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One of the great pleasures of being a Councillor is the opportunity to join with members across the country in our yearly celebration of talent, energy, dedication and support for the performing arts: the annual honours awards.
This year's awards ceremony was held October 25 at the Hotel Arts in downtown Calgary. Members Grant Reddick (Calgary) and Elsa Bolam (Montréal) were accorded Life Membership in Equity, in recognition of their lengthy careers and manifold contributions to theatre. We proudly welcomed Frank Glenfield (Edmonton) as an Honorary Member, acknowledging over 60 years of promotion and support of both professional and community theatre in Alberta.
Toronto’s Susan Wallace, Equity’s former Executive Director, received the Larry McCance Award in appreciation for her many years of dedication and service to the Association and its members. And finally, the 2010 Stage West-Equity Emerging Theatre Artist Award was presented to Bethany Jillard (Toronto) in peer recognition of an impressive start to her young career.
As I was preparing my notes for the honours ceremony, I thought back to some of the classes I had taken in Canadian theatre history. The people we studied were all extraordinary individuals who, in the best traditions of artistic creation, built new opportunity for live performance in theatre, opera and ballet, where little or none had existed before. Our instructor never failed to make the point that the people we were studying were those who had helped make Canadian theatre what it is today. They remain, in many ways, our theatre heroes, and we still build upon the strong artistic foundations that they have provided us.
With each new year of honours, what we consistently hear from the nominators is that "this is the person who made me the artist I am today." It is that immediacy of connection which makes the honours awards so special; in celebrating them together, we all recognise these mentors and leaders as ours, no matter where we live.
How very pleasant it is to rediscover, annually, that we continue to mint new theatre heroes.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
Insurance review focus groups complete
Just a quick note to say thanks to all the members from coast to coast who took time to participate in our insurance focus groups. We gathered a lot of very useful information to help us in formulating the survey, including ballpark information on insurance needs and priorities, usage patterns, member awareness of benefits and coverage, affordability ranges, etc.
By the time you read this blog post, the insurance committee will hard at work on the main survey, which we plan to roll out later this fall. In this second phase, we will be collecting data from across the membership to help us develop a plan, or plans, to provide for member insurance well into the future. When you receive your survey, please take the time to help us serve you well.
Details to follow soon.
By the time you read this blog post, the insurance committee will hard at work on the main survey, which we plan to roll out later this fall. In this second phase, we will be collecting data from across the membership to help us develop a plan, or plans, to provide for member insurance well into the future. When you receive your survey, please take the time to help us serve you well.
Details to follow soon.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
The Council Agenda - Part 1
In various reports, Council Links, EQ columns and blog postings over the years, I have made regular mention of the topics under discussion at the Council table. I thought it might be worth an electronic word or twenty to explain how those topics are chosen and how we go about discussing them.
To begin with, how do we decide what to talk about? Well, there are two types of topic on the Council agenda…
Cyclical
Because Council is charged with governing the association responsibly, year in and year out, there are a large number of recurring topics. For instance, it wouldn’t do to ignore the financial health of our RRSP funds and only review them after a problem became evident. In fact, all aspects of the work of Equity get reviewed every year. That way, we can identify issues while they are still small and address them proactively, rather than getting stuck wondering what just hit us.
Ad Hoc
For (almost*) everything else we rely on the “Request for Council Action”, a short agenda proposal. The RCA is the first step to being added to our “emerging issues” list, Council’s version of “new business”. It is most frequently used by Councillors or regional advisories to suggest a topic for inclusion on our agenda, but all members in good standing have access to it. At each meeting, Council reviews any recently received RCAs, and votes on whether it agrees to devote agenda time and member resources to an exploration of the topic.
Thus, filing an RCA is not a guarantee that the topic will be added to the formal agenda, but the odds are high. Of the close to 200 submitted in the last 9 years, only a handful were declined. In some cases, Council decided that, while the topic could certainly be fodder for a stimulating discussion, the issue was well beyond Equity’s ability to influence and the agenda time could be more profitably used for other matters. In most other cases, the topic is already covered off by existing policy, and the RCA is passed to the Executive Director for direct action.
When Council accepts or declines an RCA, either the President or another Councillor will get back to the initiating member or group so that they know what happened to the request. The President then schedules the topic for discussion in a future agenda, balancing the time-sensitivity of the matter with all the other things that we may have previously scheduled for discussion. At any point in time, Council typically has four or five modest-size topics on its agenda, and one or two major ones.
*Back to that asterisk. There is one other method of placing something on the Council agenda, and that is a member resolution passed at the National AGM. This is a legacy option, retained from the days when it was really the only opportunity for a member at large to propose a topic for the Council agenda.
There are several drawbacks to the resolution approach: you have to know the option exists (few do); it only happens once a year; it requires a quorum and sufficient support to pass at the NAGM; and it is most effective if presented in person, which means travelling to the location of the meeting.
In contrast, the RCA form is accessible online year round, any member in good standing can submit one, and proposals are reviewed at every Council meeting. At one point, we debated getting rid of the resolution process entirely, but in the end decided to keep it because there was no harm in retaining it as an additional option.
And that’s what it takes to get a topic on the agenda. The next step is the discussion itself, and I’ll deal with that in a future post.
To begin with, how do we decide what to talk about? Well, there are two types of topic on the Council agenda…
Cyclical
Because Council is charged with governing the association responsibly, year in and year out, there are a large number of recurring topics. For instance, it wouldn’t do to ignore the financial health of our RRSP funds and only review them after a problem became evident. In fact, all aspects of the work of Equity get reviewed every year. That way, we can identify issues while they are still small and address them proactively, rather than getting stuck wondering what just hit us.
Ad Hoc
For (almost*) everything else we rely on the “Request for Council Action”, a short agenda proposal. The RCA is the first step to being added to our “emerging issues” list, Council’s version of “new business”. It is most frequently used by Councillors or regional advisories to suggest a topic for inclusion on our agenda, but all members in good standing have access to it. At each meeting, Council reviews any recently received RCAs, and votes on whether it agrees to devote agenda time and member resources to an exploration of the topic.
Thus, filing an RCA is not a guarantee that the topic will be added to the formal agenda, but the odds are high. Of the close to 200 submitted in the last 9 years, only a handful were declined. In some cases, Council decided that, while the topic could certainly be fodder for a stimulating discussion, the issue was well beyond Equity’s ability to influence and the agenda time could be more profitably used for other matters. In most other cases, the topic is already covered off by existing policy, and the RCA is passed to the Executive Director for direct action.
When Council accepts or declines an RCA, either the President or another Councillor will get back to the initiating member or group so that they know what happened to the request. The President then schedules the topic for discussion in a future agenda, balancing the time-sensitivity of the matter with all the other things that we may have previously scheduled for discussion. At any point in time, Council typically has four or five modest-size topics on its agenda, and one or two major ones.
*Back to that asterisk. There is one other method of placing something on the Council agenda, and that is a member resolution passed at the National AGM. This is a legacy option, retained from the days when it was really the only opportunity for a member at large to propose a topic for the Council agenda.
There are several drawbacks to the resolution approach: you have to know the option exists (few do); it only happens once a year; it requires a quorum and sufficient support to pass at the NAGM; and it is most effective if presented in person, which means travelling to the location of the meeting.
In contrast, the RCA form is accessible online year round, any member in good standing can submit one, and proposals are reviewed at every Council meeting. At one point, we debated getting rid of the resolution process entirely, but in the end decided to keep it because there was no harm in retaining it as an additional option.
And that’s what it takes to get a topic on the agenda. The next step is the discussion itself, and I’ll deal with that in a future post.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Insurance review focus groups begin
As announced earlier, Leger Marketing, working with Equity Council, is conducting a series of six focus groups on members' insurance needs.
There will be two in-person groups in Toronto on September 23, and two in-person groups in Vancouver on September 27. One teleconference group each will be held for the eastern regions and for the prairie regions on September 29. The purpose of these focus groups is to lay the groundwork for a structured survey later this fall, to be broadly administered throughout the membership at large.
Over the next week, recruiters working with Leger will be calling a random selection of members from across the country to be part of one of these groups. If you are contacted, please consider participating. The hour or so you spend helping us out in this first phase will go a long way toward ensuring that we are able to collect a full set of meaningful and useful statistics in the later survey work.
There will be two in-person groups in Toronto on September 23, and two in-person groups in Vancouver on September 27. One teleconference group each will be held for the eastern regions and for the prairie regions on September 29. The purpose of these focus groups is to lay the groundwork for a structured survey later this fall, to be broadly administered throughout the membership at large.
Over the next week, recruiters working with Leger will be calling a random selection of members from across the country to be part of one of these groups. If you are contacted, please consider participating. The hour or so you spend helping us out in this first phase will go a long way toward ensuring that we are able to collect a full set of meaningful and useful statistics in the later survey work.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Service Standards
A large part of the work handled by Equity can be regarded as customer service. Negotiating an agreement only takes up a few months, once every three years. However, the administration of it happens dozens of times each day, year-round, every year. The Association also handles dues and financial benefits on behalf of its members, including insurance and and RRSP services. In addition, we regularly connect up with theatres, as thousands of contracts are arranged.
All these activities, and more, involve numerous member and engager interactions, some very brief and some quite extended. Four years ago, Council implemented policy to ensure that customer service of this sort met basic privacy and accessibility requirements.
At its meeting in August, and based on member feedback, Council voted to take that policy a step further: implementing published service standards.
It's worth having some sense of the context in which this change has been made. Based on the latest annual data from the office, the Business Rep department alone:
It isn't. Weeding out duplicate reports and retelling by others, complaints turn out to be comparatively few in number. In the first year of last term, I put my email address absolutely everywhere, and when I got my first customer service complaint, I started a special email folder for those. I just looked: four years now and they average three per year.
I'll be the first to say it: a couple of the complaints were quite troubling, and on several others we could definitely have done better. There are unquestionably some complaints that didn't make it to me, and there are almost certainly several that didn't make it beyond the green room. However, considered in the context of many thousands of interactions per year, and thousands of members and engagers, a handful per year is a pretty good average.
Council is interested in improving that average. We recognise that, while the typical number of customer service issues is very small, a single customer service problem can be a real show-stopper – pun fully intended.
In the next few months, Equity will implement formal, published standards in the areas of timelines for response to communication, timelines for provision of services, knowledgeable response to inquiry, and courteous treatment. Most complaints centre on one or another of these four issues.
We know that in most cases these standards will be redundant, as they are already being handily met. But by publishing them, the Association makes an unequivocal statement of the level of service which members and others have a right to expect in their dealings with us. They provide the organisation itself with a benchmark for its work, and if we should fail to meet the standard, provide the member or other person with an obvious metric for expressing their dissatisfaction.
The policy change to implement the standards was passed at the most recent meeting. The service standards themselves have yet to be finalised, but they will be published both here and on the main website when they are.
Council knows better than to believe that Equity will never muck up — we're all human too. However, we want to ensure that those occurrences continue to be rare, that we are fully prepared to acknowledge them should they occur, and that we will take every opportunity to learn from mistakes.
As always, we welcome your comment.
All these activities, and more, involve numerous member and engager interactions, some very brief and some quite extended. Four years ago, Council implemented policy to ensure that customer service of this sort met basic privacy and accessibility requirements.
At its meeting in August, and based on member feedback, Council voted to take that policy a step further: implementing published service standards.
It's worth having some sense of the context in which this change has been made. Based on the latest annual data from the office, the Business Rep department alone:
- reviews nearly 14,000 contracts for over 2,000 productions
- receives and sends over 12,000 emails
- spends around 450 hours on the phone
It isn't. Weeding out duplicate reports and retelling by others, complaints turn out to be comparatively few in number. In the first year of last term, I put my email address absolutely everywhere, and when I got my first customer service complaint, I started a special email folder for those. I just looked: four years now and they average three per year.
I'll be the first to say it: a couple of the complaints were quite troubling, and on several others we could definitely have done better. There are unquestionably some complaints that didn't make it to me, and there are almost certainly several that didn't make it beyond the green room. However, considered in the context of many thousands of interactions per year, and thousands of members and engagers, a handful per year is a pretty good average.
Council is interested in improving that average. We recognise that, while the typical number of customer service issues is very small, a single customer service problem can be a real show-stopper – pun fully intended.
In the next few months, Equity will implement formal, published standards in the areas of timelines for response to communication, timelines for provision of services, knowledgeable response to inquiry, and courteous treatment. Most complaints centre on one or another of these four issues.
We know that in most cases these standards will be redundant, as they are already being handily met. But by publishing them, the Association makes an unequivocal statement of the level of service which members and others have a right to expect in their dealings with us. They provide the organisation itself with a benchmark for its work, and if we should fail to meet the standard, provide the member or other person with an obvious metric for expressing their dissatisfaction.
The policy change to implement the standards was passed at the most recent meeting. The service standards themselves have yet to be finalised, but they will be published both here and on the main website when they are.
Council knows better than to believe that Equity will never muck up — we're all human too. However, we want to ensure that those occurrences continue to be rare, that we are fully prepared to acknowledge them should they occur, and that we will take every opportunity to learn from mistakes.
As always, we welcome your comment.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Insurance review progress report
It's been a while since Council began reviewing Equity's insurance coverage, so I thought it might be time for a brief update. Council has contracted with Leger Marketing, our research partner from the 2007 survey, to conduct a comprehensive assessment of insurance need and affordability within our membership. Aside from having had past experience with them, their project staff impressed us with a willingness to understand our needs and an obvious team approach between the project specialists from both the qualitative and quantitative parts of the work.
Our first step will be to hold a series of focus groups. In-person groups will be conducted in both Toronto and Vancouver, and separate teleconference groups will be conducted for western and eastern Canada, excluding the two areas already covered. This kind of work does not produce data in the usual sense. Because it is a "live" process, and not static like a survey, Leger will use the group discussions to refine both their and our understanding of all the issues in play.
The input from this first phase will be used to created a structured survey, to be administered throughout the membership at large. It is this second step that will produce the concrete data we will need to rebuild the plan for current and anticipated future needs.
Our first step will be to hold a series of focus groups. In-person groups will be conducted in both Toronto and Vancouver, and separate teleconference groups will be conducted for western and eastern Canada, excluding the two areas already covered. This kind of work does not produce data in the usual sense. Because it is a "live" process, and not static like a survey, Leger will use the group discussions to refine both their and our understanding of all the issues in play.
The input from this first phase will be used to created a structured survey, to be administered throughout the membership at large. It is this second step that will produce the concrete data we will need to rebuild the plan for current and anticipated future needs.
All of this work is expected to take place in the fall and early winter, with a report to Council by February. So, you'll be hearing more from us then.
When the time comes, it's vital that we hear from you. If you are contacted for focus group work, please consider participating. If this process is to produce the excellent plan we hope it will, all communities within the membership need to be represented. That includes everyone from those who want more insurance coverage, to those who want less, or none. Similarly, if a survey invitation shows up in your inbox or mailbox, please take the time to complete it. Your insurance plan will be shaped by those who do.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
ITR Committee Announced
ITR Committee Chair Kris Joseph recently announced the full lineup of the committee (save for one space). The full announcement and more detail should be available on the Equity web site in the next short while, but in the meantime, here is the rundown.
From Kris:
BC & Yukon: Steven Greenfield, Colleen Winton, Katey Wright
Northern Alberta: Gina Puntil
Southern Alberta: Cheryl Hutton
Saskatchewan: James (Jim) Arthur
Manitoba & Nunavut: (still to be confirmed)
Ontario: Sharon Di Genova, Kerry Ann Doherty, Richard Lee, Mark Wallace
Eastern Ontario & Outaouais: Kris Joseph (committee chair)
Quebec: Deena Aziz
"We have forged a troupe of 13 committee members from across Canada and are now planning for our first group meeting and the data collection phase of our mandate. Sharon, Kerry Ann and I are VERY pleased with the makeup of the group and excited about the work.
We have a wide range of work experience, career depth and breadth; expertise on data collection and analysis as well as health & safety and diversity issues; a very even gender split; and a range of folks who are members and member-engagers."
The committee is:
Northern Alberta: Gina Puntil
Southern Alberta: Cheryl Hutton
Saskatchewan: James (Jim) Arthur
Manitoba & Nunavut: (still to be confirmed)
Ontario: Sharon Di Genova, Kerry Ann Doherty, Richard Lee, Mark Wallace
Eastern Ontario & Outaouais: Kris Joseph (committee chair)
Quebec: Deena Aziz
Thanks to all who have stepped forward to help craft the future of independent theatre in Canada.
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