and gender inequity have been major contributors to Canada’s economic freefall and health crisis. Now, we can build back better from this crisis by making equity a central pillar of recovery, and all sectors should contribute.

If we are truly all in this together, we need to start acting like it.

Carmina Ravanera is a research associate working on post-pandemic gender equity policies at the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) at the University of Toronto.

Anjum Sultana is the national director of public policy and strategic communications at YWCA Canada.

They are co-authors of A Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Canada: Making the Economy Work for Everyone.

The post We can’t build back better without economic justice for racialized women appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our global economic and social systems and laid bare their inequities. Some of our society’s most vulnerable populations and most undervalued professions have been hit hardest during this crisis. While youth are largely presumed to have avoided many of the worst health impacts of the coronavirus, the pandemic has affected them severely in other ways.

The youth unemployment rate in Canada rose to 29.4% in May, up from 16.8% in March. Young people who have kept their jobs since the onset of COVID-19 have experienced steep reductions in the number of working hours. And Canadian youth aren’t alone. A recent  International Labour Organization survey on youth unemployment found that young people around the world have been severely and disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis, especially young women. For those young people who are still pursuing education, the pandemic is likely to result in unprecedented new inequalities upon graduation.

All of this is compounding one of the greatest workforce challenges of the 21st century: the skills gap for young workers, in Canada and around the world. Youth are on the frontlines of major transformations across the global economy, including digitalization, automation and climate action. Skills-proofing will be essential as the speed of change and disruptions transforms the future of work. As the latest Jobs of Tomorrow report from the World Economic Forum notes, demand for jobs in the care and green economies in particular is on the rise. It’s important to ensure that young people are equipped and empowered to combat longstanding challenges to our society, particularly the threat of climate change.

There are more young people in the world than ever before, and they are critical members of the global society driving ideas, innovations and movements. Investing in, training and retraining young people now can help get them back to work immediately while building a more just, inclusive and resilient Canada – one that’s on a path to carbon neutrality. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada had been preparing for a skills revolution, as noted by Employment and Social Development Canada, RBC, the Brookfield Institute and many others. The Canadian government has already made some meaningful commitments, such as investing in creating green jobs and training opportunities for Canadian youth in the natural resources and clean technology sectors.

In light of this, as youth leaders and allies from across the country, we have written an open letter to the Government of Canada, urging leaders to invest in youth training and skills development, as well as ensuring equitable access to these opportunities, as part of its COVID-19 response and economic recovery plan. This proposal lays out the rationale for this investment and breaks it down into three streams of recommendations:

1. Invest in future-proofed and essential skills for youth entering the workforce and people whose work is in transition.
2. Invest in sector-specific skills and technical training to address the most pressing problems facing our society, particularly the climate crisis.
3. Invest immediately in job-creation programs, such as expansion of the Student Work Placement Program (SWPP) and increased funding for developing innovative work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities for students.

Young people are crucial to economic recovery efforts. We believe that we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the foundations of Canada’s economy, prepare our youth to thrive in the future of work, generate widespread prosperity and lay the groundwork for a safer, cleaner, more equitable world. Our letter presents detailed solutions to build back better by increasing Canada’s collective human capital.

We believe that now is a time to significantly increase these efforts to achieve a resilient, inclusive economic future. During these challenging times, the best investments will be made in people.

Puninda Thind is a sustainability professional, climate justice organizer and World Economic Forum Global Shaper.

George P.R. Benson is a resilience thinker and practitioner working on economic development, urban planning and climate change.

Daniela Pico is a community builder, marketer and entrepreneur. She is director of external relations at Riipen, a technology company on a mission to end graduate underemployment; a World Economic Forum Global Shaper; a mentor with Girls in Tech; and a connector with League of Innovators.

Dominique Souris works to enable youth to create just and climate-resilient futures as the co-founder and executive director of Youth Climate Lab, a youth-for-youth global organization focused on transformative climate action.

 Ana Gonzalez Guerrero is the co-founder of and managing director at Youth Climate Lab, where she works alongside youth to build a more inclusive and sustainable future.  

Rita Steele is a sustainability professional, food systems activist and World Economic Forum Global Shaper who is passionate about transforming the global supply chain into systems that centre equity, justice and the environment and support a circular economy.

Alyssa McDonald is an organizational psychology consultant who advances sustainability through her work with the Canadian Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement and the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community.

The post Future-proof Canada’s economy by investing in youth hard-hit by pandemic appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The prevailing explanation for the transmission of the coronavirus – through direct exposure to infected people – leaves too much unexplained. Why do so many people get infected without evidence of direct exposure? How come individual cases of COVID-19 can be found everywhere, yet the major outbreaks are restricted to certain areas and facilities? What really stopped the outbreaks in Wuhan and South Korea? Perhaps something else is going on.

Evidence is mounting for another form of transmission: through polluted air. This finding was first reported in March by a team of researchers in Italy. They identified an association between atmospheric pollution and the rapid propagation of the virus: specifically, that minute particles of the virus attach to particles in polluted air. Judging by earlier tests on Zika, SARS and Ebola, the virus could remain active in the air for several hundred metres, and therefore infect people beyond a few metres’ distance.

This finding was picked up in late April by The Guardian, which quoted British scientists agreeing that “small droplets [containing the virus] could combine with background urban particles and be carried around.” The Italian findings were recently cited, with additional evidence, in a report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Air Pollution in the U.K.*

In its June issue, the Environment International journal calls on “national authorities [to] acknowledge the reality that the virus spreads through air.”

We can call this Level 2 atmospheric transmission, to contrast it with Level 1 proximate transmission. This new understanding can explain why, by early April, all 10 of the largest outbreaks of the pandemic – within China, the United States, Italy, Spain and Germany – occurred in places of heavy pollution. The evidence that the air in some cruise ships and seniors’ residences had high levels of contamination suggests further that the virus could circulate in indoor air, through ventilating systems (as was found with Legionnaires’ disease) or through the natural flow of inside air. How else to explain why so many people locked down in their rooms became infected?

Level 2 atmospheric transmission is the likely superspreader, indoors as well as outdoors. While Level 1 contact can explain how individuals get infected in the first place, Level 2 exposure may better explain how the wider outbreaks occur, and why that happens in some places and not others. An individual can carry the virus to a new place and infect people nearby. But from there, polluted air may take over and do the superspreading, as it carries the virus in the atmospheres of only some cities and buildings (depending on factors such as humidity, sun exposure and air movements).

Consider Level 2 in terms of the density and duration of the active particles. The density of these tiny particles in the atmosphere may be less than that of the heavier particles coughed into a room. But they can last longer – apparently up to hours instead of minutes – and be replaced continuously. We do know from the experience of healthcare workers that the longer people are exposed to the virus, the greater their chances of getting infected. Think, then, of all those people who are exposed to polluted air, some for as much as 24/7 (indoors as well as outdoors).

I am not a physician, but I do see myself as a pattern recognizer, especially in my books on management and organizations. And from the day in early April when I read about the Italian findings, I detected a pattern in a number of the anomalies around the spread of the coronavirus that I had identified in a blog post a few days earlier. Airborne transmission could explain this. It could also explain how we deal with the pandemic, as well as how we research it.

We require research that is grounded in learning, alongside the more formal procedures of proper research. When I asked several epidemiologists about the implications of Level 2 transmission, most were dismissive. All called for further research – one estimated two or three years of it. We can no more wait for that than we can continue to flatten the curve while waiting for a vaccine.

The evidence we do have for airborne transmission looks a lot sounder than whatever underlies the hodgepodge of reopenings currently being pursued. What evidence supports once again firing up our polluting cities? While proper research must unfold as it should, we require detective research, namely the investigation of every plausible option to deal with the virus. Is this risky? The course we are on – focusing on Level 1 transmission – is the truly risky one.

The stakes are high, while the options are few. By suspending that focus, we could discover all kinds of ways to proceed. Should we really be opening our windows to clear the air inside our buildings? Not if that brings in more dangerous air from the outside. Should we remove the masks when no one is nearby (as is now being done in some hospitals) or allow schools and plants to reopen so long as everyone can keep their distance? Not if the air inside is found to contain contaminants that could be carrying the virus.

By stopping the polluting, indoors and outdoors, we may be able to stop the pandemic. China and South Korea have been lauded for isolating their people to flatten the curve. But the greater benefit may have been serendipitous. With reduced traffic and industry, the outbreaks might have ended because the pollution abated. If so, then simply reopening our economies, however gradually, could turn out to be deadly if it triggers a second wave.

Must we force ourselves into this either/or impasse, between the flawed options of opening up and closing down? We can open up our economies selectively, where distancing is possible, by allowing the resumption of activities that barely pollute while keeping major sources of pollution closed until they can be cleaned up – if ever. If this sounds drastic, it may turn out to be not nearly as harsh as the alternatives we’re facing now.

Indoors, we should be investigating every problematic space – residences and schools, offices and arenas, factories and meatpacking plants – and allow no one back inside until experts declare the air to be safe from the virus.

Do the experts always get it right? When cholera broke out in London in 1854, the established belief was that the disease was transmitted through the air. Dr. John Snow’s belief about transmission through polluted water was dismissed by the medical establishment. Snow placed a pin on a map where each person had died and found that all but two casualties were clustered around one well in Soho. The two outliers turned out to have also drunk water from that well. While the physicians tried to cope with the outbreak, the handle was taken off the pump of the well, and the outbreak ended.

Still, it took another 12 years for medicine to accept that cholera is a water-borne disease.

The evidence suggests that we need to stop the polluting to stop the pandemic. By so doing, we will have done the right thing to preserve our health, as well as for the planet, which has had enough of our warming.

*On May 29, in a medRxiv preprint, researchers in the MRC Toxicology Unit at the University of Cambridge reported, “Our model indicated that exposure to PM2.5 and PM10 [pollutants found in outdoor and indoor air] increases the risk of COVID-19 infection.”

Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University and the author of Managing the Myths of Health Care.

A variation of this piece is co-posted on mintzberg.org/blog and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

The post Moving ahead of the pandemic appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It’s too early to predict how COVID-19 will reshape the future. The travel, entertainment, hospitality and personal-services sectors have already been devastated. A Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey found that 32% of owners who had shut down their businesses in March were unsure if they would ever reopen.

The media has also identified the first winners of this global reckoning. Setting aside for a moment the immeasurable personal tragedies caused by the virus, here are some preliminary results:

• Greater concern for the environment could be COVID’s legacy, wrote columnist Gwynne Dyer. “The clean air over China’s cities in the past month, thanks to an almost total shutdown of the big sources of pollution, has saved 20 times as many Chinese lives as COVID-19 has taken . . . People will remember this when the filthy air comes back and want something done about it.”

• Movements for social change may be empowered by governments’ rapid moves to restrict behaviour and unleash financial support. At TheConversation.com, U.K. economist Simon Mair said the virus “is expanding the economic imagination. As governments and citizens take steps that three months ago seemed impossible, our ideas about how the world works could change rapidly.”

• Retail and food workers are finally getting some respect, with companies such as Maple Leaf Foods, Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro and Walmart granting raises to frontline staff, introducing the concept of “hero pay.” Though Corporate Knights asks whether $2 extra an hour is enough for the grocery employees putting their lives on the line. Canadian banks are giving frontline employees an extra $50 a day and additional paid time off; TD Bank Group is giving bonuses of up to $1,000.

• Tycoons such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma and Elon Musk, in most cases, polished their reputations by funding hospitals, medical supplies and research. But the Canadian billionaire community, wrote the Toronto Star’s David Olive, “has hardly been heard from on arguably the greatest crisis Canada has ever faced.”

• Manufacturers of everything from hockey skates to gin began retooling to deliver personal protective equipment to those who need it most. Heavyweights that have stepped up include H&M, Ford, GM, Dyson and Gucci’s parent company, Kering. Several companies have been saluted for establishing COVID relief funds, including Facebook, which set up a US$100 million relief fund for businesses in 30 countries, and meal-delivery companies, whose services helped thousands of restaurants stay open. Facebook also set up an additional US$100 million fund to support news media. Sony, Netflix and Amazon created their own US$100 million global relief funds — though striking Amazon employees say not enough is being done to keep them safe.

And then there are the hidden heroes: the workers delivering essential services across dozens of sectors, as well as anyone who is stepping up to support aging relatives during the crisis, check up on their neighbours, shop for the quarantined, donate money or haul canned goods to food banks. We’re banging on our pots and pans in thanks for you, too.

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