How the Canva crew learned to love feedback
“How am I doing?” is a question that has helped graphic design platform, Canva, to become one of Australia’s most talked-about startups.
In May, the six-year-old company announced it had raised $70 million from US venture capital firm General Catalyst (valuing Canva at $3.6 billion) and acquired two stock photography firms.
Its workplace culture has also received acclaim – with top employer awards from Great Place To Work and LinkedIn last year – and its workforce has at least doubled every year.
In answer to the question above, it seems like Canva is doing very well, thank you.
The practise of asking for feedback is a core part of Canva’s culture and performance strategies. We need to know how we are going so we can improve, however most of us hate the assessment.
New York University research at a major consultancy looked at our aversion to criticism and discovered that people are equally anxious, whether they are giving the feedback or receiving it.
One of the co-authors of the study, psychologist and NeuroLeadership Institute senior scientist, Tessa West, says the best way to develop a “feedback culture” is to train people to ask for it – rather than wait for it to be delivered.
By requesting the assessment of their performance, individuals feel a sense of control and certainty and can steer the discussion where they want. The people giving the feedback will also feel more relaxed, because they no longer have to guess what is wanted from them.
The head of people at Canva, Zach Kitschke, says new hires are introduced to the feedback culture through an “onboarding boot camp”, featuring sessions from the three founders of the company – Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams.
“Having a feedback conversation can be challenging and quite tricky, but we have a workshop that everyone goes through to learn how to do feedback and act in a constructive, supportive way,” Kitschke says.
“We have the philosophy that if everyone is constantly asking what they did well, or how they went in the meeting or what could they do better or how could they grow, then people are more open and more ready to hear feedback and people are more likely to give it as well.”
Kitschke has been with Canva for six years, from when it was a small startup with seven people to its present workforce of 600 in three offices in Sydney, Manila and Beijing.
Executive coach, Sarah Nanclares, joined the company as an internal coach last year and writes in a Canva blog: “… asking for feedback is a bit like exercising a muscle: the more you use it, the easier it becomes, and before you know it seeking regular feedback is no longer a scary task. In fact, it becomes welcomed.”
Points of difference
1.Skin in the game: Every employee is given equity options and becomes an owner of the business. Employees get a bonus of $5,000 if they successfully introduce a new hire to the business.
2. The Fix-It form: This form can be used to notify the founders and other senior executives of any problems.
3. Right fit: Recruits are screened for the values: Be a force for good, be a good human, set crazy big goals and make them happen, empower others, pursue excellence, and make complex things simple.
4. Someone to watch over me: Every new person gets paired with a mentor from the same area or discipline. Anyone can receive training to be a mentor.
5. Businesses within the business: Within Canva are 15 groups that function as their own startups, running independently, with the ability to move quickly.
6. Breaking bread: The teams stop for lunch every day and sit together at long tables so that no-one has to eat alone. A chef prepares shared serving plates and anything not eaten at lunch is refrigerated for people to take home for dinner. Ingredients come from a Canva-owned farm and the bar is open all day.
7. Open door: Employees are welcome to bring their dogs and children to work.
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. The Alliance is a community of organisations sharing insights and learning together, to find a better way of doing business.
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
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BY The Ethics Alliance
The Ethics Alliance is a community of organisations sharing insights and learning together, to find a better way of doing business. The Alliance is an initiative of The Ethics Centre.
What I now know about the ethics of fucking up
We’ve all fucked up before. Big mistakes and small, regrettable misdemeanours.
I have a penchant for saying things that are funny inside my head but come out all wrong. I know I’ve unintentionally offended and hurt people by blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. If I’ve become aware of it, I’ve tried to make amends. But it’s never been big, public or career ending. So, being honest, part of my interest in going along to ‘The Ethics of Fucking Up’ was schadenfreude.
I wanted to hear how Sam Dastyari and Mel Greig, who shared their stories of the ‘Chinese political donor scandal’ and the ‘Royal prank call’ had stuffed up. In truth, I wanted to revel in it just a little, to tell myself that at least it had never been that bad for me. I wanted to identify with Paul McDermott, whose fuck ups had never made the front pages or ruined lives.
I watched the crowd enter the sold-out venue in inner Sydney, thinking that every single one of these people who looked so smart, privileged and self-possessed had done at least one monumentally stupid thing in their lives. Had they come looking for redemption? For confirmation that what they did was okay? Because we all fuck up, whether we’re being naïve and thoughtless or doing something dastardly.
Pizza, wine and dark confessions
So what did I take away from a night that was variously funny, intelligent, shocking and sad, with pizza and wine thrown in for good measure?
It seems the biggest fuck ups come about when there is a combination two things: individuals being encouraged to act without first thinking through their decisions, and institutions not living by an ethical framework – or not having one at all. Add to that the speed at which we act in the tech era and it’s no wonder we’ve hurtled into our present state.
As Sam described it, ‘We’re heading backwards with our morality, with our acceptance and empathy for others, with our responsibility for the planet, while fear, selfishness and xenophobia are controlling our political decisions’.
So despite not being able to condone what he did in the ‘Chinese political donor scandal’, my heart ached for him when he described how, in the midst of the scandal, he lay in bed at 3am alone with his thoughts, realising he was solely responsible for the mess.
Rethinking forgiveness
Nobody deserves this unless they have committed some monstrous crime. I decided that I will accept mea culpas and requests for forgiveness more graciously, in my personal life and by public figures. When somebody shows true remorse, I’ll forgive them, because I’m more aware how we all fuck up from time to time, in big and small ways. It’s only human.
We love to hold individuals to account, especially when they are public figures. Perhaps we should be harder on institutions. Mel Greig told us how the broadcast organisation’s processes and ethical judgements went unquestioned during the ‘Royal prank call’.
To recap: the call to the London hospital caring for the Duchess of Cambridge ended in the suicide of nurse Jacintha Saldanha, who fell for the joke thinking it was the Queen and Prince Charles. A chain of decisions meant the prank call was broadcast in full – although Mel tried to stop this happening.
Yet Mel had to wear all the blame. Her description of the trolling she endured afterwards, which included death threats, made the room go quiet. Tears shone in the eyes of the person next to me. Public shaming, relentlessly negative and disparaging media coverage and the non-stop blast of social media are damaging people like never before. At no time has it been easier to broadcast judgment on individuals, instantly and loudly. But institutions are never made to suffer in the same way. Think banking royal commission.
How would I survive if this happened to me, I wondered?
A call to arms against the trolls
Would I be brave and resilient like Mel, and use the horrible experience to start a conversation to help other people, as she did by starting Troll Free Day? Would I have been strong enough to front up to the inquest into nurse Jacintha Saldanha’s death, look her children in the eye and say sorry? Would I stop looking for scapegoats and accept blame, as Sam did, learning to live with what he called ‘the darkest shit in the world’?
As always, a discussion about ethics goes on long after the lights have been turned off. Listening to this conversation about the ethics of fucking up has encouraged me to start conversations about it with friends and family. I realised we all draw the line about what we will and won’t forgive somewhere different, one of the things that defines our personal ethics.
The crowd drifted into the street to the sounds of Paul Kelly’s I’ve Done All the Dumb Things and Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time. Neither has ever been on my playlist, but I heard them in a new way. Opening your ears to things you think you already know is good thing.
I’ll certainly go back for The Ethics Centre’s conversations on desire, lying, courage and nudity.
Ethics Explainer: Ethics of Care
Ethics of care is a feminist approach to ethics. It challenges traditional moral theories as male-centric and problematic to the extent they omit or downplay values and virtues usually culturally associated with women or with roles that are often cast as ‘feminine’.
The best example of this may be seen in how ethics of care differs from two dominant normative moral theories of the 18th and 19th century. The first is deontology, best associated with Immanuel Kant’s ethics. The second is consequentialism, best associated with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and improved upon by John Stuart Mill.
Each of these moral theories require or encourage the moral agent to be unemotional. Moral decision-making is expected to be rational and logical, with a focus on universal, objective rules. In contrast, ethics of care defends some emotions, such as care or compassion, as moral.
On this view, there isn’t a dichotomy between reason and the emotions, as some emotions can be reasonable, morally appropriate or even helpful in guiding good decisions or actions. Feminist ethics also recognises that rules must be applied in a context, and real life moral decision-making is influenced by the relationships we have with those around us.
Instead of asking the moral decision-maker to be unbiased, the caring moral agent will consider that one’s duty may be greater to those they have particular bonds with, or to others who are powerless rather than powerful.
In a Different Voice
Traditional proponents of feminist care ethics include 20th century theorists Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings. Gilligan’s influential 1982 book, In a Different Voice, claimed that Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development were biased and male-oriented.
On these dominant psychological accounts of human development, male development is taken as standard, and female development is often judged as inferior in various ways.
Gilligan argued if women are ‘more emotional’ than men, and pay more attention to relationships rather than rules, this is not a sign of them being less ethical, but, rather, of different values that are equally valuable. While Gilligan may have deemed these differences to be ‘natural’ and associated with sex rather than gender, these differences may well have been socially constructed and therefore the result of upbringing.
How might the ethics of care theorist resolve the classical ‘Heinz’ dilemma: Should a moral agent steal the required medicine he cannot afford to buy to give to his very sick wife, or stick to the rule ‘do not steal’, regardless of the circumstances? A tricky dilemma, to be sure, as there are competing duties here (namely, a positive duty to help those in need as well as a negative duty to avoid stealing).
Arguably, the caring person would place the relationship with one’s spouse above any relationship they may or may not have with the pharmacist, and care or compassion or love would outweigh a rule (or a law) in this case, leading to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to steal the medicine.
It’s worth noting that a utilitarian might also claim a moral agent should steal the medicine because saving the wife’s life is a better outcome than whatever negative consequences may result from stealing. However, the reasoning that leads to this conclusion is based on unemotional weighing of costs and benefits, rather than a consideration of the relationships involved and asking what love might demand.
Writing at the same time as Gilligan, Noddings also defended care as a particular form of moral relationship. She asserted that caring was “ethically basic” to humans and that it can be seen in children’s behaviour. While Noddings does not rule men out from being caring, it is usually women who feature in her examples of caregivers.
Noddings, like Gilligan, prioritises relationships that are between specific individuals in a particular context as the basis for ethical behaviour. This stands in contrast to the idea that morality involves following universal, abstract or purely logical moral rules.
Who cares?
Ethics of care has been influential in areas like education, counselling, nursing and medicine. Yet there have also been feminist criticisms. Some worry that it maintains a sexist stereotype and encourages or assumes women nurture others, even while society fails to value carers as they should.
Noddings and Gilligan both argue against this, saying that the capacity for care is a general human strength, and while it is empowering to acknowledge it as a positive capacity in women, it should be encouraged regardless of gender.
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BY Dr Laura D’Olimpio
Dr Laura D’Olimpio is senior lecturer in philosophy of education at the University of Birmingham, UK, and co-edits the Journal of Philosophy in Schools.
The transformative power of praise
What is it about the legal industry that makes it so depressing? Well, it is not the work – but it could be exhaustion mixed with a lack of control about how much work they can handle and a shortage of appreciation from their bosses.
Psychologist and a scientist in behavioural neurogenetics, Bob Murray, says human beings are designed to work as little as 10 hours per week.
“If we work for more than 10 hours a week, it becomes stress,” he told a recent seminar in Sydney.
While that may seem an extreme position at first glance, it is important to understand what Professor Murray means by “work”.
“Work” is the stuff we do that is a grind. It is, perhaps, the administrative work that takes us away from the tasks that are meaningful or enjoyable.
“Work means not necessarily enjoying yourself, not necessarily relating. Human beings are relationship-forming animals. We are driven to surround ourselves with a network of supportive relationships and we can work hard and long… providing that we do it in the company of other people that we actually like, and that we enjoy the process of doing things with them.
“It’s not a question of how many hours you work. It’s whether you enjoy the process of doing that work. And whether you enjoy the people that you do it with”.
Murray said people come to work to be part of a tribe and to learn.
“So people in law firms are willing to stay there for long hours, providing they’re enjoying the process of learning what they’re doing,” he said.
Murray says 30 percent of all lawyers think about suicide once a year and 40 percent are clinically depressed.
A national survey of almost 1000 lawyers finds that excessive job demands, minimal control over workload and spillover of work commitments into personal life are some of the work-related factors correlated with poorer mental health outcomes.
“Concerns about the structure and culture of legal practice in Australia are also highlighted,” say the authors of the study, Lawyering Stress and Work Culture: An Australian Study, 2012-2013.
He says one relatively simple thing that employers and managers can do is to praise their people. However, only around 5 percent of people get praised once a day.
Praise is powerful because of its effect on the “feel good” chemicals we produce, like dopamine, which helps our brains work faster, smarter, and more creatively.
However, poorly given praise tends to antagonise people. Murray says there are three elements to effective praise:
What: The giver has to be specific about what they are praising. A generic “well-done team” can have the opposite effect.
How: This is the effort or the way someone has gone about something. It is the kind of praise you may give a child who comes last in a race, but stuck it out to the end, gave it their best effort and didn’t let the team down. It is not necessarily tied to success, but encourages and rewards the right behaviours.
Who: This is praise for the relationship. “ I really enjoy working with you. It’s great to have you as part of you of my team.” Murray says this kind of praise is less used in law firms than other kinds – but is the most powerful.
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
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BY Professor Bob Murray
Professor Bob Murray, is a principal at consultancy Fortinberry Murray, was speaking on a panel, hosted by The Legal Forecast and Clarence Workplaces for Lawyers in Sydney.
Are we prepared for climate change and the next migrant crisis?
A powerful infographic published in 2014, predicted how many years it would take for a world city to drown.
It used data from NASA, Sea Level Explorer, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Venice will be the first to go under apparently, its canals rising to wetly throttle the city of love. Amsterdam is set to follow, Hamburg next.
Other tools play out the encroachment of rising tides on our coasts. This one developed by EarthTime shows Sydney airport as a large puddle if temperatures increase by four degrees. There’s also research suggesting our ancestors may one day look down to see fish nibbling on the Opera House sails.
Climate change refugees will become reality
Sea level rise is just one effect of anthropogenic climate change that would make a place uninhabitable or inhospitable to humankind. It’s also relatively slow. Populations in climate vulnerable hotspots face a slew of other shove factors, too.
Already, we are seeing a rising frequency of extreme weather events. Climate change was linked to increasingly destructive tropical cyclones in a report published in Nature last year, and Australia’s Climate Council attributed the same to earlier and more dangerous fire seasons. Rapidly changing ecosystems will impact water resources, crop productivity, and patterns of familiar and unfamiliar disease. Famine, drought, poverty and illness are the horsemen saddling up.
Some will die as a result of these events. Others, if they are able, will choose to stay. The far sighted and privileged may pre-empt them, relocating in advance of crisis or discomfort.
These migrants can be expected to move through the ‘correct’ channels, under the radar of nativist suspicion. (‘When is an immigrant not an immigrant?’ asks Afua Hirsch. ‘When they’re rich’.)
But many more will become displaced peoples, forcibly de-homed. Research estimates this number could be anywhere between 50 million and 1 billion in the 21st century. This will prompt new waves of interstate and international flows, and a resultant redistribution and intensification of pressures and tensions on the global map.
How will the world respond?
Where will they go? What is the ethical obligation of states to welcome and provide for them? With gross denialism characterising global policies towards climate change, and intensifying hostility locking down national borders, how prepared are we to contend with this challenge to come?
“You can’t wall them out,” Obama recently told the BBC. “Not for long.”
While interstate climate migration (which may already be occurring in Tasmania) will incur infrastructural and cultural problems, international migration is a whole and humongous other ethical conundrum. Not least because currently, climate change migrants have almost no legal protections.
Is a person who moves because of a sudden, town levelling cyclone more entitled to the status of climate migrant or refugee (and the protection it affords) than someone who migrates as a result of the slow onset attrition of their livelihood due to climate change?
Who makes the rules?
Does sudden, violent circumstance carry a greater ethical demand for hospitality than if, after many years of struggle, a Mexican farmer can no longer put food on the table because his land has turned to dust? Does the latter qualify as a climate or economic migrant, or both?
Somewhat ironically (and certainly depressingly), the movement of people to climate ‘havens’ will place stress on those environmental sanctuaries themselves, potentially leading to concentrated degradation, pollution and threat to non-human nature. (On the other hand, climate migration could allow for nature to reclaim the places these migrants have left.)
There is also the argument that, once migrants from developing countries have been integrated into a host country, their carbon footprint will increase to resemble that of their new fellow citizenry – resulting in larger CO2 emissions. From this perspective, put forward by Philip Cafaro and Winthrop Staples, it is in the interests of the planet for prosperous countries to limit their welcome.
Not that privileged populations need much convincing. Jealous fear of future scarcity, a globalisation inflamed resentment towards the Other, a sense that modernity has failed to deliver on its promise of wholesale bounty: all these are conspiring to create increasingly tribalised societies that enable the xenophobic agendas of their governments. A recent poll showed that 46 percent of Australians believe immigration should be reduced, a percentage consistent with attitudes worldwide.
A divided world
In the US, there’s Trump’s grand ‘us vs them’ symbol of a wall. As reported in the Times, German lawmakers are comparing refugees to wolves. In Italy, tilting towards populism and the right, a mayor was arrested after transforming his small town into a migrant sanctuary.
Closer to home, in a country where the 27 years without recession could be linked to immigration, there’s Scott Morrison’s newly proposed immigration cuts. There’s Senator Anning blaming the Christchurch massacre on Muslim immigration. There’s the bipartisan support for the prospects, wellbeing and mental health of asylum seekers to deteriorate to such an extent, the UN human rights council described it as ‘massive abuse’.
Yet the local effects of climate change don’t have a local origin. Causality extends beyond borders, piling miles high at the feet of industrialised countries. Nations like the US and Australia enjoy high standards of living largely because we have been pillaging and burning fossil fuels for more than a century. Yet those least culpable will bear the heaviest cost.
This, argues the author of a paper published in Ethics, Policy and Environment, warrants a different ethical framework than that which applies to other kinds of migration. He concludes that industrialised nations “have a moral responsibility … to compensate for harms that their actions have caused”.
This responsibility may include investing in less developed countries to mitigate climate change effects, writes the author. But it also morally obliges giving access, security and residence to those with nowhere else to go.
BY Kate Prendergast
Kate Prendergast is a writer, reviewer and artist based in Sydney. She's worked at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Broad Encounters and Giramondo Publishing. She's not terrible at marketing, but it makes her think of a famous bit by standup legend Bill Hicks.
Corruption, decency and probity advice
Corruption and probity are hot topics in Australia’s public sector. Even a cursory glance at recent cases brought before corruption watchdogs shows this.
The long running stories and court cases that follow have become a staple of national news bulletins. Any time a state asset is built, sold or disposed of, there are serious questions to be asked.
Probity – which is a corporate noun for ethics or honesty and decency – has established its place in the architecture of technical services that assess, assure and measure high-risk public sector projects. Probity advising and auditing is crucial when how a project is executed is just as important as any intended outcome.
As the line separating public and private sector accountabilities becomes less clear, non-government actors are increasingly looking to probity professionals to help ensure – and show – integrity in their dealings. However, before doing so it is important the probity professionals themselves improve the integrity of their process and gain a more sophisticated understanding of ethical frameworks.
Probity services are provided both by large accounting firms and a growing band of smaller boutique operators. Probity plans (documents that set out how the project will be run to ensure the integrity of the process) are now a mandatory requirement for many public projects.
Probity professionals use a number of lenses to monitor and promote ethical decision making in execution, typically through the following fundamentals:
Value for money: Was the market tested adequately to ensure an organisation was achieving the most competitive result, which made the best use of resources?
Conflicts of interest and impartiality: Were processes in place to manage any actual, perceived or potential conflicts of interests?
Accountability and transparency: Was an auditable trail maintained to provide evidence of the integrity of the process? Was enough information made available to promote confidence – for example, were selection criteria and time lines for decision making adequately communicated?
Confidentiality: When sensitive information from stakeholders is received, such as private or business-in-confidence information, was there a process in place to identify and protect this information?
The growth of probity services over the last 30 years undoubtedly reflects their ability to add value to projects. However, over that same period there has been concern that practitioners have at times diminished, rather than promoted, probity fundamentals. Some of the critical factors include:
- Relying too heavily on compliance monitoring at the expense of ethical considerations
- Allowing their duties to be too narrowly defined by clients
- Lacking the confidence to challenge impropriety
- Allowing themselves to be “shopped” (much like “legal advice shopping,” clients can go from one probity advisor to another until they get the advice they want).
There is also concern that public sector agencies can overuse these services, having the effect of “contracting out” their probity obligations in their regular operations.
To some extent these are symptoms of the unregulated nature of probity services. There are no formal qualifications required for probity advisors and auditors and no professional standard governing them.
Their difference from traditional audits or investigations has led to some misunderstanding of their role and judgements which can lead to unfair criticism of probity professionals, but also to exploitation by both clients and probity practitioners.
To tackle these problems and prepare for a broader role in guiding business dealings, probity practitioners need to acknowledge their own industry’s need for an ethical framework and an increasingly robust standard for professional practice.
This framework would acknowledge their implied obligation to society to be more than a mere compliance check, and, on behalf of the average Joe on the street, to be the one in the room to ask a simple pub test question: after all the boxes have been ticked, does it look and sound like an ethical process?
To do this, the profession needs to imagine its duty in broader terms than self-interest or the interest of clients, but to society in general, in line with other professions tasked with acting in the public interest.
For some time, probity professionals have used policy documents such as the NSW Code of Practice for Procurement to gauge the ethical performance of government projects. However, as their duty and work expands to different sectors and in line with changing community expectations, they will need to be able to identify the ethical frameworks peculiar to those sectors and to the organisations they are commissioned by.
Used effectively, an ethical framework is the foundation of an organisation’s culture.
When requested to provide probity related advice, The Ethics Centre includes the ethical framework amongst its list of fundamentals. This allows our clients to do more than tick boxes. It allows them to assess whether they have lived up to their ethical obligations, the values they proport to uphold and their promise to the community.
In a world in which trust is in deficit, these are important skills to have.
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BY David Burfoot
David has worked in the not-for-profit, public and private sectors domestically and internationally for organisations as diverse as the United Nations Development Program, Deloitte, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption and Sydney University. He has been an anti-corruption specialist with a number of government agencies and held senior positions responsible for corporate planning, change and internal communications.
Australia, it’s time to curb immigration
A majority of Australians welcome immigrants. So why then do opinion polls of young and old voters alike across the political divide, now find majority support for reducing our immigration intake?
Perhaps it could be for the same reason that faith in our political system is dwindling at a time of strong economic growth. Australia is the ‘lucky country’ that hasn’t had a recession in the last 28 years.
Yet we’ve actually had two recessions in this time if we consider GDP on a per-capita basis. This, combined with stagnant real wage growth and sharp increases in congestion and the price of housing and electricity in our major cities, could explain why the Australian success story is inconsistent with the lived experience of so many of us.
The decline of the Australian dream?
Our current intake means immigration now acts as a ponzi scheme.
The superficial figure of a growing headline GDP fuelled by an increasing population masks the reality of an Australian dream that is becoming increasingly out of reach for immigrants and native-born Australians alike.
We’ve been falsely told we’ve weathered economic calamities that have stunned the rest of the world. When taken on a per-capita basis, our economy has actually experienced negative growth periods that closely mirror patterns in the United States.
We’re rightly told we need hardworking immigrants to help foot the bill for our ageing population by raising productivity and tax revenue. Yet this cost is also offset when their ageing family members or other dependents are brought over. Since preventing them from doing so may be cruel, surely it’s fairer to lessen our dependence on their intake if we can?
A lack of infrastructure
Over 200,000 people settle in Australia every year, mostly in the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne. That’s the equivalent of one Canberra or greater Newcastle area a year.
Unlike the United States, most economic opportunities are concentrated in a few major cities dotting our shores. This combined with the failures of successive state and federal governments to build the infrastructure and invest in the services needed to cater for record population growth levels driven majorly by immigration.
A failure to rezone for an appropriate supply of land, mean our schools are becoming crowded, our real estate prohibitively expensive, our commutes are longer and more depressing, and our roads are badly congested.
Today, infrastructure is being built, land is finally being rezoned to accommodate higher population density and more housing stock in the outer suburbs, and the Prime Minister has made regional job growth one of his major priorities.
But these issues should have been fixed ten years ago and it’s increasingly unlikely that they will be executed efficiently and effectively enough to catch up to where they need to be should current immigration intake levels continue for the years to come.
Our governments have proven to be terrible central planners, often rejecting or watering down the advice of independent expert bodies like Infrastructure Australia and the Productivity Commission due to political factors.
Why would we trust them to not only get the answer right now, but to execute it correctly? Our newspapers are filled daily with stories about light rail and road link projects that are behind schedule.
All of it paid for by taxpayers like us.
Foreign workers or local graduates?
Consider also the perverse reality of foreign workers brought to our shores to fill supposed skill gaps who then struggle to find work in their field and end up in whatever job they can get.
Meanwhile, you’ll find two separate articles in the same week. One from industry groups cautioning against cutting skilled immigration due to shortages in the STEM fields. The other reporting that Australian STEM graduates are struggling to find work in their field.
Why would employers invest resources in training local graduates when there’s a ready supply of experienced foreign workers? What incentive do universities have to step in and fill this gap when their funding isn’t contingent on employability outcomes?
This isn’t about nativism. The immigrants coming here certainly have a stake in making sure their current or future children can find meaningful work and obtain education and training to make them job ready.
There’s only one way to hold our governments accountable so the correct and sometimes tough decisions needed to sustain our way of life and make the most of the boon that immigration has been for the country, are made. It’s to wean them off their addiction to record immigration levels.
Lest the ponzi scheme collapse.
And frank conversations about the quantity and quality of immigration that the sensible centre of politics once held, increasingly become the purview of populist minor parties who have experienced resurgence on the back of widespread, unanswered frustrations about unsustainable immigration that we are ill-prepared for.
This article was produced in association with IQ2: Should Australia curb immigration? With powerful arguments presented at both ends of the spectrum, it was a debate that raised issues from urban planning to government policy, environmental impacts to economic advantages and more.
BY Satya Marar
Satya Marar is an Indian-born, Sydney based writer, public commentator and Director of Policy at the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance. He took part in the IQ2 debate, ‘Curb Immigration’
How to build good technology
Dr Matthew Beard explains the key principles to guide the development of ethical technology at the Atlassian 2019 conference in Las Vegas.
Find out why technology designers have a moral responsibility to design ethically, the unintended ethical consequences of designs such as Pokemon Go, and the the seven guiding principles designers need to consider when building new technology.
Whether editing a genome, building a driverless car or writing a social media algorithm, Dr Beard says these principles offer the guidance and tools to do so ethically.
Download ‘Ethical By Design: Principles For Good Technology ‘
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
The dangers of being overworked and stressed out
If anyone has a visceral understanding of how high-pressure work environments make mincemeat from young graduates, it is Georgie Dent. Her first job as a young lawyer ended in a nervous breakdown and two weeks in a psychiatric hospital.
Now a well-known journalist and advocate for women, Dent is also supporting her husband (a surgeon-in-training) through the brutal demands of his work, is raising three young daughters and has just published a book (Breaking Badly) about how things fell apart during her 18-months of working in a top law firm, 12 years ago.
“I think that there is the same sort of cultural expectation in law and medicine, that you will suck up absolutely everything and you will work around the clock,” she says.
When Dent looks back at her time as a lawyer, she acknowledges that an unworkable workplace was just one element in her breakdown. She also had to deal with her anxious personality and the ravages of Crohn’s Disease – a life-long gastrointestinal disorder.
“I think, for me, it probably wasn’t avoidable. I actually think, no matter what job I had taken, I was headed for some sort of breakdown. Being in a particularly stressful job with really long hours certainly didn’t help me physically… and then mentally,” she says.
Dent’s first six-month rotation in the law firm was with a Partner who was regarded as a genius and “rainmaker”, but was actually a shouting bully. As she details in her book:
“Almost anyone who has done any work inside a large law firm will have a tale or two about a tyrannical partner. These men and women are feared and revered in equal measure: they are not afraid of throwing phones and think nothing of publicly dressing down members of their team, they expect an immediate response to every email regardless of the time it’s dispatched, and generally have everyone in their vicinity living on a knife’s edge.
“The man I worked for had had nine members of staff leave in the six months before I joined – and it was a team of six. He went hot and cold, and was aggressive, void of self-awareness and really difficult to please.”
A lack of autonomy
Dent stayed the course and then moved onto a team that was welcoming and collegiate, but the stress had exacerbated her Crohn’s, which only added to her anxiety.
Juniors such as Dent, as she was then, had been the stars of their schools and universities, but found their achievements and intellect counted for little at work.
“As the firm’s underlings, we operated at the whims of partners, senior lawyers and clients. The higher a person climbs in a law firm the greater autonomy they secure. We were on the bottom rung, which meant no autonomy at all.
“We were so lowly, in fact, that we were rarely given a glimpse of the ‘big picture’. Instead, we were often asked to complete tasks without any context, which meant we were regularly blindsided when it came to the next step.
“Having a substantive task doled out at 5.30pm with a tight turnaround wasn’t unusual – in fact, it was practically expected. The salt in the wound was when this kind of task was handed to you at the end of a quiet day, after you had been hanging around and asking for work since morning, unsure of how you could possibly meet your billable target without anything to do.”
Dent sees this lack of control as a factor in burn-outs among lawyers and doctors.
Unsafe hours for doctors
Reconstructive plastic surgeon, Neela Janakiramanan, has written about the pressures on young doctors in a column for Women’s Agenda(of which Dent is a contributing editor).
“As an intern, I learned that it is considered acceptable to work eighty hours in a week if you have the following week off, and not be paid overtime for the week worked because the average across the fortnight is only forty,” writes Janakiramana.
Janakiramana’s longest fortnight was 204 hours in twelve consecutive days, “with the majority of it on call, in the midst of a job where the average was 180 hours a fortnight. I was in my third trimester of pregnancy”.
It is worth noting that the suicide rate for doctors is twice that of the general population and a 2016 audit found 53 per cent of public hospital doctors are working unsafe hours. Mental health starts to decline after someone has worked more than 39 hours per week, according to research.
After leaving the law firm to recuperate, Dent found herself in another occupation often regarded as high-pressure – journalism – for BRW magazine. Even though she was again starting at the bottom, Dent found the experience enlightening.
“It was just so different to me, culturally,” she says.
“In editorial meetings, people were allowed to speak. In a law firm… you don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. As a junior, you’re not even allowed to send an email.
“[In law firms] You’re on the leash so much and, culturally, that creates a different dynamic. I found it very refreshing to walk into other workplaces where you can still sit around the table and pitch ideas and contribute to conversations without thinking through every single word that you say.”
Longer (hours) does not equate to ‘better’
When it comes to working hours, many studies show that longer work weeks do not improve productivity. They may even make people less productive.
Dent points to the experience of Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand, which offered its 250 staff a four-day work week, while retaining their full-time wages. A study of the impact of the initiative reported lower stress levels, higher levels of job satisfaction and an improved sense of work-life balance.
Company founder, Andrew Barnes, told The Guardian: “For us, this is about our company getting improved productivity from greater workplace efficiencies… there’s no downside for us”.
Dent supports the idea that law firms “gear themselves” around efficiency, rather than time worked.
“I think then across every industry, every field, I think we need to get a recognition that we work incredibly long hours and we have to look at how that is impacting our lives as well as that work,” she says.
“It’s easy to fall into that trap of thinking that, in this line of work [law], we have to be available all the time and that’s the only way we can deliver value to clients. I just don’t necessarily think that’s true. And I think that it’s worth being a little bit bold.”
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
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BY Fiona Smith
Fiona Smith is a freelance journalist who writes about people, workplaces and social equity. Follow her on Twitter @fionaatwork
Big Thinker: Buddha
Gautama Buddha lived during the 5th century BCE and was the founder of the Buddhist religion. He also developed a rich philosophical system of thought that challenged notions of permanence and personal identity.
Buddhism is typically considered a religion but it also has a strong philosophical foundation and has inspired a rich tradition of philosophical inquiry, especially in India and China, and, increasingly, Western countries.
Buddhism emerged from the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, an Indian prince who turned his back on a life of leisure and opulence. Instead, he sought to understand the causes of suffering and how we might be able to be liberated from it.
Coincidentally, Gautama Buddha lived around the 5th Century BCE, which is at a similar time to two other great philosophers in different corners of the world – Socrates in Ancient Greece and Confucius in China – both of whom sparked their own major philosophical traditions.
Desire, happiness and suffering
Like many philosophers – from Aristotle to Peter Singer – one might say the Buddha was interested in how to live a good life. The starting point of his teachings is that life is suffering, which sounds like a pessimistic start, but he was just reminding us none of us can escape things like illness, death, loss, or these days, doing our tax returns.
Buddha went on to explain suffering is not random or uncaused. In fact, he argued if we can come to understand the causes of suffering, then we can do something about it. We can even become liberated from suffering and achieve nirvana, which is a state of pure enlightenment.
Many philosophers believe this teaching is just as relevant today as it was over 2,000 years ago. We’re told today that we ought to be happy, and that happiness comes from being able to satisfy our desires. Our entire economy is predicated on this idea. So we work hard, earn money, get stressed, buy more stuff, yet many of us can’t seem to find deeper satisfaction.
It turns out that no matter what desires we satisfy, there are more desires that crop up to take their place. And there are some desires that never go away, like the desire for status or wealth, and some desires that can never be satisfied, like when we experience unrequited love. And when we can’t satisfy our desires, we experience suffering.
The Buddha said this is because we have our theory of happiness backwards. Happiness doesn’t come from satisfying ever more desires – it comes from reducing our desires so there are fewer that need to be satisfied. It’s only when we desire nothing and we can just be that we are truly free from suffering.
Thus the Buddha argues our suffering is not caused by the whims of an indifferent world outside of our control. Rather, the cause of suffering is within our own minds. If we can change our minds, we can find liberation from suffering. This led him to develop a theory of our minds and how we perceive reality.
Permanence
He said that one of the fundamental mistakes in the way we think about the world is to believe in the permanence of things. We assume (or desire) that things will last forever, whether that be our youth, our possessions or our relationships with loved ones, and we become attached to them.
So when they inevitably erode, decay or disappear – we grow old, our possessions wear out, our loved ones move on – we suffer. But this suffering is only because we failed to realise that nothing is permanent, that all things are in flux, and if we can come to enjoy things without being attached to them, then we would suffer less.
Tibetan Buddhist monks have a ritual where they spend weeks painstakingly creating incredibly detailed and beautiful mandalas made out of coloured sand. Then, once they’re finished, they ritualistically sweep the sand away, destroying the mandala, and drop the collected sand into a river to flow back into the world, representing their embrace of impermanence.
The self
Another core philosophical insight from Buddhism was to question our sense of self. It’s natural to believe there is something at the core of our being that is unchanging, whether that be our soul, mind or personality.
But the Buddha noted when you try to pin down what that permanent aspect of ourselves is, you find there’s nothing there, just a stream of impressions, thoughts and feelings. So our sense that there is a persistent self is ultimately an illusion. We are just as dynamic and impermanent as the rest of the world around us. And if we can realise this, we can release ourselves from the pretense of what we think we are and we can just be.
Interestingly, this is very similar to an observation made by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who said when he introspected, he could never settle on the solid core to his self. Rather, his self was like a swarm of bees with no boundary and no hard centre, with each being an individual thought or experience. The Buddha would likely have enjoyed this analogy.
Meditation
One of the aspects of Buddhism that has had the most lasting impact is the practice of meditation, particularly mindful meditation. The recent mindfulness movement is based on a form of Buddhist meditation that encourages us to sit quietly and let our thoughts come and go without judgement. Essentially, we must ignore our thoughts in order to control and be free from them. Modern science has shown that this kind of meditation can reduce stress and improve our focus and mood.
Buddhism is not only the fourth largest religion in the world with over 500 million adherents today, and third largest in Australia, but it continues to be a rich vein of philosophical inquiry.
Western philosophy was rather slow to take Buddhism seriously, but there are now many Western philosophers who are engaging with Buddhist ideas about reality, knowledge, the mind, the self and ethics.
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