ben

Here is a photograph that I took and tweeted on 3^rd January 2018, a day when 14 ambulances were queued up outside the Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh (WWL) A&E department. It had not been my intention to create a news story but the picture was picked up by many of the national media and featured as the first item on BBC TV news that evening as symbolising the strains on the NHS. 

What the picture could not show is what was happening inside the hospital and had indeed been happening for several weeks. Every bed in the hospital was full so that new patients could only be admitted once an existing patient was discharged. This meant that all of the cubicles in A&E were full of patients waiting for beds in the wards to become available. The waiting rooms had overflowed onto the corridors with many patients waiting for A&E cubicles to come free so that they could be assessed. Under these circumstances flow through the hospital seizes up and the unfortunate patient experiences long delays. The government target is that 95% of patients should be seen and treated within 4 hours of arrival. On several days, we achieved this for less than 50% of patients. The least urgent patients could sometimes wait for as much as 12 hours to see a doctor.

This is obviously bad for patients but it is also profoundly exhausting, upsetting and stressful for staff. Apart from the sheer relentless weight of work, staff grow increasingly anxious that these delays put patients at enhanced risk because later diagnosis results in a later start of treatment. The patient’s condition can worsen within what appears to be the safety of a hospital and staff are profoundly aware of the risk, especially when patients are in unsupervised waiting areas. A good definition of stress is feeling responsible for an outcome but not being able to control that outcome. So a very busy A&E department is a place of enormous stress. It is not surprising then that staff in such circumstances have a higher than average sickness rates. Their absence in turn, inflicts even greater stress on those who do come to work and it is remarkable really that almost all staff do still come in to work, day in, day out, despite knowing what to expect. Although this article concentrates mainly on the A&E Department there is a very similar position on the wards with relentless pressures to discharge patients as soon as they are safe to go.

What then, can we do to reduce and manage that stress? The first thing is to acknowledge the problem and take it seriously. One of our main objectives is to maintain a positive and healthy culture and particular priorities are to stamp out anything that looks like blame. When things are tough it is far too easy to find someone to blame but this is deeply corrosive to teamwork and relationships. Another way of generating positive energy is to look for and acknowledge successes, even small ones. There are numerous instances of individuals arriving early, staying late and generally going the extra mile. It is important to recognize these invaluable contributions and to constantly and routinely thank staff.

It is also important as an employer to show that you are concerned about staff welfare so it is vital to have a regular, senior presence on the ‘shop floor’. This also creates the opportunity to listen to staff and ask for their suggestions on what can be done to improve the situation and to improve their health and wellbeing at work. For some time, we have offered practical help such as hand massages, weight loss clubs and classes in mindfulness but this winter, we have wanted to find new ways to demonstrate our appreciation and support. We announced a Winter Wellbeing package consisting of mostly quite small things but, put together, can make a real difference:

• Surveys show that around 30% of staff face financial difficulties with Christmas often being a time of particular pressure. So we have given staff access to a financial advice service which can help for example to consolidate loans and reduce interest costs
• During December, volunteers handed out mince pies to staff
• We announced our intention to put Amazon lockers on each of our Hospital sites so that staff can shop on-line and have their purchases delivered conveniently
• In the 12 days leading up to Christmas we published daily hints tips and advice to help keep staff healthy and happy
• These included the concept of a Power Pause where all staff, no matter how busy, are encouraged to take controlled short breaks during their shifts.
• The gesture that seemed to be appreciated more than anything was what we called “the gift of time”. In recognition of all their hard work in 2017 we announced that all staff would be given their birthday in 2018 as an extra day off.

Perhaps it is the sheer quantity of actions and offers but this appears to have had a genuine positive impact on staff. Our annual national staff survey was conducted over October and November and, despite all the pressures, responses to two thirds of the questions either improved or stayed the same compared to the previous year. The answer to the two all important questions were that 73% of staff would recommend WWL as a place to work compared to 60% in the rest of the sample,  and 77% would recommend care at WWL compared to 69% in the rest of the sample.

Andrew Foster

Chief Executive

Wrightington, Wigan & Leigh NHS Foundation Trust

 

In this article, Prof Stephen Wood outlines the important of employee involvement to increase productivity. His research on the 2004 and 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) showed that while role-involvement increased job satisfaction, both organisational-involvement and role-involvement increased productivity, quality and financial performance. Contrary to most research findings, his study showed that organisational-involvement and role-involvement were not correlated and that they may have different, though overlapping, antecedents and effects.

Increasing salience is being given to Britain’s productivity problem. Its relative standing in the international league tables has been in decline since the 1870s when it was in pole position. But the big change was in the 1970s when most Western European countries overtook us. The current concern is more about the way our productivity fell, as it tends to in recessions, in 2007 but has not yet rebounded back to pre-2008 levels. There was a slight recovery in 2010 and early 2011 but productivity has been declining again and has plateaued since 2013. This is historically unprecedented.

Many factors, including the Government’s austerity programme, lie behind this but what is also a concern is that there seems a genuine uncertainty, if not bewilderment, about what can be done about it. Insufficient attention is though paid to the human factor. Successive governments have targeted skills acquisition and the quality of the workforce may have increased.  and Conservative governments’ employment relations legislation has weakened trade union power beyond all recognition.  Yet, there remains a problem, which must lie elsewhere: presumably in work organization and management. A rich body of knowledge is being neglected that shows employee involvement is good for productivity and other related measures such as product and service quality. And much of this evidence-based is British and based on a national survey which is the envy of the world, the Government-led Employment Relations Survey series.

My recent work on the last two surveys, in 2004 and 2011, particularly shows that employee involvement has positive effects on productivity across the whole economy, private and public, manufacturing and services. An element of this is explained simply by employees being more satisfied. But job satisfaction does not simply arise from the air.  There are two types of employee involvement strategy: job or role involvement often known as empowerment or enriched job design, is an approach to the design of high-quality jobs that allows employees an element of discretion and flexibility over the execution and management of their primary tasks, while organizational-involvement management entails workers participating in decision-making, beyond the narrow confines of the job, in the wider organization or the business as a whole.  Role-involvement management concentrates on an employee’s core job, while organizational-involvement management entails workers participating in organizational decision-making. Organizational-involvement management aims to encourage greater proactivity, flexibility and collaboration amongst workers through the use of practices that offer opportunities for organizational involvement, either directly – through idea-capturing schemes, team work and flexible job descriptions – or indirectly, through the disclosure of financial information, specific training for involvement, or appraisal systems. Organizational involvement is thus concerned with the development of broader horizons amongst all workers, so that they can think of better ways of doing their jobs, connect what they do with what others do, and react effectively to novel problems.

Together role-involvement and organizational-involvement management constitute what is often known as High-involvement management. The prescriptive management literature recommends that involvement practices should be used together if their maximum effect is to be realised, as they are mutually reinforcing. However, in practice, the two types may not co-exist. Indeed the evidence we have from our WERS studies is that they are not even significantly correlated, and may have different, though overlapping, antecedents and effects. This is in fact what at this stage of its development what we might expect as much of the use of organizational involvement experimentation has been in mass production settings where role involvement is traditionally low and work is highly routinized, Japanese manufacturing being the obvious case in point.

The lack of correlation between the role and organizational-involvement management means that we can assess their effects independently.  And this is what I did in my analysis of WERS. I found that both types had significant effects on the productivity, quality and financial performance of organizations. But only role involvement management increased job satisfaction and in turn this partly explained the better performance. The explanation for the performance effect of organizational involvement did not lie in job satisfaction or enhanced employee well-being. Nor did it seemingly lie in workers simply showing more initiative. Given organizational involvement is concerned with the development of broader horizons amongst all workers, so that they can think of better ways of doing their jobs, connect what they do with what others do, and react effectively to novel problems we need to look beyond simple changes in employees’ individual satisfaction and behavior. Organizational performance is about achieving thing as a collective based on coordinated individual actions.

We can speculate that the most telling aspect of organizational-involvement management is perhaps then is it transforms the ability of us all to relate to each other as both colleagues and implicitly internal customers, through, for example, enhancing our appreciation of each other. This expansion of people’s horizons and shared understandings through greater contact and integration increases the individual and collective human and social capital of the organization. For the daily lives of employees it ought to reduce, what stress theorists call, hindrance stressors, such as employees having inadequate information and uncooperative colleagues, and increase, challenge stressors such as involving them in problem solving, enhancing team working and growing employees’ roles.

An interesting aspect of the WERS research is that we get the same results in 2004 and 2011. That is there is no change over the recessionary period. Moreover, we were able to measure the use of wage and employment freezes, redundancies work reorganizations and other measures to directly combat the recessions, and found the involvement–performance results were not fundamentally different in those workplaces that used a lot of these recessionary actions. This is especially interesting as a commonplace criticism of high-involvement management is that it is not sustainable. The argument is that managements will inevitably have to use cost-cutting measures when recessions and other crises occur and these will undermine the positive effects of involvement on employees and their trust in management and this in turn will dilute the performance effects of high-involvement management and precipitate a withering of genuine involvement.

Yet the evidence of WERS is that the use of role or organizational involvement practices remains stable in that time and confined to a minority (typically around a third for the most popular) of workplaces. The only practice to increase substantially was formal appraisal which is now almost ubiquitous. But whilst feedback is an important ingredient of involvement and information dissemination, all too often appraisal is not done well and does not produce the positive psychological effects it potentially could. Addressing such issues and more generally development of involvement may require a change in the approach of human resource managers and CEOs to their monitoring of practices. All too often the focus is on processes – for example, whether appraisals are being done on time, whether the information was disclosed to all people at the same time, or whether the training course went smoothly – rather than on the content in the delivery – what actually happened in the appraisal, dissemination or training activities?

Stephen Wood is a Professor of Management at University of Leicester. He can be contacted at [email protected]

The position of business is one that rightly attracts more scrutiny than it did a few decades ago. Like politicians, the Church and many of our other great public institutions, businesses can no longer rely on a tacit acceptance of their value to the health, wealth and social progress of the UK.

Yet firms remain critical to all of these – and the challenge of communicating the role of businesses in our society and economy is one that the leaders of companies – and of representative bodies like the CBI – have grappled with for many years.

Greater openness is clearly a part of the answer. Transparency is to be welcomed. But firms will need to explain what they do, not just be open about it. The stories we tell matter to how people feel about a company, so long as behaviour matches up to those stories. Yet negative coverage about individual businesses can often contribute to a sense of fear.

Too often, not reaching out makes things worse, not better. Nor is it the case that businesses need to be defensive. Earlier this year, the CBI worked with Porter Novelli to set this out by establishing a baseline measure of where firms stand.

There was good news but also some more challenging feedback in that work. Perhaps most surprisingly, people’s views of the reputation of British businesses was better than firms had feared, with 58% saying that UK firms had a good or very good reputation, compared with fewer than 10% saying the opposite.

But dig a little deeper, and the origins of concern become clear. 77% of respondents saw CEOs as far removed from the concerns of ordinary people – meaning that sometimes, when business leaders do try to explain things, we can make things worse!  

There are simple ways to address this, of course. Ditching the management jargon always makes a difference.

But in the longer term, our survey showed that it is the familiarity people feel CEOs lack breeds trust in companies. As customers, people valued that personal touch, good value and being treated as an individual more than anything else.  

And the most familiar people of all with any business? Its employees, of course! Here, again, there was some positive news that reflected various CBI Employment Trends Surveys over the years. 64% of employees feel they have a good relationship with their employer. As ambassadors for the company delivering the service people want, and as citizens themselves – that is a good base from which to work.

But it is not yet good enough. The position of British business in our society depends on people understanding the value companies bring, seeing firms challenge poor standards and boosting productivity. That means that getting our people strategy right matters hugely.  It must be a key part of the wider industrial strategy, launched recently by Greg Clark.

There is clearly room to up our game. The certainties of the Human Resources Management approach that dominated practice for two decades need to be challenged, with greater space found for meaningful employee voice, however employees choose to represent themselves or be represented.

Finding ways to better develop and support line management is key to this, as they are the key actors. For business leaders thinking about how this happens effectively, the signals and incentives that are sent become all-important. It is time for a new long-termism, with the approaches to people a genuine Boardroom priority to match rhetoric about “our greatest asset”.  

For some firms, this is a challenge – especially as they face a more disrupted market than ever before. The Taylor Review has emphasised how fast the world of work is changing to reflect this, and our approach to managing must change with it.

But the debate about the right solutions are should change with the world of work. Enhanced voice and decentralisation may sit uneasily for some – but they are the strategies that will deliver the trust, engagement and customer satisfaction that will be essential to success in the mid-21^st Century, and ongoing trust in society for businesses.

At the same time, others too must look afresh at the world of work. Too much of the debate around Taylor saw new problems answered by old solutions. As businesses will have to step up – so too will others. Practice matters as much as any change to the legal base. Unions and others will need to turn their attention to this, as the field where their members’ interests can be best served.

Nothing emphasises this so much as the “gig” economy – where workers exist alongside each other, some happily flexibility that works for them – others feeling unable to access the work they really want. The answer to this is to focus on opportunity and practice – not to ban different forms of work and restrict choice for others.

If business wants to continue to play its role – creating the wealth that supports families in wages and pensions, and paying the taxes that fund our schools and hospitals – new approaches are necessary. A more open, less jargon-heavy business community will need a focus on employee engagement to really perform – and the tools of the past two decades are unlikely to make the grade. The challenge now is to step up – and find partners who are willing to work with us on this journey towards a more open, diverse and productive workplace.

Neil Carberry leads the CBI’s work on issues related to two great enablers of growth in the UK – people and skills, and infrastructure.

As technology, behaviours and culture evolves, so does the way we view our work. New futurology research reveals how organisations that introduce agile working substantially improve productivity, save on costs and find it much easier to recruit

The relationship between employees and how they work is continually developing. Flexible working and working from home are among the most common examples of the increasing flexibility many employees, particularly in the professional services industry, have been experiencing over the past decade.

Increasingly, similar flexibility is being introduced in other areas of business management, including the design of workspaces, job titles and leadership structures, with some companies even allowing employees to take other work with other employees, as long as it doesn’t cause a conflict of interest.

Focusing less on where and how long employees spend on work, and more on outcomes, futurologists and change management experts propose that this approach will become more prevalent as businesses look to operate more agile and robust businesses, prepared to tackle the uncertain economic and geo-political future.

In the newly-published management research paper The Agile Revolution, a cross-sector BPS World poll of employees and employers found that attitudes towards the ‘traditional’ way of working are shifting, with the traditional nine-till-five working day potentially dying out in some sectors.

Only just over a third of working Britons (38%) now see the office as an essential base to work from most of the time, with just over quarter of bosses (26%) thinking the same.  In fact, 10% of the bosses surveyed go so far as to say that the office is ‘an outdated concept’ in their industry.

This change in attitude has seen a rising trend in people finding alternative places to work, whether that’s from home, in work hubs or in coffee shops.

One recent study showed that 81% of office workers now spend three and a half hours working out of a coffee shop each week, and while it was once seen as the preserve of start-ups, the same study found that three out of four staff working for companies with over 250 employees actually prefer working from a coffee shop.

According to Paul Allsopp, managing director of The Agile Organisation, agile working is “about bringing people, processes, connectivity and technology, time and place together to find the most appropriate and effective way of working to carry out a particular task. It is working within guidelines (of the task) but without boundaries (of how to achieve it).”

England’s largest local authority, Birmingham City Council (BCC) has led the way in reacting to the trend by modernising their back-office culture and buildings to transform the way they delivered their services in 2006. This included moving 78 offices into eight, which saved £100m, and creating optimal locations for 10,000 employees, such as the opportunity to do extra hours from home in the evenings.

Lloyds Banking Group, meanwhile, improved its job share register and launched an enhanced Shared Parental policy to offer greater choice and flexibility for its working parents in 2015, and the company is also investing £1bn over the next three years to improve its technology infrastructure in order to better aid agile working practices.

The business benefits of agile working

The BPS World poll found that 43% of people said their organisation is between 6-10% more productive thanks to agile working, and 10% even felt their organisation’s productivity was boosted by an impressive 20% because of it.  Most importantly, they reported that it is easier to attract talented employees, with 84% saying it’s easier to hire skilled staff.

A 2009 government report, Engaging for Success, also found that workplace flexibility improves team communication and productivity. Managers who participated in the study reported improved team communication, team interaction, productivity and even customer service. In fact, 98% of managers identified no negative impact of workplace flexibility on their business.  

There is no singular framework to follow when creating an agile workforce, but they often include a shift in managerial culture and mind-set, a willingness to engage and empower employees and then the implementation of flexible policies, new technology and workplace opportunities.

Megan Knapp, start-up coach and business strategist, offers four steps to an agile workforce: “To successfully implement an agile working programme, a company must make sure everyone’s on the same page and has similar benefits. People are people, and jealousy is inevitable, not to mention a tricky thing to manage. Agile working may not be applicable to every position, so how can the company account for those who won’t benefit from it? Or are there ways, like incorporating flexible hours instead of remote working, for these employees?

“Then, the issue of technology has to be addressed: what else do we need before we can successfully work remotely? Next, create a plan for keeping company culture up even with individuals working outside of the office. This may mean more informal events, conferences, or some face-to-face meetings to keep everyone feeling connected. It has to be addressed at a company level, as preferences will vary.”

She added: “Last, decide how progress will be monitored and performance will be reviewed. Will it still be by the hour? Will it be by the project? It’s up to you as a company.”

Jermaine Haughton, Chartered Management Institute. A version of this article previously appeared on the CMI website. For more research and analysis from CMI head to www.managers.org.uk/insights  

When the latest set of productivity figures came out in October, they painted a depressingly familiar picture. The UK continues to seeing falling productivity, and with every drop the pressure grows on the Government to take meaningful action in order to try and solve the problem, which is key to addressing falling real wages and improving the public finances.

One of the difficulties in tackling the problem of the UK’s poor productivity growth is that it is so complex with many contributing factors put forward to explain it. Many people cite the low investment in capital equipment and processes, while others will point to cheap labour, or poor levels of literacy and numeracy. The questions ‘What causes poor productivity?’ is a question with a myriad of answers!

Another key piece of the productivity puzzle which is increasingly coming under the spotlight is the quality of management. The Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane argued in March this year that a lack of management quality is a plausible explanation for the UK’s long tail of low productivity companies. He went on to suggest that if we were to make progress in solving this issue, then we could see significant economic returns.

It is against this context that the CIPD supported by JP Morgan developed and piloted its People Skills initiative, which provided HR support to more than 400 small firms through local partners such as a chamber of commerce, Local Enterprise Partnership, Growth Hub and councils in Hackney, east London, Stoke and Glasgow, from July 2015 to October 2016.

The evaluation report People Skills; Building ambition and HR capability in small firms was published in September and provided some fascinating insights into the type HR support SMEs need, how much it is valued and its impact.

One of the most significant findings from the evaluation of the research project was that the first step to business improvement for many small businesses is getting the very basics of people management in place. This could be something as simple as establishing workers’ terms and conditions and job descriptions. The research suggests that until these people management ‘foundations’ are in place, owner-managers don’t have the capability, interest or time to invest in value-added activity such as training staff. However, while the typical type of support delivered to SMEs through the People Skills service was fairly transactional, the evaluation found evidence that the initiative added significant value to participant organisations, including indications of improvements to their productivity.

Face-to-face advice was crucial in delivering the sort of bespoke support that the businesses needed. The model itself used local-based HR consultants, which meant that it provided not only flexibility for businesses but also ensured that the consultants were well-versed in the local challenges that SMEs faced.

What was also striking was that the vast majority of owner-managers that used the People Skills service had previously never received support before. This was primarily down to a lack of awareness of how valuable this support could be to their business. It leads us to question why, when people are first setting up their businesses, a HR consultation isn’t offered alongside the collection of meetings with finance professionals that most people will sit down with.

The overwhelming message from the pilot was that these services made a difference, were valuable to the organisations who used them and were filling a vital gap in the market. To that end, we have now recommended a national rollout of the People Skills initiative across the Local Enterprise Partnership network in England as part of a renewed focus in the Government’s industrial strategy on enhancing workplace productivity by boosting managerial quality, increasing investment in skills and strengthening the quality of business support through local-level institutions. Our provisional estimate is that if the CIPD-JP Morgan delivery model were adopted by all LEPs, it would require initial funding of about £13 million per year for at least three years. This could be funded by allocating £40 million from the £23 billion National Productivity Investment Fund.

While of course boosting the HR and people management capability of small firms does not represent in any way a solution to the productivity puzzle in itself, it certainly has a role to play.

There are nearly 1.3 million small firms in the UK employing between 1 and 50 people and in total about 36% of the UK’s workforce, so efforts to boost productivity growth will be undermined unless more is done to provide them with the support they need to become more efficient and grow.

Ben Wilmott, Head of Public Policy at CIPD

Sexual harassment in the workplace is far from being a new phenomenon. But with recent high profile allegations putting the issue at the top of the news agenda employers should be asking themselves whether they are doing enough to protect their own employees from sexual harassment in the workplace.

Why should employers tackle sexual harassment?

If ignored or handled badly, workplace harassment can leave organisations with serious problems, including poor morale and disengagement, reduced performance, absence, resignations and a lack of respect for management.

What is more, as most employers know, sexual harassment in the workplace is unlawful. Those who are on the receiving end can be awarded compensation by an employment tribunal, which in some cases can run to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Claims can be made not only against the perpetrator but also against their employer: as a general rule, employers are liable for harassment by their own employees unless they can show they did as much as they reasonably could to prevent that kind of behaviour.

Allegations of harassment can also damage an organisation’s reputation. Tribunal claims are heard in public and judgments are published online for all to read. The media will often show a keen interest in sexual harassment claims in particular, which can lead to harmful, not to mention embarrassing, press coverage.

What is sexual harassment?

The concept of sexual harassment in the Equality Act covers a broad spectrum of behaviour. The definition encompasses any unwanted conduct of a sexual nature which has the purpose or effect of violating a worker’s dignity or otherwise creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for them. It can also be sexual harassment to treat someone less favourably for rejecting, or submitting to, unwelcome sexual advances or other sexual behaviour.

A common reaction of those accused of harassment is to say they didn’t mean any harm or that it was just ‘banter’ or ‘harmless flirting’. However, it is the effect of the behaviour that is key. That said, in determining whether or not sexual harassment has taken place a tribunal would consider not only the perception of the recipient of the harassment but also whether it was reasonable for the conduct to be seen as harassment. As such if a recipient is particularly sensitive but a reasonable person would not have taken a particular form of conduct to amount to harassment then it is unlikely to satisfy the legal definition.

What should employers do to prevent harassment?

At the very least, an employer should have in place an Equality and Diversity or Dignity at Work Policy that covers all forms of discrimination with a specific section covering sexual harassment. Such policies should include examples of what may be considered sexual harassment to help employees understand where the boundaries of acceptable behaviour lie. The policy should be regularly updated to take into account changes in legislation and best practice.

It is important that employees are left in no doubt that harassment will not be tolerated. The policy should make it clear that harassment will be treated as misconduct and could result in the perpetrator being dismissed without notice in appropriate cases. It is also useful to remind employees that they personally (and not just the employer) can be liable for acts of harassment in the workplace.

In addition, employers would be well advised to provide training and updates to its employees on its Equality and Diversity and Dignity at Work Policies so that employee are well aware of what is and what is not acceptable behaviour in the workplace.

What if an employee feels they have been sexually harassed at work?

Employees need to know what they can do if they feel someone is behaving inappropriately towards them so that those who are subjected to sexual harassment can be confident that their complaints or concerns will be taken seriously and considered objectively, however senior the alleged perpetrator may be. Again, this should be spelled out in the Equality and Diversity or Dignity at Work policy.

Ordinarily, a policy will suggest that the first step would be for the employee to raise any concerns with their line manager or, if their complaint is about their manager, with another senior manager. Often, though, individuals may prefer not to discuss matters with their line manager, such as where allegations raise matters that the individual feels are highly personal or sensitive, or where the alleged perpetrator is someone in a senior position. For this reason, many organisations also have equality champions who are trained to provide support and guidance and deal with such issues on a confidential and sensitive basis.

Taking action

Employers should investigate complaints of sexual (or any other kind of harassment) fairly, promptly and confidentially. A failure to investigate a complaint could in itself result in the employer being exposed to a claim. Once the investigation is completed, if it shows that there is a case to answer then a disciplinary hearing should be called to give the alleged perpetrator the opportunity to answer the allegations against them. They should be given a fair hearing and have the right to be accompanied at the disciplinary hearing by a work colleague or a trade union official.

The role of the internal disciplinary process is to consider “on a balance of probabilities” whether sexual harassment has taken place and if the allegations are well founded, to take appropriate disciplinary action and to put in place reasonable steps to prevent further harassment or discrimination. In a serious case this could result in summary dismissal for gross misconduct and in a less serious case a warning and possibly additional training for the perpetrator.

Further action

Where harassment has been identified, it is always sensible for employers to reflect on their own policies and workplace practices to see if wider improvements can be made.

Ultimately, the employer’s aim should be to create a culture in which everyone knows that sexual harassment is not welcome or tolerated and feels able to speak out about behaviour they consider inappropriate.

Author: Simon Rice-Birchall, Partner and Head of Equality Law at international law firm Eversheds-Sutherland

This is not another horrid example of mixed metaphors but what sprung to mind when I read a recent contribution to the 100-Year Life website, which we created for Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott’s book The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. We ask website visitors to submit their stories about either how their longer lives are panning out or how they expect to see them pan out.

The contribution that sparked my Dinosaur in the HR Room reaction was as follows:

“I am an IT Consultant. I have just been asked to go back to a client I worked for last year doing the same job with the same people. It took me four hours to complete the HR pre-employment questions and evidences. 

I have worked for almost 40 years and have three degrees, completing my last one over five years ago.

I can now afford to retire and do not need to work just for the money. As well as taking time for holidays and family life I do some voluntary work.

For any gaps in my employment record of more than 2 weeks they want me to provide details of a friend that I have known for more than five years who can explain these gaps.

They also make it mandatory to provide at least one lecturer reference and one academic qualification from the last five years.

 I am afraid they the corporate world in the UK certainly has no understanding of a flexible life so far.”

I thought this was a painfully clear illustration of why as organisations we need to do more than talk about engaging easily with new ways of working, from contractors to freelance workers. We would be wise to appreciate that it’s no longer ‘the future’ – it’s happening now, and by making engaging with our organisations cumbersome for freelance talent, we stand to lose out on great individuals, or at the very least, appear like dinosaurs and as such send the wrong signals.

At Hot Spots Movement we call these cumbersome approaches ‘sunset processes’ – that is, processes that were established possibly many years ago when the nature of work and workers was different, or perhaps came with an acquired company and were deemed too complicated to discontinue it at the time.  These ‘sunset processes’ have reached the end of their valuable life and the challenge for HR is to remove them so that they do not end up constraining the business.

In short, people processes can be illustrated by showing an excavation site where you can see the different archaeological ages, layer by layer.

Removing sunset processes is just the start. As HR professionals we need to decide rather urgently if we want to lead how our organisations engage with freelance talent. If the answer is yes, then we need to design the engagement journey for freelancers with two important outcomes in mind: (1) ensure that freelancers want to work with our company (yes, you will want to be a freelance ‘employer’ of choice) and (2) ensure that the company benefits in all respects from engaging with freelance talent.

If HR doesn’t take the lead, line management will procure freelance talent directly, and our organisations won’t benefit from a signature ‘Freelance Experience’. Over the past years, HR functions have spent much time designing their Employee Experience, with the smartest companies appreciating that this experience begins well before the first working day and all the way through to how their people leave the company. I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t put as much effort into designing the Freelance Experience as you do for the Employee Experience. The reward – and the risk –  is no less substantial.

Maybe now is the time to let the dinosaur move to the museum and say goodbye to processes that are not fit for purpose, or plainly unnecessary, for the age of agile working and longer careers.

In January 2015, McKinsey published an article stating that companies in the top quartile in terms of ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to outperform those in the bottom quartile. Having more women in senior management positions also has been shown to increase profitability.

In that case, so the rational argument goes, it should be obvious that organisations should increase diversity simply because it’s good for business. In the corporate world business tends to be about maximising profit so it is worth posing the question – why have organisations been so slow on the uptake in putting that information to good use?

Today, almost three years later, research from The Guardian shows that amongst the UK’s top 1000 companies, only 3.5% of senior managers are BAME. According to Grant Thornton, the proportion of senior business roles held by women in the UK has fallen from 21% in 2016 to 19% in 2017. The percentage of businesses in the UK with no women in senior management has also risen from 36% in 2016 to 41% in 2017. After some progress in recent years, UK firms now appear to be going backwards, despite increased pressure to improve gender diversity levels.

The number of women in senior positions is now close to the levels reported over a decade ago when Grant Thornton’s first annual survey in 2004 revealed the proportion of senior business roles held by women stood at 18%. The UK is the second worst performing EU country in terms of female representation in senior roles.

One explanation for why this happens is the part that unconscious bias plays. This refers to the biases we all have, regardless of our own gender, race or class, but are unaware of. Our brains are hard wired to categorise people based on their external attributes and this can be influenced by our upbringing, social interactions and the media.  

Every one of us experiences difference. If you think of the protected characteristics from the Equality Act (2010), and then look at the people who you interact with, you’ll see that you do interact with someone who is different to you – maybe you don’t know someone who is transgender – but you probably do know someone who is a different age, race, or gender.

However, all of us experience these differences in different ways. People are considered to be privileged have access to social power which they are perceived not to have earned. What is not in dispute is these people often don’t realise that others don’t have the same access that they do and might see everything as a level playing field.

There was an article a few years ago detailing the experience of a doctor who joined a gym. Upon joining, the doctor received the code to enter in order to get into the changing room. But the code didn’t work. At the front desk, staff told her that the code was for the men’s changing room, and she’d have to drop the “Dr.” for the system to give her access to the women’s room. Men would never have to experience this: their privilege is invisible to them.

Unconscious bias can have a significant influence on various organisational processes like recruitment, promotion, learning and development and individual outcomes like employee engagement, performance and productivity. When unaddressed, unconscious behaviours have the potential to shape and reinforce a culture where employees are treated unfairly and where they can develop a feeling that they are being discriminated against.

And yet, because all of us experience difference, it means that changing our society is something we can all contribute to. Mellody Hobson, the president of Ariel Investments, came up with the term “Colour Brave,” and she says we all have a part to play: “The wonderful thing is if we can all take responsibility. It’s on all of our watch. Rome is burning, and we’re all holding cans of water. Every single person. If we could do that – all of us – I think that moves the needle in a big way. We all do our part in different ways. The question is – what is your part?”

For us at the IPA, our part is to provide training, where we introduce ideas that will help people have the difficult, uncomfortable conversations that might move the needle and address, in our own small way, some of the inequality we experience both in the workplace and in society at large.

If you would like to know more about our training programme, “How to understand and deal with unconscious bias”, please contact Derek Luckhurst, IPA Training & Development Director

[email protected] 07780697024.

Following UNISON’s legal challenge, the Supreme Court, last week, ruled that employment tribunal fees are unlawful because they price workers out of accessing justice and discriminate against women.

This means that employment tribunal fees no longer apply. What’s more, the government will have to refund any fees paid since 2013 — at a cost of about £27m. 

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld each of UNISON’s arguments against employment tribunal fees.  They found that the Fees Order:

1. Restricted access to justice;
   • As the Supreme Court said, “Fees must be affordable not in a theoretical sense, but in the sense that they can reasonably be afforded. Where households on low to middle incomes can only afford fees by forgoing an acceptable standard of living, the fees cannot be regarded as affordable”.
2. Limited Parliament’s role in granting employment rights and how they should be enforced;
3. And, discriminated unlawfully against women
   • As the Supreme Court said, “The Fees Order is indirectly discriminatory under the Equality Act 2010 because the higher fees for type B claims put women at a particular disadvantage, because a higher proportion of women bring type B than bring type A claims.”

 

The Supreme Court judgment smashes down a financial barrier which was pricing workers out of justice.  When tribunal fees of up to £1,200 per case were introduced in 2013, it very quickly became clear that many working people could no longer afford to uphold their rights at work.  The number of cases taken has dropped by nearly 70%.   Low-paid and insecure workers all but lost their ability to take cases, whether on non-payment of the national minimum wage, unauthorised deductions from pay, or even unfair dismissal.  Only union members and the well-off were guaranteed access to justice.

And the number of discrimination cases has gone through the floor too (see graph below), hurting women, workers with disabilities, black and minority ethnic and LGBT+ workers who have been unfairly treated or harassed.

 

 

 

The outcome is one of the most significant employment law judgments for a generation.  It is a massive step towards ensuring that working people can enforce their employment rights.

This decision will also have a positive knock on effect leading to more disputes being resolved in the workplace.  It’s been widely recognised, including in evidence given to the recent government review on tribunal fees, that bad bosses have become emboldened due to workers being less likely to pursue an employment tribunal claim. 

Huge congratulations to UNISON for this landmark victory.  This victory is a massive step to improving working peoples’ ability to enforce their employment rights.  And it is a great example of the value of working people standing together in trade unions.

 

In our recent research report, “ Tune In To Temps – how employers and recruiters can support agency worker voice in the workplace” we highlight nine key ways that employers can adopt good practice that will promote high levels of engagement amongst this important part of the UK workforce.

One area of some controversy is the recommendation that agency workers’ are listened to at work both when they give advice and suggestions about operational matters and when they raise concerns or grievances they might have. The conclusion is that they should be given the same access to and support from any staff representatives in the workplace as permanent employees.

The vast majority of staff forums exclude agency workers from the process and this is a situation rarely questioned. When a large number of ICE forums were established in the early 2000’s, the perception of what the role of the representative was seemed to naturally preclude agency workers. How could a staff representative “take up an issue” on behalf of an agency worker for example? How could they “canvass and represent their views”? This was, at the time quite understandably, seen as a process that should only include permanent staff.

This, however, is not the role of the staff representative as we see it today. Two major changes have occurred; the role is now more sophisticated than simply canvassing and reporting the views of the constituents, plus the use of email is more widespread than it was fifteen years ago. Both of these mean that there is no reason why the voice of agency staff should not be included in the two-way communication between an organisation and the representatives.

Through research and our training programmes, the IPA has re-positioned the role of the representative considerably. Instead of focussing on problems and concerns, staff representatives are coached to ensure that all staff have a voice – including those who are highly engaged and enjoy their jobs. In other words, the representative is no longer there just to represent the five, ten or fifteen percent of staff who have a problem with something but have to include everyone.

So, instead of becoming the traditional de-facto “agony aunts”, staff representatives have developed into more effective reporters of “hot topics” and a accurate temperature check for senior managers to consider. As a result, good practice and the voice of the engaged is heard alongside the issues that need to be addressed strategically. There is no reason at all why Agency staff should not be included in that accurate temperature check or reporting of good practice.

The evolvement of the “Hot Topic” request and the availability of email in workplaces has also removed a potential barrier to including agency workers in the process. Instead of the potentially calamitous idea of representatives “canvassing views” on specific topics (thereby giving staff an impression that they are voting on something or creating an expectation that their individual views will be addressed using their desired outcome) the “Hot Topics” will be requested on a regular basis by email.

Instead of asking people what questions they have (which should be asked through the line manager) or what issues they “want raised on their behalf”, the representatives will ask them a series of less personal questions that will provide the more accurate and balanced report back:

What are the main taking points in your department?

What are the main areas of concern in your department?

Is there any good practice in your department that we can share at the next meeting?

What’s going well in your department?

It could be that an agency worker might have experience of something that has worked in other organisations and their exclusion might stifle potential innovation. Agency workers might not just have a voice, they may have a well-informed one.

It is also important to remember that staff forums are not there to negotiate. As such, the majority and the minority perspectives are equally important in discussions. Everyone needs factual communication that will allow them to make their own minds up about how they feel about their jobs and staff representatives play a vital role in making sure this happens. The representatives do not, or should not, argue solely from the perspective of a majority and this is another reason why excluding agency workers makes no sense. They are an additional voice, not an additional number. 

As our report concludes, both agencies and host organisations should ensure that agency workers are treated with decency, compassion and respect at all times which they are as entitled to as any other employee. They should not be treated differently where inductions or celebrations of success are concerned if they are going to be genuinely regarded as “part of the team”. It is logical, therefore, that they should also be part of the important two-way process that staff forums provide.

If you want more information about our training programmes or our Hub for Representatives, please contact me:

[email protected]

07780 697024

The gig economy has been under massive scrutiny in the media for years and, more recently, self-employment and atypical working have climbed the political agenda too. 

As CEO of a trade body whose members effectively employ atypical workers, I am pleased to see this shift in focus by Government, Parliament and think tanks.

But what are they trying to solve? And are they going about it the right way? 

These questions kickstarted a panel discussion at the IPA recently chaired by IPA Director Nita Clarke. I had the pleasure of being asked to join Nita alongside John Park of Community, Kate Shoesmith of REC and Michael Mealing of the FSB.

With a melting pot of views from a variety of backgrounds, we were expected to have a lively, engaging discussion. Needless to say, we lived up to the billing but it was encouraging to see there was more common ground than disagreement on some of the most important issues. Here are the top three and why they matter: 

 

1. Clarity

One thing everyone in the room seemed to agree on was the need for further clarity – particularly on employment status.  

There are contradictions in the existing rules. For example, there’s the fact that there are currently two categories for tax status but three for employment status. This was always doomed to fail. PRISM engaged the Social Market Foundation to undertake a review into self-employment and contracting. One of the complexities identified in their initial research is that some people have more than one job, and can be classed as both employed and self-employed – the tax system simply doesn’t work for these people.  

We have also seen an increase in cases where employment status in the gig economy has been disputed in court. In many cases rights have been denied to workers who have been misclassified. With clarity of status will come clarity over workers’ rights.  

 

2. Direction

PRISM, the trade association I represent, has been calling for a strategic review of the sector. This is because we believe the current problems with tax and employment law are a direct consequence of the silo mentality operating within Government. The issue has seen repeated reviews conducted in isolation. An overarching review that looks at all areas, including tax, benefits and rights stands the best chance of succeeding in the long run. A more holistic approach would ensure a balance between seemingly competing interests – the Treasury’s aim to increase tax take and lower the tax gap, and the desire to protect and support the rights of both the self-employed and employees.  

Our organisation would also like to see the Government introduce a roadmap, similar to that for corporation tax, so we can all get off the merry-go-round of legislative changes that have a distorting effect on the market. From this we would inherit more certainty and a clear direction of travel for employers and workers alike. 

 

3. Transparency 

Transparency is desperately needed throughout the supply chain that governs how a worker is engaged. For example, PRISM believes recruitment agencies and umbrella companies have a part to play in increasing transparency and awareness around rates for workers.  

 

The responsibility to increase transparency also lies with HMRC and they should make this one of their leading aims. Some companies in employment supply chains still show blatant disregard for the rules but more effective enforcement and publicity around it would go a long way in helping to pull all firms into line. This would go some way to levelling the playing field over night because it is the pursuit of profit that creates a lot of market distortions to begin with. The perceived compliance that encourages workers to do business through these firms – whether they are an umbrella company or employment intermediary – would no longer be an issue. Workers would be able to feel confident that if a firm was marketing itself publicly as offering a particular service that was not within the rules, it would soon be removed from the marketplace by HMRC.

Put simply, it doesn’t matter how thick the rule book is, no one will read it or obey it if it’s not enforced. The Government’s decision to appoint a Director of Labour Market Enforcement is a positive step in the right direction but more work needs to be done in this area.  

Atypical working is increasing.  If the Government doesn’t get ahead of the game and stay one step ahead, then we’re stuck with the status quo and that’s probably the worst outcome for everybody.