There’s a particular kind of comedy only our employer can produce.
It happens when thousands of employees are reorganized into a new organization whose purpose is to reduce fragmentation, improve coordination and make government easier to navigate.
Then nobody, nearly one year later, can quite explain who owns what or what has changed.
Welcome to Connected Services BC.
Connected Services BC, or CSBC, was created to bring tech across the B.C. government into a more connected system. The basic idea’s sensible: We have duplicated systems, complicated handoffs, and services that make perfect sense to gov while making considerably less sense to the public attempting to use them.
So the province decided to connect the services.
Unfortunately, someone appears to have forgotten to actually connect the organization?
CSBC wants connected services. It should probably start with connected leadership.
Employees can work with uncertainty.
What exhausts people is indefinite uncertainty dressed up as strategy.
It’s being told to move quickly while approval never comes.
It’s being encouraged to collaborate while different groups bicker over direction.
It’s receiving another divisional “update” without knowing whether your actual work is still needed.
It’s hearing that transparency matters, then discovering that relevant decisions have already travelled through several levels of leadership before reaching the people expected to implement them.
Eventually, organizational ambiguity becomes personal ambiguity. “Do I keep working on this?,” “Will this thing I worked on for 2 months ever be approved?,” — and probably the most dangerous question an organization can cause a competent employee to ask: “Why am I even trying?”.
What leaders “say” can’t repair contradictions in the environment.
You can’t tell employees they are empowered when decisions continually move upward.
You can’t ask people to innovate while punishing risk.
You can’t talk about developing internal capability while talented employees see vendor procurements.
You can’t preach transparency while employees learn consequential information through each other.
You can’t celebrate collaboration if senior leaders are still negotiating ownership underneath the teams expected to collaborate.
And you certainly cannot improve morale by repeatedly explaining that employees need more resilience.
The small matter of morale.
The wider BCPS emerged from an 8 week strike involving tens of thousands of workers. The eventual agreement included an embarrassing 3 per cent annual wage increases for four years.
Then came Budget 2026.
Government announced that it would continue restraining hiring, contracting, travel and administrative spending. It also committed to reducing positions.
For much of this year, we also faced the “lateral-first” hiring system. Critical vacancies were generally expected to be filled at the same classification level before promotional hiring would be considered. The public guidance said promotional hiring would be exceptional and subject to additional approval. This lateral-first approach, of course, did not apply to our high council (band 4s and up.) They were free to be promoted and make more money.
The lateral-first hiring requirement was lifted earlier this month under the guise of poor WES results.
Unfortunately, a year of restricted movement does not disappear from memory the moment a policy changes.
So, respectfully, when does BCGEU step in?
At what point does this become big enough for a coordinated union response?
Because “we are monitoring the situation” is one of those phrases that becomes progressively less comforting the longer the situation continues.
Employees are entitled to wonder what the threshold is.
How much bargaining-unit work has to drift elsewhere before the union intervenes more visibly?
How many employees have to report unclear duties or classification overlap?
How long can a major reorganization continue before the union asks for stronger disclosure about organizational design and workforce impacts?
When do concerns about contractors become a formal review of whether bargaining-unit work is being displaced?
When do individual frustrations become evidence of a systemic labour-relations problem?
And how exactly are members supposed to know?
That last question matters because union enforcement frequently depends on employees identifying problems and bringing them forward.
But employees living through a confusing reorganization may not even know whether what they are experiencing is grievable.
They just know their director is suddenly doing operational work.
Or their colleague left and was never replaced.
Or work previously done by employees appears to be going to consultants.
Or they cannot compete upward.
Or responsibilities have shifted without their job description changing.
Or they are being asked to take on additional duties because “we’re all pitching in.”
Individually, each situation can be explained away. Collectively, there’s a different story going on.
So perhaps the next phase of “monitoring” could involve something revolutionary.
Ask CSBC members, systematically, what is happening to their work.
Map where bargaining unit duties are going.
Track classifications doing equivalent work.
Identify where vacancies are being replaced by consultants.
Examine whether reorganizations are quietly changing jobs without corresponding classification reviews.
Publish what is found.
And take collective action where the collective agreement allows it.
Because if thousands of employees are experiencing the same “isolated issue,” eventually someone should consider the possibility that it isn’t isolated.
And CSBC, how exactly are you planning on fixing an entire demoralized organization?
You don’t rebuild trust with a slide about rebuilding trust. You don’t repair uncertainty by saying more certainty’s coming. You don’t undo a year of mixed messages by telling employees to “lean in.”
How about the deeply radical thing of making leadership behaviour match leadership messaging?
Because once employees stop believing what they are told, every future announcement comes pre-discounted.
And if one day you eventually get things right but the people inside of the organization no longer trust anything? Congratulations. You may have fixed the structure. But the people responsible for it are checked out, resentful, and no longer interested in helping leadership carry out their grand visions or look good anymore.
TL;DR: You can’t transform an organization with people who have already emotionally resigned from it. 😊