Employers hold responsibility for creating culture of trust and openness, says expert
Employers need to re-establish their workers’ employee voice as it could be the answer to tackling the “catastrophic imbalance of power in UK businesses”, delegates were told at a CIPD event last week.
The Voice and Value conference, co-hosted by the CIPD and the London School of Economics (LSE), brought together leading academics and HR practitioners to discuss the value of having a constructive dialogue between management and employees.
In discussing what today’s employees want to influence, David Coats, director of WorkMatters Consulting said it is clear that employees are keen to have a say within their organisation over the things that matter to them.
“People don’t stop being citizens as soon as they enter the workplace; we should treat them as citizens at work not human resources,” he said, commenting that public policy and bad press had in recent years undermined the importance of the trade union, the traditional model of employee representation.
Andrea Broughton, principal research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies, said it was up to employers to help create a culture of trust and openness, so staff had a clear route to being heard and feeling valued.
“Many companies are relying on social media as a tool to get people engaged, and a platform for people to have their say,” she said. “But social media is only good as a tool if the culture is already there.”
“If we look at our European counterparts in France, works councils are an expected and celebrated thing, but we must remember that we are starting in a very different place in the UK. We can’t build an employee voice by putting systems into an existing model, we have to build from the ground up,” she added.
Commenting from the audience, Kim Hoque, professor of HRM at Warwick Business School said that establishing an employee voice wasn’t the answer to creating a financially successful business as some employers are “hugely successful, but have no interest in employee engagement and employee voice”.
Coats said that any push for establishing employee voice would have to come from an organisation’s want to genuinely address the imbalance of power in UK organisations.
The government backed Engage for Success campaign could go some way to helping establish an employee voice, said Gill Dix, head of strategy at Acas, but she said: “It’s hard to go down the engagement route in many of today’s businesses. The control and command model is much easier.”
Despite this, managers would eventually have to relinquish control if they were to encourage everyone to align behind one organisational goal, said Tony Dundon, professor of HRM and employment relations at the National University of Ireland Galway.
“The right to representation is a human right,” he said. “There needs to be a representative voice and if that isn’t a trade union, then a collective voice needs to come from a robust system of independent representation,” he added.
Jonny Gifford, research adviser at the CIPD chaired the afternoon sessions at the conference. Read a round-up of the day's events in his blog 'Do employees have a RIGHT to voice?'