This is a post that’s five (or maybe even ten or fifteen?) years in the making.
When I started at RPL fifteen years ago, I was an extremely unique position in the HR Unit called “Organization Development Specialist” with responsibility for staff training and development, change management initiatives, working on the nebulous “organizational culture” among various other duties.
I was in the role for three years when I was abruptly called into a meeting and told that my position was being eliminated with no explanation.
Worse, there was also no plan to replace the work I did in any way.
A very insightful, experienced colleague named Tony Neal (RIP) was talking to me about this change and said “Jason, I know you’re disappointed about your job being eliminated but honestly, I’ve been here long enough to know that I’m going to be more disappointed that there will be no plan to do the work you’ve been doing.”
This was extremely prescient as one of the major projects I was working on when my position was eliminated was updating and modernizing RPL’s badly outdated (“How to Use a Fax Machine” outdated) staff training manual with a comprehensive Staff Manual that wouldn’t just be about “training” but really a one-stop shop to capture everything an employee would need to know about the organization and things that would be ways to develop that always nebulous “organizational culture.”
Worse, I had gotten to the point that I had a fairly developed outline for this tool so it was just a matter of reviewing, approving then expanding the sections of the manual outline.
That was fifteen years ago and I admit it’s become a bit of a personal running joke that every time we get a new manager or person in HR, I’ll send them my outline and say “Hey, if you’re interested in working on consistent staff training processes like most large organizations have (hell, employees who work at DQ tell me they got more thorough and comprehensive training then when they started at the library!), I wanted to send you this as a potential starting point.”
I’ve continued doing this to this day – as a Branch Manager heroically says they’re taking on this job then…nothing. As an Executive Director tells me “It’s coming!” when I press her…two years ago.
But the funniest/saddest example is from the early days of the Covid shutdown.
A manager and a small group of frontline staff who were all working from home (including myself) were put in charge of reviewing and updating our circulation procedures. I sent a suggestion to the manager that, since we were all at home without a lot to do, we should expand the scope of this project to develop a more full-featured staff manual and by the way, I even had an outline for the project to get us started.
This was the response I got from that manager and thinking of Tony’s comment and frustrated that this idea was shot down without any other discussion (eg. saying it’s an HR responsibility? Guess what – those staff were all working from home too!), I decided to put a reminder in my calendar for FIVE YEARS forward to see if there had been any progress.
I totally forgot I had done this until it popped up in my calendar, fittingly on April 1, 2025, earlier this week and I just started laughing in my office.
Tony was right. We are no closer to consistent, systemwide staff training than we were five years ago. Or ten. Or fifteen.
What makes this especially rich is our Director was on stage at our Staff Conference last year and talked about how “accountability” is a core principle of our work at the library.
But honestly, from what I’ve seen, accountability is a moving target and applied *very* inconsistently.
If I try to understand the thinking behind the lack of progress on this, the best I can come up with is that the manager who made the decision, every one of of the 4-5 HR managers we’ve had since I was in that unit, and various others in senior management (“it’s coming!!!”) are either people who’ve never worked on the frontlines of the library (or haven’t for decades) and don’t understand how complex and wide-ranging the job is.
I saw it directly recently when I spent an hour that I was on desk for meal coverage showing a placement student some of the basics of our circulation system as they’d expressed a desire to apply to RPL once their placement ends.
A newish staff member who was sitting at the other station overheard much of my explanation and said “Wow – that’s more thorough training than I got!” (Again, I was literally only showing the person the basics of our circ system and some of the tricks, scripted comments, and reasoning for various things that happen in the system – I didn’t begin to talk about dealing with our public computers. Or our photocopier. Or any of the many specialized services the library offers from a sound studio to laptop lending to musical instrument loans. Or how a lack of consistent initial training hurts our customer service, our staff retention rate and our overall brand.)
I have another idea for a post about the difference between a culture of “no” and a culture of “yes” (one of the things I really pushed during my time in HR and continue to push to this day) and a different post about how our words – about accountability, about Truth & Reconciliation, about the entire purpose of an organization – often don’t match actions. I’ll likely also get into some related ideas about whether you gain respect by your position solely or by your actions.
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