Customer service standards

I wrote several months back regarding new customer service standards that were in the works, and they have recently been published on the Equity website. You can find all the details here, but these are the basics:

1. All persons dealing with Equity may expect to be treated in a courteous manner.
2. All persons dealing with Equity may expect a knowledgeable response to their inquiry.
3. All persons dealing with Equity should expect to receive a timely response to their request for services or in response to their communication.

Just as importantly, there is now a clearly identified process for dealing with complaints.

As with all policies, Council will regularly monitor results from this change, and that will be added to our review of policy EL-2, in June of each year.

In the context of the thousands of service interactions each year, problems are fortunately rare. However, we do recognise the impact that a even minor issues can have in the context of an individual production or members' livelihood. Equity is committed to identifying issues as they occur and working toward improvement. These new service standards are an important step in that process.

Philanthropic policy

For a while now, Council has been looking at the possibility of writing a new philanthropic policy, one that would allow Equity to use a small portion of its resources for charitable purposes.

In truth, Equity already does this in some measure, but it is peculiarly self-serving type of charity. In pursuit of specific goals (assistance with career transition, affordable housing, and financial crisis), Equity either directly contributes to the Dancer Transition Resource Centre, PAL and The Actors Fund of Canada, and/or specifically recognises them as preferred fundraising recipients. All three certainly qualify as charities, but we know that our own members are significant beneficiaries of their work.

What Council was exploring, however, were activities solely to the benefit of third parties. Many members will recall the 2006 Oruuano project as an example of this, where we assisted a fledgling sister artists' association in Namibia. By the way, if you are not familiar with that project, you can read about it here.

The topic engendered some spirited discussion at Council. Representing artists with precarious livelihoods, and being no different ourselves, there is a natural desire to assist those less fortunate. However, there is also a recognition that Equity works with very slim resources, and shouldn't charity begin at home?

In the end, we decided to go out and do a quickie poll of the membership, using the various regional CPAGs. We asked about member interest in this kind of activity, preferred targets, level of resource use, and whether we should seek Canadian or international beneficiaries.

Although two-thirds of respondents felt that Equity should be devoting some portion of its resources to philanthropic activity, the results on the various detail points (who, when, how, etc.) expressed a wide range of opinion. Without reproducing all the results here, it summarises the situation nicely to note that with 66% of members surveyed supporting regular philanthropic work, quite a few of the summary comments that came back expressed reservation about using association resources for anyone other than members, for activities elsewhere as opposed to here, for using resources for this purpose at all, and so on. A very mixed message.

What Council has taken from this feedback is that support exists, but it is hardly overwhelming and is significantly qualified in many respects. In April, Council passed new policy approving philanthropic activities, but respecting the following limitations:

• that fulfilment of this policy is not an annual obligation, so Equity can wait until a worthy project presents itself;
• that activities under this policy are capped at 0.5% of the previous year's revenues;
• that projects needed to be of a clearly philanthropic nature; and 
• that fulfilment of this policy may not compromise achievement of other key policies which benefit members.

What all this means is that such projects are now permitted, but within strict resource limits and only when the resources so used will not have a negative impact on our core services. 

In other words, Council intends to take the same approach most of us do in our own giving when someone shows up at the door: if we can afford to contribute, we will; but if our circumstances do not so allow, we will wait until they do.

Member benefits - secured fees

Unlike many member benefits, working with secured fees is one of those invisible protections of which most members are thankfully unaware. I say "thankfully" because in the best of circumstances, it, like a high-wire safety net, remains unused. However, just like a safety net, you would not want to be without that protection if you do need it.

All member benefits and protections have their roots in Council policy. In this case, the applicable policy is End-2: Working Under Contract, which states:

Members will work with secure contracts in place, ensuring…appropriate and consistent remuneration [and] a guarantee on a portion of the fees payable…

In practice, this means that either the engager must put down a deposit on a portion of the fees (typically two weeks' worth of fees, taxes and benefits) or must prepay the artists. In the case of a tour, the per diems for the same period are also require a bond.

For established theatres, this security is most often posted in the form of an irrevocable letter of credit, although some theatres post cash bonds with the office. Cash bonds are kept separate from all other Equity accounts, and are not used for any purpose other than as security. Also, interest paid on cash bonds is credited to the engager, and does not go into Equity's general revenues. In all cases, Equity has the unilateral right to withdraw funds from the security deposit if required.

If you have served as a deputy on a show, you will recall having signed a "release" form at the end of the contract. Receipt of this form is critical, as it advises our staff that all the contractual financial obligations have been satisfied by the theatre, and Equity may now release the security back to the engager.

If you are the deputy, it is really appreciated, by both the theatre and Equity staff, when you get that form back to the ofice promptly at the end of a contract. If you are contacted by the deputy on your show and asked to confirm full payment so they can send in the release, please get back to them ASAP. Theatres are understandably anxious to know that their security is unencumbered, and Equity does not want to tie up an engager's money any longer than absolutely necessary. If you happen to have misplaced the form, please download one here – send it in as soon as the production has closed and  you can confirm that there are no outstanding fees.

Does Equity ever have to pay members out of the security deposit? In a word: "yes", several times per year. I'll pull together some details for a future post.

Council's environmental responsibility policy

In a recent post, October methinks, I talked about how Council has an annual roster of cyclical agenda items, so that every aspect of Equity's work gets examined on a regular basis. One thing I neglected to mention is that Council also examines its own work on a cyclical basis – we have committed to excellence in governance, and that means engaging in regular appraisal of ourselves.

Part of last year's review included consideration of Council's environmental footprint. With 10 meetings per year, and three of those being full two-day meetings, Council goes through a lot of paper in the preparation of agendas, minutes, policy documents, discussion papers, etc. Council meetings also necessitate a fair amount of travel, since we bring all members of Council together three times per year.

Having written new policy to reduce our environmental footprint, here is what we have done since then to put that policy into action.

Paper
In the middle of last year, we switched to an electronic meeting package format for all seven teleconference meetings. This means that not only is much less paper consumed, but the environmental impact of sending that paper across the country is avoided. Councillors who are away from their home base can still request hard copy packages as needed, but that is now very much the exception.

Meeting packages are still sent out for in-person meetings – the number of documents that need to be reviewed in advance of a two-day meeting is more than we can reasonably expect Councillors to print at home. Also, while on a conference call, Councillors can usually refer to documents on a computer screen, something not easily managed when we meet in person.

We reviewed this approach at our February meeting to ensure it is working well for Councillors and staff. Although it will see a few tweaks to be more user friendly, it appears to be a success. We will also be reducing some of our other reprint schedules in favour of update sheets when necessary. Aside from the environmental benefits, there are also financial benefits to these changes: we are now using much less paper and toner and staff time for our work, as well as reducing courier costs.

Travel
We also looked at turning some of our in-person meetings into telephone conferences. However, much efficiency is gained by actually having participants together in the same room – converting even one two day in-person meeting into teleconference format would mean the addition of roughly ten more two-hour phone meetings in order to complete anywhere near the same amount of work. We did, however, add teleconference capability to our meetings, so that Councillors who are not able to attend in person are now able to be there by phone.

Video conferencing was also explored, but the current cost of having that set up for two whole days in nine or ten locations across the country is enormous. Doing the same thing through personal computers is not a viable option when meetings involve 20+ participants. Perhaps some day...

Instead, we will be purchasing carbon offsets for our travel on an annual basis. At the end of last year, a calculated equivalent in carbon offsets for our Council travel footprint were purchased from Less Emissions Inc. Less is currently the highest rated carbon offset vendor as reviewed by the David Suzuki Foundation and The Pembina Institute. Here is a link to their guide and grading report, if you want more information.

Administration
In order to ensure environmental awareness throughout all of Equity's operations, Council established similar policy for our Executive Director and her staff. A recent monitoring report detailed several new and updated initiatives:

• Waste paper is  now sent to a shredding company, both for security reasons, and to ensure that it is properly recycled and not combined with other waste.
• When the office photocopiers were replaced due to age, new ones were chosen that cost less per month and are much more energy efficient than the ones they replaced. Used toner cartridges and old drums are recycled through the manufacturer.
• Fax machines have recently been eliminated and all incoming faxes are now delivered via email.
• Every effort is made to distribute information regarding member services and other topics of interest via “piggybacking” with necessary mailings: either EQ or member invoices.
• The dep pack, one of our most constant mailings, was recently pruned to use less paper.
• EQ is packaged in an oxo-biodegradable polybag, and while the EQ paper stock has a glossy feel, the paper used for it has 50% recycled content and is acid and elemental chlorine free.
• When choosing a hotel for Council meetings, one of the criteria assessed by staff is whether or not the hotel has an environmental policy and what the specifics are.

Running a national organisation unavoidably has a significant environmental footprint, at least given current technologies. Council and staff will continue, however, to actively explore options to reduce that footprint wherever possible.

New Equity Honours Category Announced

One topic that has been stewing away gently on a back burner for a while now is a review of our slate of annual honours.

For those of you unfamiliar with our honours programme, here are the basics. Each year we solicit nominations from members across the country, for deserving honourees in three categories. The nominations and support material are reviewed by a Council committee, and the results presented to Council for approval. The awards themselves are presented at a honours evening each fall/winter.

Like everything, even our honours structure needs an overhaul now and then. Honours committees over the years had identified some confusing overlap between award categories, a few procedural concerns, and the absence of an award category for contributions that did not fit neatly into one of the existing options. The review work is now done and reflected in the new policy GP-14, for readers who want all the details.

And for those of you who prefer the executive summary...

Life Membership is awarded to members who have made an outstanding contribution to the performing arts within the jurisdiction of Equity. It recognises not only an extraordinary career, but also colleagues who have gone "above and beyond" in other ways that contribute to the benefit of either Equity or its members.

Honorary Membership is awarded to an individual who is not an Equity member, but who has made an outstanding contribution to Equity and/or its members, or to the performing arts within the jurisdiction of Equity.

The Larry McCance Award is awarded to a member or to a former staff member, who has made an outstanding contribution to the Association and its members, through elected representation, notable service on staff, or other exemplary action and advocacy.

And now for the new one...

Beginning in 2011, The CAEA Award of Distinction may be given to any organisation, individual, or group of individuals, excluding current staff, in recognition of significant contribution within the realm of live performance benefitting the membership of the Canadian Actors’ Equity Association.

The purpose of this new award is to allow Equity and its membership to recognise worthy recipients who would not otherwise be eligible for one of the other awards. The criteria are very open, so that the nominators have free rein to let us know what is important to them.

Full details on the honours categories, as well as a nomination form and instructions, can be found here. The nomination cutoff for each round of honours is May 1st. However, nominations are accepted all year, and will automatically be considered for the next available round of honours, depending on the submission date.

The next time you catch yourself thinking "people really ought to know how special that person is", head to the nearest computer, or give the office a call, and submit a nomination. That is exactly the kind of person the honours exist to celebrate.

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:

• reviews nearly 14,000 contracts for over 2,000 productions
• receives and sends over 12,000 emails
• spends around 450 hours on the phone 

The overwhelming majority of these interactions are positive and productive. But when one occurs that is not, that's when Councillors hear about it. And that's when the local CPAG members hear about it. And that's when everyone else in the green room hears about it. A single bad experience can echo so far and for so long, that it ends up sounding like a chorus of common occurrence.

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.

Member Benefits - a safe and sanitary work environment

As part of this blog, Council has asked me to include information on some of the many benefits and services offered by Equity to its members. This article is the first in that series.

First off, I hope everyone is aware that a summary of your membership benefits and protections is set out in the Ends section of our policy document. If not, you should give it a read sometime; the Ends statements outline Equity's commitment to you as a member. They're what you pay your dues for.

Ends policies state that (paraphrased):

All members will have protection, support and resources while under contract and while pursuing future contracts, including safe and sanitary places of work and audition. 

I've condensed two parallel policies into a single statement here, so please forgive the somewhat awkward construction. In the policy document you will find it divided into "work under contract" and "pursuit of future contracts," because Equity needs to deal with these two conditions separately. I'll go into more detail below.

While under contract
All engagement policies and agreements include specific language setting out expectations for a healthy and safe work environment. Take the Canadian Opera Agreement as an example. It requires a safe and sanitary place of engagement, including clean and properly heated dressing rooms and washroom facilities; hot and cold running water; clean, safe, accessible and well-lit access to the stage door; enclosed access from dressing rooms to the stage; minimum temperature requirements met; well-delineated passageways in case of blackouts; safe rehearsal and stage surfaces; security from threats to personal safety; regularly cleaned costumes and hair pieces, etc.

You get the idea, and you can find the details listed under "Safe and Sanitary Places of Engagement." In situations where performances take place outdoors, more detail is added. Additionally, Equity has the right to inspect any venue on request to ensure compliance.

All other major agreements are similar. Smaller agreements, such as the Indie, include parallel language. Safety of the Artist is a frontmost concern. Always.

Finally, all major agreements stipulate adherence to provincially mandated health and safety requirements, or to the Ontario Health and Safety Guidelines for Live Performance where no specific provincial regulations exist. As of this writing, BC, Alberta, Ontario and Québec all have health and safety requirements geared toward workers in live performance.

While in pursuit of future contracts
Ensuring safe and clean places of work and audition is more complicated. Where a negotiated agreement exists, such as the Canadian Theatre Agreement with PACT, we include requirements for audition and associated warmup and other spaces, and these apply even in the absence of a signed contract.

Working with independent engagers outside such negotiated agreements is admittedly tricky. Without pre-agreed conditions for audition, we can't point to a piece of text and tell the engager that they must live up to those terms. We rely on engager common sense and goodwill, not to mention the fact that a large percentage of independent engagers are members or ex-members, and they don't need a lot of prompting to provide a decent audition environment. That said, we are certainly not shy about weighing in on the few occasions when we hear of poor conditions.

What to do if you feel that work or audition conditions are unsafe, unclean or otherwise dangerous
If you are under contract, tell your Deputy and your Stage Manager. The overwhelming majority of concerns can be addressed quickly and locally, once brought to the attention of these two. If your concern persists, or you are not yet under contract, then get on the phone to a business rep in either office. If the matter is urgent, you will even be able to contact someone outside of office hours.

Equity exists to help protect you, but we can't do our work if we are unaware of a problem. One of the most common answers to questions that begin "Why didn't Equity...?" is "We didn't know." Thankfully, issues of unsafe working conditions are few and far between, but if you find yourself in an unsafe or otherwise unhealthy work environment, and the problem is not cleared up pronto, get on the phone. We're there to help.