Employee councils and social media are opening up new routes for staff to get their voices heard. But is anyone listening?
If you spot a convoy of plush black limousines cruising through the more salubrious parts of London this summer, you probably won’t be catching a glimpse of a visiting dignitary or Hollywood A-lister. In what has been billed the ‘employment case of the year’, Uber drivers have been packing out the Central London Employment Tribunal to determine whether the taxi app has been denying them basic workers’ rights.
The two test cases being brought are multi-faceted but potentially crucial in the reshaping of the UK economy. But whatever the outcome, they are equally significant for the GMB, the union that has brought them. Struggling to find their place in a rapidly fragmenting work environment dominated by ever-higher self-employment and atypical contracts, and increasingly seen by many as anachronistic, trade unions are by some measures at a crisis point in their existence, which presages broader questions over employee voice and engagement in businesses.
Kevin Rowan, head of organisation and services at the TUC, certainly feels the Uber case – and those involving cycle couriers, which will be heard in London later this year – represents a change in direction. “Defining employee status is a key role for the unions today,” he says. “In the gig economy, it’s more difficult to perform a representative role in a traditional sense, as many of these people aren’t employees, so we’re looking at different representation models. We still do some collective bargaining in sectors such as automotive and energy, as well as some public sector organisations – but it’s changed massively.”
The figures show why the evolution of unions has accelerated recently. In 1979, around seven in 10 workers were dependent on unions to represent them in bargaining over pay or terms and conditions, and more than half the workforce was a member. Now, only around a quarter of UK workers are union members and even fewer are covered by collective bargaining, although membership levels increased slightly between 2014 and 2015.
The government’s Trade Union Act has raised the bar for industrial action and could, say some, turn unions into little more than left-leaning think tanks without an active stake in the labour market. Jeremy Corbyn is sufficiently worried (and has strong enough union support) to pledge that, if he became prime minister, he would require all employers with more than 250 staff to bargain collectively with recognised trade unions, as it is “the best way to guarantee fair pay”.
Unions are still capable of making the headlines, as a number of recent high-profile disputes in the transport sector – and the well-publicised junior doctors’ strike – demonstrate. And the last Workplace Employment Relations Study, taken in 2011, showed that, despite decades of decline, union presence (if not membership numbers) has stayed relatively stable since the late 1990s. There has also been a slight growth in non-union representation – such as works councils – from 6 per cent of private sector workplaces in 2004, to 13 per cent in 2011.
But the bigger question is how employee voice is being heard and acted on, and how businesses are being held to account if organised representation is not the only game in town. Unions are rethinking their approaches to remain relevant in a world where individual opinion is no longer filtered as a collective but can be heard as a range of voices across multiple channels. But that presents just as profound a challenge for employers. In short, with so much noise, is anyone actually listening to staff any more?
“Nowadays, unions are doing a lot to recruit new members but have to bring in a significant number just to stand still because of the changing nature of the labour market,” says Dr Richard Saundry, professor of HRM and employment relations at Plymouth University. “What we’re now seeing is a representation gap; the decline in union representation has not been replaced by non-union forms of representation.”
Increasingly, employees’ first line of support if they have a problem is their line manager – indeed, most employers emphasise this as the preferred route. But managers’ lack of objectivity poses its own problems. And the recent parliamentary report into the running of Sports Direct shone a light on the growing chunk of today’s workforce whose voice seems, wilfully or otherwise, to go unheard. Unite ran a campaign against the strict ‘six strikes and you’re out’ culture that left workers afraid to speak out over low pay and conditions in case they lost their jobs. Yet Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley told a parliamentary committee he continues to believe he could “do a better job than Unite” in looking after employees’ interests.
Whether cases like Sports Direct are aberrations or are directly linked to the decline in union representation and employee voice is a moot point. On the one hand, ONS figures in August showed that only 81,000 people in the UK were involved in labour disputes in 2015, the lowest figure ever and part of a broad, generalised decline in industrial action.
On the other hand, workers who feel their grievances go unheard are finding new ways to cause disruption and breach the public consciousness. Commuters faced almost daily disruption this summer because of Southern Railway’s dispute with its unions over plans to alter the role of conductors. A spike in sickness absence led the company’s CEO to claim workers were staging unofficial industrial action.
Meanwhile, Pizza Express last year ended its practice of taking an 8 per cent cut from staff tips almost as soon as a public campaign was launched by staff. And when a B&Q manager linked the store’s axing of overtime pay to the introduction of the national living wage, via an online petition, it kickstarted a nationwide discussion on the topic in which unions played just one small part.
Listening to staff is, of course, not just about defusing dissent or dealing with worst-case scenarios. From suggestion boxes to engagement surveys, there is a proud history of dialogue with employees, both formal and informal, that is taking the concept of voice in new directions and creates an opportunity to build more consensual and productive organisations.
The trend that has developed alongside the relative decline of unions is a rise in employee or works councils – which may or may not include union representation – and employee seats on advisory or even executive boards. To critics, this is an attempt to give an illusion of genuine representation without any obligation to implement recommendations or enter formal negotiations.
Ksenia Zheltoukhova, a research adviser at the CIPD, says non-union employee forums, which have often grown out of employee networks supporting diversity and inclusion, can sometimes be seen as a tick-box exercise. “The agenda is often driven by conversations on diversity, but this tends to only give a voice to certain groups. Outside of these groups, are people really listened to?” she asks.
But Zheltoukhova also points out that if organisations use internal forums to listen and – crucially – affect strategic direction, they can lift engagement and create new value. The key is to understand what you hope to achieve, she says: is it just to rubber stamp a proposal or set of changes, or do you want to genuinely debate your values?
Theresa May is such a fan of worker representation on boards – common in Germany, Denmark and Sweden – that she wants to explore making it mandatory among larger businesses. At present, it is a rarity, save for the odd notable exception such as Mick Barker, an employee director at FirstGroup. A train driver by day, he sits on the transport giant’s board with full speaking and voting rights, having been elected by the workforce.
FirstGroup still has separate union representation, but Barker says his role is about soliciting views from staff and offering an alternative voice in boardroom discussions: “The first thing that flashes through my mind is probably almost the opposite to what flashes through most of the others’ minds. I’m thinking of employees.” Martin Gilbert, a former director at the company, has described the presence of an employee director on the board as “invaluable” in keeping employment practices in check.
The propulsive force that makes representation more imperative is, of course, the internet. On online platforms, most specifically Glassdoor, employees offer their unfiltered and often controversial views on their companies. While many see it as a vital democratic tool, in the same vein as review sites such as TripAdvisor, there is the potential for axe-grinding or libellous comments – and employers’ responses have ranged from utter refusal to engage to using Glassdoor as a means of tracking staff sentiment.
For some, Glassdoor is the new trade unionism in the same way online activism is replacing direct action as a means of harnessing social dissent. Zheltoukhova says its rise was inevitable: “Employers like to give an illusion that employees can speak to them, but then people talk around the watercooler – that is what Glassdoor is like. Employers need to make more room for dissent – for multiple perspectives.”
Joe Wiggins, European head of communications at Glassdoor, believes its anonymity enables its users to speak freely, so people looking up a prospective employer get a truly honest view. “It only works because people can choose what they say without giving out information such as their name or job title,” he says. “This makes it different from the type of feedback you would get through surveys, which arguably offer a more sanitised view. A student working the summer season gets as much say as an area manager; it levels the playing field.”
Michael Silverman, managing director of Silverman Research and former head of employee insight at Unilever, argues that the way we give feedback as consumers now influences how we seek to share our concerns as employees. “Technology has pushed the evolution of employee voice. It’s not just a case of putting your employee survey online – people need an open forum so everyone can see what others are saying. And in face-to-face focus groups, some voices are naturally louder than others, so aren’t heard equally,” he says.
Silverman says employers feel an increasing sense of threat around the volume of staff feedback, and are perplexed about how to deal with it – particularly where it’s anonymous. “CEOs tend to be happy with it, but those a couple of levels down sometimes feel threatened by it.”
What they can’t afford to do is not listen. When the CIPD surveyed almost 10,000 HR practitioners last year in its From best to good practice HR: developing principles for the profession report, it found a striking correlation between those businesses with customer-focused cultures and those that believed employee voice was important. At the same time, however, respondents were less likely to consider voice than they were ‘impact on wellbeing’ when making key decisions – which suggests many employers want to do the right thing, but haven’t asked what that might mean.
Derek Luckhurst of the IPA, an organisation that sets up and supports employee partnerships for employers, believes works councils or forums can offer “informed employee voice” – a contrast to the often scattergun views and comments you might see on Glassdoor or enterprise social networks such as Yammer. “Social media can be one-sided,” he says. “The management just gets disengaged by the quality of debate. The key is factual, consistent communication. A trade union or council rep can communicate with management to get key staff messages across.”
For Richard Morris, who’s on the HR graduate scheme at food manufacturer Mondelēz, having access to senior people is one of the reasons he joined its Young Professionals Network: “Having the UK MD ask us to tell him what we think makes me feel I’ve got a voice. The top guy’s saying ‘tell us what you need’. He’s passionate about it rather than just being there because it’s in his calendar.”
Sarah Salter, early careers lead at Mondelēz, adds: “It’s an opportunity for those early on in their careers to have a collective voice, and for the company to listen and learn.”
But what does the future hold for unions and networks like this, which are often fighting to be heard against a cacophony of unsolicited feedback in the background? One of the consequences of a more fragmented labour market is a “more individualised employment relationship”, says Zheltoukhova. “Trade unions face the same challenge as employers: how do they foster that individual relationship while staying relevant to their collective position?”
They’re also struggling to keep pace with the workplace’s rapid digitisation. The UK arm of online news outlet Vice recently rejected a push for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to be recognised, claiming: “The NUJ is used to working with old print media businesses and structures – is it not used to innovative, digital workplaces like this where the culture has always been to encourage flexibility and allow people to work across different departments.”
By contrast, the recently inaugurated Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, which is behind the cycle couriers’ forthcoming push for recognition, seeks to organise primarily outside of workplaces, concentrating on the contingent and freelance workforce.
Some see this as the likely direction of travel for unions in future, as the workforce itself schisms between those who enjoy security and flexibility and those in danger of exploitation. And HR professionals, who are employees as well as conduits for the concerns of others, know just how important it is that everyone has a voice. But there is, as Uber drivers and Sports Direct workers have demonstrated, little point speaking until there’s someone to hear you.