After CEO's comments go viral, Canadian employment lawyer explains how to balance data, trust and legal risk in performance management
AT&T CEO John Stankey’s recent viral internal memo to management spoke a lot about culture and performance – it also mentioned the use of employee data to identify what he referred to as “outliers”.
“As technology and the ‘information economy’ evolves, each of our respective contributions are going to become increasingly measurable,” Stankey wrote in the section of his memo entitled “Contribution, trust, and effectiveness”.
He went on to explain that inconsistencies in behaviour that could run counter to “our stated priorities and employment expectations” would be targeted for potential linking to an employee’s name.
While the memo’s tone was not ideal, the approach of monitoring data for employee performance metrics is not uncommon in Canada, according to Melanie Sutton, employment lawyer at Nelligan Law.
“Most companies, to some degree, measure their employees’ performance, whether it’s the hours they’re working, their sales targets, customer satisfaction, any of those kinds of metrics,” she says.
“Employees typically know that that information is being measured. They know that they’re being evaluated or their performance is being measured based on certain measurable criteria.”
Sutton notes that as long as employees are aware of the metrics being used, risks to employers is limited.
“It’s a practice that employers can and do engage in...
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