ALIA and employer support

I was talking to a colleague the other day about the amount of support that employers give to employees to conduct professional Association contributory business during work time. She was amazed that some employers do not support ALIA associated work and I was just as astounded at the extent of the support her employer gave her - ALIA committee work is even put into her annual workplan as part of professional development.

A leading library service has made comments that Association related work is not 'real life', budgeting for events that had a turnover of hundreds of thousands of dollars was not applicable to a work scenario and working with volunteer committees had no bearing on staff management in the workplace.

Whilst I am not surprised by this attitude, I am disappointed. If working for a volunteer association does not constitute 'real life' or 'real work', then what does it constitute? Sure it is great professional development and good learning for the participant, but learning such as this has to be better utilised when applied in the workplace.

So what does constitute Association related workplace support? That's an interesting question. Once I would have thought it was something as simple as dialling into a conference call during work time or receiving phone calls in the workplace, but I have been surprised by the level of support from some employers. As I mentioned earlier, one colleague has ALIA related work inserted as an output in her annual workplan, so she is able to dedicate time during her work day to Association related work, others, although having no formal work plan in place, can dial into teleconferences, send and receive emails. write reports and attend meetings during their work day. Of course, I wouldn’t expect that this would be done all day, every day, but obviously there is trust in the staff to be able to deliver their own work objectives.

So what are the worst examples of lack of support that I have heard about? Library staff needing to stay back to 'make up' time used during the day to answer Association related emails, emails being monitored, not encouraging contribution to professional literature, refusing to fund conference attendance yet applying it to a workplace training plan and (perhaps) the most disappointing of all, that a library service is too small to support Association related work. Surely investing staff time in something as important as growing the profession and professional development would outweigh such an outlook?