Just a few things I experienced at PHAC on Colonnade last year:
Office Space/Seating:
Loads (and I mean about 100) of empty cubicles but management crammed 3 – 4 sections/functional groups of people into a space that held about 30 cubicles. Too many people, not enough work stations in that small area. When we asked about using or reallocating the 100 or so empty cubicles, we were told that they belonged to another PHAC group. However, no one ever saw those groups, nor were those cubicles ever used during the year. In fact someone once told me that the majority of those empty cubicles belonged to a group that was stood up during covid to handle screening. Now, 2023, the contracts for those people had long expired and they no longer worked for PHAC. The workstations sat empty.
Individual cubicles were not to be assigned to any one person. You would need to pre-book a spot on a booking platform. The platform was often down so you couldn’t book.
Some people would book a cubicle out for 6 months or more but rarely ever show up to use the cubicle so it would sit empty but would register as booked online. You couldn't sit there as they "might" show up for work.
Blocks of cubicles were not assigned to a specific section but rather split among multiple sections. Example.. Mon and Thurs Sect A had the cubicle while Sect B had the same cubicle on Tues and Fri. Sect C had it Wednesday. You had to know the schedule of the different sections and where they would sit on any given day to avoid conflict.
Any conflict over a cubicle between two staff members had to be sorted out by those two staff members. Management refused to intervene.
Because different people used the workspace throughout the week, when you arrived in the morning you needed to change settings on chair posture, desk height, screen locations, etc every time you worked. Sometimes you would come in and find the chair was swapped out because someone in another cubicle liked your chair better, and the one left in its place was falling apart. But then it wasn’t really your chair so they felt they could get away with it, and you had no recourse. Or that the monitor was gone, the mouse missing, etc. These are petty issues, but when you are confronted with it regularly, it can be demoralizing, even triggering for some.
People started to have increased anxiety on the way to work, wondering if they would have a space to work, what the conditions would be, and if there would be a conflict. Ironic, given that the agency is all about health..
Sometimes, you would come in knowing you didn’t have a cubicle for the day because the booking platform was down, or all of your sections cubicles were booked. So you would then wander around trying to find an unused cubicle, find one, set yourself up, log on, sip your coffee, then someone would come along and tell you that the cubicle was used normally by so-and-so and you had to move. You move to avoid conflict and then observe the cubicle and so-and-so never shows up that day. Other times you wander looking for a cubicle, then just go home in frustration.
Every time we raised these and other workspace-related issues to the manager or director we would be told that they were working on it and it would be fixed next month. Next month never arrived over a 12 month period. I still don’t think they ever reallocated space.
Working Hours:
Told to come into the office twice a week but you could pick your two days. There were 8 people in the team, rarely were team members in on the same days. Some days you could be the only person from your team in the office. Mondays were always quiet.
One team member lived 3 provinces away so only ever attended meetings through Teams. If there were no meetings that day or week that included him, no one ever saw him or interacted with him. Not sure how he could ever feel included or part of the team.
Sometimes you would have a Teams meeting and some of the attendees are on the other side of the cubicle wall or in the same cubicle space as you (Cubes were set up for two people to work). So even if the majority of attendees were in the office, we never got together and used a conference room with video capability for the online personnel, we always used Teams from our workspaces. For fun I would stick my head up over the cubicle wall and appear in the background of my colleague who was also in the meeting. So, there was never any team cohesion or esprit de corps. Morale was meh.
When I worked from home, once I was chastised because sometimes my online presence was not indicated. I said that on occasion I print out and read material I am working on. I was told that I needed to find a way to indicate online I was working even if I was reading printed material. So essentially if you are working a 7.5 hr day at home you must show that you are online all the time, while if you are in the office you can leave your desk for any number of reasons and you don’t need to indicate that you are online or even at your desk.
We even had some staff that had sold their houses mid pandemic, moved away from Ottawa, bought a new house somewhere cheaper on a lake or some place nice, worked from home, and when told that we were returning to the office, then applied for an exemption to working in the office because it was too far to commute to work.
Anyways, just thought I would share.
