Tag Archives: employee relations

Flexible friends…?

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Today (30 June) marks the extension of the right to request flexible working to all employees with more than 26 weeks service. It’s deemed significant enough to feature on the headlines of Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, and to have attracted this slightly hysterical article in the Daily Mail – so what does it mean in practice for small business?

Firstly, up to today, the right to request flexible working was restricted to those with young families or caring responsibilities (e.g. looking after an elderly relative). And to make this request there was a formal process with specified deadlines which both employer and employee to follow.

From today, anyone who’s worked for you for 26 weeks or more can make a request – without having to give you a reason why – and the cumbersome paperwork is no longer required (in reality, very few small employers bothered with the bureaucracy anyway).

The important thing is that it’s a right to ask. It’s not a right to demand. You can legitimately refuse a request if it would add to your business costs, provide a worse service to customers, affect quality or productivity, if you cannot reorganise workloads or recruit additional staff, or if there is not enough work at the time the individual wishes to work. In other words, the same common sense reasons why you wouldn’t make any other change to your business.

However, don’t make your default position “no”. Despite the tabloid nonsense, most people will make a request because they have something going on in their life outside work that is impacting on work. A small adjustment might be all that’s needed to retain and motivate a member of staff. And it’s not “take it or leave it” – you can discuss options with the employee concerned and often come to a solution that works for you and them. Again, in my experience smaller employers are not only willing to try to accommodate requests, but actually find that it can be an advantage in attracting staff from competitors. It’s the big bureaucracies with their fear of “setting a precedent” that are less willing to be flexible.

It’s ironic of course that for years business leaders and employers’ organisations have been calling for workers to be more “flexible and adaptable”. Since employment is a relationship, it’s not unreasonable that some employees might want their employer to be flexible too. But in practice, despite the scaremongers, I’m not expecting that my phone will be in meltdown today as hundreds of employees besiege my clients with flexible working requests!

 

 

 

The Balance of Power

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Originally posted March 2014

The sudden death of union leader Bob Crow this week has thrust industrial relations back into the business and political spotlight. Both political allies and foes immediately began the process of mythologising him (as an aside, the way in which we continue to elevate the recently dead to saints and gods in the manner of the ancient Greeks and mediaeval Catholic church would make an interesting blog post, but this isn’t it)

The general consensus is that Bob Crow was a successful union leader because he took his personal principles into his professional life and refused to compromise them.  I never met Mr Crow – though I have in the past dealt with his union, the RMT – but the most frequently cited evidence for his success is the position of his members working on London Underground. That to me suggests that the key to his achievements was not his personal values (though I’ve no doubt he had them) but his understanding of power relationships in work.

London Underground is a closed rail network (or rather a series of them) which operates separately from the rest of the UK’s railways. It is relied on by millions of Londoners to carry them to and from work. Consequently, a withdrawal of labour can cause massive inconvenience, and brings media and political pressure onto the organisation. The unions representing the workers in that business are therefore in a very strong position to maintain and improve conditions for their members because they have power on their side.

Contrast this with last year’s Grangemouth dispute (about which I blogged here). In that scenario, all the power was with the management who could and did threaten to close the plant if their demands weren’t agreed to. Interestingly, the resolution of the dispute – which involves £130m of investment in the plant – has arguably pushed the power back towards the workforce.

There are also historical examples – the success of the miner’s strikes in the early 1970s, compared with their failure in the mid 1980s, is simply that power had shifted from worker to employer.

Power relationships don’t always have to involve unions. An individual employee with key technical, managerial or other skills can always extract a better deal from a company because the consequences of losing that individual have a damaging effect on the business overall. And in some areas of professional services, it’s not uncommon for an entire team to move from Company A to company B.

There’s a tendency these days for HR people to assume that all the power is with the employer, and that their task is to “align” employees with the employer’s objectives. But effective HR people need to understand where the power lies within the organisation – and plan and manage accordingly. Bob Crow is a good example of how to do that.

 

Machiavelli and Macho Management

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Originally posted October 2013

As a young HR professional, I cut my teeth on what were known in those days as “industrial relations”, and spent many a happy hour (well, many an hour anyway) locked in negotiations with trade unions. Big industrial disputes (like big hair and shoulder pads) went out of fashion by the end of the 1980s, so it was with a mixture of professional interest and nostalgia that I watched how the Grangemouth dispute last week played out.  (If you missed the story, the background is here).

Depending on your viewpoint, it was a classic case of old-fashioned politically motivated trade unions attempting to resist change by an employer, or bully-boy tactics by a company using a pretext to drive down workers terms and conditions. Either way – and there seems to have been elements of both extremes at work – the dispute reached a head when Ineos announced that the plant would close with the loss of 800 jobs; the next day the union accepted the company proposals; and the following day the company said the plant would in fact stay open and that £300m would be invested in it.

A resounding defeat for the unions and a victory for macho management? I don’t think so. A wise old manager once told me “even if you’ve won your point, always give the union something to take back to their members. Trying to humiliate them will just lead  to resentment and they’ll look for an opportunity to gain revenge at some later date”. In fact that view goes all the way back to Machiavelli, who – although he advised Princes to kill or banish their opponents, since being merciful and magnanimous in victory would lead to a constant fear of plots and rivalry –  also counselled against trying to rule people (which in this case means the employees) by fear to the point of hatred.

So I’m going to indulge in a bit of crystal-ball gazing.

Grangemouth will reopen with the staff on worse terms and different work patterns, and Ineos will begin its investment. But as staff begin to resent the things they conceded “at gunpoint” the plant will be characterised for the next few years by “low level” industrial disputes, not necessarily formal action or even make the news but those which take up a lot of managerial time and effort. At some point, when the union feels on much stronger ground (probably after the investment is completed, or the economy is stronger), there’ll be another big dispute. Ineos will then be faced with a choice: play the “nuclear” card of threatening to shut the plant again (and risk looking like the boy who cried wolf); back down to the union demands; or decide to cut their losses and sell a troublesome plant to a competitor.  Whichever they chose, their significant investment won’t yield much of a return, and I wouldn’t fancy being one of their shareholders over the next few years.*

 

(*Note – this blog is not intended as financial advice. Shares in Ineos may go up, down, loop the loop or defy the ground. Past performance is not a guide to the future, as any football fan will tell you).

 

Quantum Physics and Refuse Collection

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Originally posted July 2013

At the moment I’m reading and enjoying Daniel Pink’s “Drive”, and have just reached the point where he describes companies who have introduced a system called ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) – where so long as the objectives are achieved, there is no monitoring of whether an employee is in work, or if they are  actually working at a particular time.

It sounds innovative and radical, but it reminded me of my days working as an Industrial Relations Officer for a local council in the late 1980s. There, the refuse collection department was seen as a hotbed of labour disputes. One of the particular problems from a management perspective was a working practice called “Stint and Finish”, where once the days bins were collected, the bin men could finish work. So although contracted to work between 730 and 430, with an hour for lunch, the men (and they were all men in those days) would – by agreement between themselves – cut short their break and aimed to finish as early as possible – usually by 230 and earlier on a Friday.

At the time, the government were introducing “Compulsory Competitive Tendering”, whereby Councils had to tender their direct services and where – provided minimal quality standards were met – price was the only determining factor. “If the staff can finish that early every day, then they must not have enough to do – and maybe we need fewer staff” ran the logic. “If we can cut costs, the in-house service has more chance of winning the tender”.

So off were dispatched the Council’s Work Study team (or as they grandly titled themselves “Industrial Engineers”) with their stop watches and clipboards, along with the Safety Officer to make sure that the staff were following proper procedures. And what did they find…? Without any apparent dawdling or shirking, each daily round was completed exactly as specified and the vehicles arrived back promptly at 430. It was almost as if, like sub-atomic particles, the very act of observation had changed the behaviour of the employees.  And on the days the study was being carried out, residents’ complaints about late collection of the bins rose.

What we had was the classic trade-off between efficiency (keep costs to an absolute minimum and work staff as hard as they can be) and effectiveness (provide a service residents are happy with, give staff the freedom to organise the work as they see fit within a defined cost base). Where does your organisation lie?

(Oh, and if you’re interested, the in-house team won the competitive tendering bid)

 

Fear, Itself

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Originally posted May 2013

Being an entrepreneur involves taking risks. Setting up a business, launching a new product, or making essential changes come as second nature to many of those who lead organisations (including those which are “not for profit”, which doesn’t make them any less enterprising).

So why is it that when it comes to people issues, so many dynamic and energetic business people suddenly become very cautious and risk averse? Is it because

  • Even the most task-centred of us doesn’t like confrontation and bad feeling?
  • Or because people can answer back and challenge us?

Maybe it’s because

  • We believe what politicians and tabloid newspapers tell us about how complex and restrictive employment laws are?
  • We fall for the scare tactics used by certain companies selling their employment insurance products?

Or perhaps it’s a result of

  • Bad experiences of HR people or departments who seem process bound and too eager to say “no” (I suspect, without any evidence, that this might be the origin of the infamous Beecroft report)
  • A single bad experience (maybe a very problematic employee or a badly handled tribunal) that colours our view of all employment issues

Rather like the fear of crime far outweighing the actual likelihood of a criminal event, so people will still fear HR issues no matter how many times they are told the UK has one of the most flexible labour markets in the world. And fear – as this excellent blog points out – can be paralysing.

I don’t have an answer – I’m just interested to know why it happens. And I also wonder why we don’t treat our fears like Buffy the Vampire Slayer when we realise how insignificant they actually are