Every disclosure of non-public information is a violation of trust and therefore an ethical issue. Nevertheless, there are of course situations where the disclosure can be justified, but I believe that such a decision should consider the following:
- Does the same (or equivalent) information already exist?
- Is there a public interest to disclose this information?
- Can the disclosure of this information harm anyone?
^ I take great care with information that comes to me quietly, to ensure that I am not forwarding information that would violate anyone's personal or business privacy, and especially to ensure that I'm not getting anyone in hot water for having forwarded it in the first place.
Yeah right, you took so much consideration that you didn't even bother to search if the decision had already been publicly announced in the meanwhile.^^
For the records: the Email was sent to all employees on Wednesday at 11:02, the press release was published at 17:46, whereas you dumped here the entire content of the Email at 19:30, thus almost two hours after a press release was published.
In this case, I would not consider an email that was apparently transmitted to several thousand employees as particularly confidential. I am sure that VIA would not circulate such a memo with any critical business IP in it, as they know that with that big an audience, and given the topic, someone somewhere will pass it onwards. I would not treat an individually addressed email or a technical or business document in this way, but this particular document was pretty innocuous.
My point was not that the Email was particularly sensitive, but that it was largely irrelevant to the audience here. We are not on Wikileaks, we don't disclose information for the sake of disclosure. If you wanted to inform us that the Canadian and Ocean are suspended, then why did you not just write that? For instance:
"I've just heard that the Ocean and the Canadian are now cancelled until at least November, I'm sure there will be soon a press release, indeed, here it is: [link/quote]"
If you insist that the Email includes information which provide additional (i.e. incremental) insights over press releases which "generally aren't worth the pixels they consume", then how do you want to establish that without searching for the press release in the first place?
I'm not "feeling aggrieved" that one of my colleagues was so naive to forward this Email to you (and apparently forgot to ask you not to share it), but of your laziness to simply copy&paste the entire Email without any redaction effort, because you could apparently not be bothered to paraphrase what you had read (let alone: search for a public source).
I have closely followed the discussions on
Skyscraper Page,
Railroad.net,
Amtrak Unlimited,
CPTDB and
Groups and nowhere has a poster disclosed the Email to
inform about the decision.
For an example of an appropriate and responsible use of public and non-public information in Social Media, I refer to a certain poster on Groups, who apparently also is a silent reader here:
- In a first post, he remarked that the reservation system had been adjusted to no longer accept bookings before November 1,
- in a second post, he shared the press release and
- in a third post, he linked to your post remarking that a letter to all employees had been disclosed here.
If you have a look at his third post, you can see how he only quotes two short sentence fragments to get his point across:
Yes, that is 34 (or only 6.2%) of the 547 words used in that Email, but can you find anything else in the Email you deem to be relevant enough to this discussion and to provide sufficient additional insights not already offered by the press release to justify your disclosure?
There was no harm in publishing this.
Paul is of course right that no CEO in it's right mind would share any information with all of his employees at once, if he considered any of it as damaging to the company if disclosed to a third party or the public. Nevertheless, just like Paul ignored two-thirds of the questions one should consider before disclosing any non-public information, you are ignoring one-half of the sides involved in this communication: the employees, at which this letter was addressed.
As was hinted in the second-last paragraph, VIA's management has gone to great lengths to avoid laying off its employees as much as possible (a decision which is of course much easier to justify if your shareholder is the federal government - and therefore remains on the hook financially if your laid-off employees apply for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit or regular employment insurance benefits - than for a public corporation like Air Canada with private shareholders) and I am
once again proud to work for an employer which puts its employees first. However, even at reduced pay (for those who no longer have enough duties to work full hours, including myself), there is only that long that any company (even a taxpayer-funded one) operating only less than 20% of its regular timetable volume (if you compare this
temporary schedule with the
regular one) can keep close-to-all of its employees on its payroll. And
this is why the news that the Canadian and the Ocean will be suspended for another 5 full months than what was previously communicated is deeply unsettling for many VIA employees, especially for those who are only trained to work on these routes (like on-train staff and, especially, locomotive engineers or station staff).
Now consider that operational employees which currently have no trains to work on might not be checking their work phones as often for news from HQ as regularly working employees are. Even though it is unavoidable that a large number of them will have learnt about the extended cancellation of their trains through news or social media, they deserve to have a chance to at least read the Email which explains them this decision before they find it shared across social media (and read by members of the general public). And this is why I take much less offence at what was shared than at
when it was shared: not even 9 hours after it was communicated to all employees...
Just in case you wonder how I learnt of this decision: I was in a video conference with my team (we've all been working from home since mid-March, except those who absolutely have to work physically on-site) when one of my colleagues saw the Email in his inbox and shared the news. As someone who plans and adjusts the equipment deployment for the Canadian and other routes west of the Corridor (among countless other responsibilities, of course), Wednesday's decision has profound implications for my work, but even I was informed only at the same time as everyone else. I thankfully had more than enough reasons to anticipate that the cancellation date would be pushed by a few more months, but the fact that it took only eight-and-a-half hours for a note-to-all-employees to find its way into a public forum underlines why certain decisions unfortunately have to be kept between a bare minimum of people before they can be communicated to all employees at once, which then starts a race-against-the-clock in which the press release needs to be written and the
travel advisory and reservation system needs to be updated, in the hope that the press release will reach the public before the employee communication does. So again: it is less the content than the
speed with which something is leaked which is harmful.
I hope that these thoughts and insights will make one or the other reader here rethink his personal attitude towards disclosing non-public information (not just of VIA, but of any company, organisation or individual) and realize that the benefits of delaying the disclosure are three-fold:
- As time passes, the information's potential to harm anyone decreases.
- At the same time, the probability that information enters the public domain which reveals similar (if not: the same) information, which obviates the relevance of the information we wanted to disclose, increases.
- Finally, every minute we gain (before publishing that information) can be invested to improve our understanding of the information's potential harm and the information which is already publicly available.
I know it is not really realistic to hold (predominantly) anonymous Social Media users accountable to the same standard as we hold journalists, but I still believe it's an ideal worth striving for...
