NEW PROJECT: Creating a Space to Share Best Practices for Political Staffing
A new government means big changes in parliamentary staffing, and I'm going to use this space to highlight best practices that can help political offices function better.
A special update today on something I’m adding to the Substack!
Don’t worry, I’m going to continue doing at least one post a week on data and politics, including new polling releases. But I’m also going to start sharing conversations I’m having with current and former political staff (and others in the political realm) about how we can help political staffers do their jobs in a successful and sustainable way.
I’ll get into the rationale for this in a second, but first I want to encourage all of my readers who have worked in politics to join in on the project.
If you have been involved in politics at any level, I want to hear from you about:
Any best practices or skills you have that you think staffers would benefit from learning about and implementing in their own work.
Any topics you wish you had more training or guidance on.
I have a short survey here for you to pass on comments about either of these things, and/or to offer to participate yourself: SURVEY LINK
I also want to celebrate the new mandate with 2 months of free access to all of these posts for those who are employed as staffers at the federal or provincial level (for any party). I strongly feel that training and knowledge sharing at the beginning of a new mandate has an immensely positive impact on outcomes for Canadians, so I want staffer to have access to the knowledge shared if it’s going to be useful.
If that’s you, send me an email at northpollstrategies@gmail.com with the name of the office you’re working for and the email address you want to use for the subscription and I’ll gift an upgraded subscription for two months.
I would also love your support if you are able to share this Substack with others you know in the political staffing space who could benefit. The more readers we get, the easier it will be to attract new and interesting voices to talk to from different backgrounds.
If you aren’t a current staffer, you are still welcome to upgrade to a paid subscription to support the project and see all of the interviews. The current plan is to feature one conversation for this project on the main newsletter each week and to post a second conversation each week for paid and gifted subscribers only.
Why Focus on Political Staff?
I am a firm believer that governments and political parties succeed and fail on the micro level. A vision from leadership is important, but that vision can only be effectively implemented through the hard work of hundreds of staffers.
With that in mind, it’s hard not to be concerned with the low priority most political parties put on investing in their own staff. Anyone who has worked in politics will tell you that salaries are low, training is limited, and chaos ensues when burn out arrives and results in high staff turnover in political offices.
Many workplaces deal with this type of challenge, but politics is special for a few reasons:
Politics is a high-pressure fast-paced environment that encourages offices to focus on getting through the day rather than long-term planning.
Political staff tend to be very young, and even those in management positions usually don’t have managerial experience before being promoted to these roles.
Staffing is a tough job, with long hours. Most staffers burn out within a few years, and people are constantly leaving to find better salaries and work-life balance elsewhere, creating unusually high employee turnover.
Most workplaces learn how to deal with issues over time and adapt to avoid past mistakes, but any learned lessons in politics are lost when governments are voted out and new offices are created from scratch with entirely new staff.
In my time in politics, I was fortunate to have the chance to have direct conversations with staffers about training gaps and workplace culture concerns and get feedback from staff surveys. I was shocked by how ubiquitous burnout was in political offices, and how few people felt comfortable talking about that reality with their teams, but I was also heartened by how easy it could be to make positive changes when that became a priority for high level staff.
A lot more work is needed, but it starts with people talking about it and sharing best practices. There’s no template for how to be good at most political staffing jobs, so it’s very useful when the people who have done these roles share the things that made them successful and give guidance about the things that can go wrong.
There are (hopefully) staffers in each party right now who are tasked with training or supporting staff as part of their job description,1 and in my experience they tend to do good work with limited resources. I just think we need more, and I don’t think there are enough people talking about how we can professionalize political staff.
Let’s start a conversation about it!
Although you’d be surprised at how rare it is to find anyone in politics whose job is primarily to help other staffers be successful - it’s often treated as a side duty for chiefs, research bureau staff or whip staff who have other top priorities on a busy day. It’s too easy for these responsibilities to be sidelined under this structure, and I’d love to see roles created that prioritize team building, staff support and workplace culture as a primary responsibility.