Tausi Insider

If your career objective is to climb the corporate ladder, then you need to get recognized as a high-potential employee, or HiPo. HiPos have been tagged as the top performers in an organization and are invited to key meetings, asked for input, offered advanced learning opportunities and given plum assignments. And even when economic circumstances lead to layoffs, they are the ones who don’t just avoid the axe, but always seem to endure without any scars. So what does it take to be recognized as a HiPo? While some of it may be who you know, or luck, there are ways to influence how you and your talents are perceived. If you are deliberate and thoughtful about showcasing your strengths and establishing your workplace value, you can, and will, position yourself as a HiPo. Here are seven things you can do right now to become worthy of HiPo status. 1. Do excellent work Fulfill your current responsibilities. Don’t just perform well, perform exceptionally well. This is your baseline. If you ...

The economic update that was meant to shed light on how Canada will compete with new clean-spending measures in the United States and elsewhere has instead sowed confusion about one of the key elements of that strategy. Last spring, the federal government announced that it was exploring carbon contracts for differences (CCFDs). As presented then, the mechanism would guarantee companies making clean-technology investments of financial benefits from planned carbon-price increases, even if the price did not actually go up to $170 per tonne by 2030 as planned. Since August, when Washington committed US$370-billion to climate-related measures via the Inflation Reduction Act, Ottawa has faced increased pressure to follow through. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has suggested that Canada’s national carbon price means it doesn’t need to match subsidies in the U.S. But Canadian industries have complained that political uncertainty around the market-based mechanism – including whether it will be...

This is the weekly Careers newsletter. Radhika Panjwani is a former journalist from Toronto and a blogger. Companies scrambling to attract and retain talent should review their total rewards strategy and move beyond the base salary, bonus and other average incentives, say experts. Instead, compensation packages must be creative, flexible and customized, says Anand Parsan, national practice leader for compensation consulting at consulting firm Eckler Ltd. “Things such as flexible work arrangement or work-life balance that were non-negotiable in the past are now becoming table stakes as organizations adopt a more holistic strategy to retain employees,” he said. Imagine for instance, offering some employees a number of rewards credits to pick, choose and use whichever way they want. Those with a spouse and children will likely spend it differently than employees who are single, Mr. Parsan said. Programs that allow workers to choose and spend the money where they see fit will go a long w...

Shopify Inc.'s headquarters in Ottawa on May 3, 2022. During the pandemic, the company partnered with the government on an initiative to help small businesses grow, and on the COVID Alert app. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press Vass Bednar is the founder of Regs to Riches , a senior fellow at CIGI, and the executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy in digital society program. I recently reported Shopify to … itself. The Twitter account “ Deceptive Design ,” which illuminates deceptive design patterns, had noted two fishy apps available on the app store of Shopify Inc. , the Ottawa-based e-commerce platform. One advertises the ability for merchants using Shopify to create fake low-stock indicators. Another adds faux time pressure for customers through a large animated countdown timer. These apps are made by third-party app developers and are not necessarily Shopify’s fault. But Shopify claims certain standards in its official requirements for apps . By a...

Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux's office decided to crunch the numbers to estimate what would happen if the Bank of Canada overstepped with its rate increases. Dave Chan/Tausi Insider After six interest rate increases totalling 3.5 percentage points – and with the promise of still more to come – there’s a growing urgency to the questions the Bank of Canada faces about its aggressive pursuit to snuff out inflation. How high is the central bank willing to go? How far is too far? And how much economic collateral damage might the bank inflict if its policy tips into overzealousness? With the question becoming an increasing preoccupation of Ottawa policy makers and a broad swath of the Canadian public, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer decided to crunch the numbers to estimate what would happen if the Bank of Canada overstepped with its rate increases. Predictably, it’s not good. Arguably, it might be tolerable. But surprisingly, it might not make much difference...

The question I work night shifts at my company, however, the HR department only works from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. I would like to book an appointment with them to discuss some concerns I have about my manager and they say that I need to come in during work hours to meet with them in person. It’s inconvenient for me to come in during the 9-5. Should I be compensated for the meeting time? Does the HR department have an obligation to meet with me during my working hours if I need to discuss workplace concerns? The first answer Marion Blight , associate, Randy Ai Law Office, Toronto I’m sorry that you are having difficulty accessing your employer’s human resources, but there isn’t really a special obligation here for HR to be the one who accommodates your schedule. If you would like to have this meeting, then it can happen on their terms, within reason. However, whoever is required to come in during their off hours to handle this matter should at least be compensated. HR would certainly be wo...

OUR METHODOLOGY Almost 25,000 lawyers as well as in-house lawyers and legal executives working in legal departments of a company across Canada were actively invited to take part in the survey. The sample was collected via research conducted by Statista on company websites and further public available sources. Invitations were sent by email with a personalized link that could only be used once. In addition, lawyers and clients could participate in the survey via an open link. In these cases, the participants had to validate themself by providing a personal company email address before their answers were included in the evaluation. The link was announced and made available online on Tausi Insider’s Report on Business magazine's website. The survey, available in English and French, was conducted online between May 17 and July 10, 2022 and more than 3,100 responded to the invitation. Statista recorded more than 10,000 recommendations for the...

Traders work on the floor at the closing bell of the Dow Industrial Average at the New York Stock Exchange on Jan. 10, 2019 in New York. BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP/Getty Images David Morrison is president and chief executive of Eight Capital, an independent Canadian investment bank. When you’ve lived as many cycles as we have in institutional markets, you just see things differently. We look for patterns, so anomalies stand out. We are constantly examining the interconnectivity of markets and supply chains to predict what will happen when dominoes begin to fall. That’s why when we started seeing the precursors of a 1990s-style recession nearly 18 months ago, even as the market remained one-way, we began to pivot accordingly. And it’s why we now believe the timing is right for things to get a lot worse for the real economy as opposed to the stock market, which is already at or near its bottom. The coming recession will be trickier and deeper than most people have anticipated. But just as we ...

Defence lawyer Gary Martin, right, representing Yuesheng Wang, and Crown Prosecutor Marc Cigana leave after speaking to the media following a hearing at the courthouse in Longueuil, Que., on Nov 15. Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press Matt Malone is an assistant professor at Thompson Rivers University’s Faculty of Law. The arrest of Hydro-Québec employee Yuesheng Wang on Monday for allegedly obtaining trade secrets from the utility on behalf of China puts Canada in uncharted waters. It represents the first major use of Canada’s criminal trade secrets laws and should prompt a shift toward cracking down on economic espionage. This is an area where Canada has lagged the efforts of its peers for years – and still has a long way to go to get it right. Canada has two major criminal trade secrets laws. One criminalizes trade secrets theft for the benefit of, or in association with, a foreign economic entity. The other, and more recent criminal law, makes it an offence for anyone to obtain or c...

Samuel Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX, testifies during a Senate Committee on Feb. 9. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images Blair Wiley is chief legal officer of Wealthsimple, which offers cryptocurrency trading. Critics are quick to suggest that events like the recent collapse of FTX Ltd. make crypto a Wild West, without the regulatory oversight we take for granted in other industries. But in fact, in Canada, we do have a regulatory framework for crypto and it’s been working, and working well. Canadians are affected by the insolvencies of the Bahamas-based FTX, and New Jersey’s Celsius before it, largely because those companies have been operating in the country without conforming to its regulatory framework. It’s estimated that total losses from FTX could exceed US$10-billion, spread across a million creditors, including in Canada. More needs to be done to bring these foreign platforms under our regulatory framework and fast, otherwise Canadians will continue being victim to poor actor...

This is the weekly Careers newsletter. Déjà Leonard is a copywriter and freelance journalist based in Calgary. Historically, when someone is laid off it’s something they keep to themselves, or share privately with family and close connections who may be able to help them find another opportunity. It makes sense. Being laid off can be an emotional experience , leading to feelings of anger, sadness, fear and shame. Some people even experience physical symptoms like fatigue, weight loss or gain, and muscle pain. However, over the past few years, the feeds of social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter have been filled with professionals sharing news that they have been laid off, and how it has personally affected them. The past few years have normalized announcing layoffs Evangeline Berube, vice-president of strategic accounts at employment agency Robert Half, said she spends a lot of time on LinkedIn in her role and has observed this spike in announcements. “I think some of this is al...