26th May 2010
Engagement
has been championed by managers and HR practitioners, but they are not the only
ones who have a role to play says Tom Wilson, director of Unionlearn
“Business and organisations function best when they make their employees’ commitment, potential, creativity and capability central to their operation.”
This statement, made in the introduction to the report Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement is one that trade unions can readily agree with. The most important role of unions, ever since they were founded, has been to fight for workplaces that are safe, fair and offer the staff learning and training opportunities. Unionlearn, the learning and skills arm of the TUC, was set up in 2007 to support union learning.
So what is employee engagement? Largely it is jargon for a process in which employees and their managers speak, and, more importantly, listen to each other, where there is mutual respect and shared values about their enterprise. It is about, as the report by David McLeod and Nita Clark says, transforming the working lives of many people for whom Monday morning is an especially low point of the week. The authors quote figures showing that only three in ten of UK employees are actively engaged with their work, that a fifth may be disengaged and only four per cent exhibit high levels of engagement.
The report also provides evidence that improving engagement correlates with improving performance. A major report by Leeds University*, commissioned by unionlearn, including a survey of 415 employers with one million employees, backs this up. It discovered that almost nine out of ten employers, who work with or have formal arrangements with unions for learning activities in their workplace, want to continue to do so. Two-thirds say that their organisation has benefited and eight in ten believe it benefited the individuals taking it up.
It showed that unionlearn’s projects have led to better workplace morale and improved relations between management and staff; almost a third of employers surveyed said that organisational performance had improved and 42 per cent said that levels of trust between management and unions had increased.
Unionlearn’s greatest asset is its union learning reps. Since 1999, more than 25,000 reps have been trained to act as advocates, encouraging and advising their colleagues on the advantages of improving their skills. They recruit their colleagues at the bus depot, factory or office water cooler to workplace learning. A survey conducted by the University of Central Lancashire, to be published later this year, discovered that three-quarters of union learning reps have helped arrange courses for their colleagues and almost half obtained funding for learning. Almost two-thirds of managers, reported that ULR activity had increased the provision of basic literacy and numeracy skills and a majority agreed that there had been increases in job-related training and courses leading to qualifications.
ULRs play a vital role as facilitators of employee engagement. A bakery in Barnsley introduced a learning centre for its workers. To get to it, staff had to pass through the human resources department and sign in: nobody used it. When a new HR manager started, he consulted the union reps and the upshot was that the managers were turfed out of their restaurant (so they had to eat with the workers) and the room was transformed into a learning centre with a computer suite and library. The management and union reps now have regular meeting to keep the learning centre on track. And yes, it has become exceedingly popular with the bakers.
The MacLeod review makes the point that an employee is more likely to go the extra mile if he or she feels valued and that loyalty is rewarded. There is evidence that increased employee engagement can lead to lower accident and sickness rates and retention of staff. A happy workplace is a fair workplace and that is why unionlearn champions those who often miss out on opportunities at work, because of race, gender, disability or because they work night shifts. A third of Union Learning Fund projects are targeted at a specific ethnic or minority group. An evaluation of a project promoting basic skills and English for Speakers of Other Languages courses found that they had a direct, positive effect on safety on building sites and improved productivity in a range of settings; one company identified a 20 per cent increase in productivity. And as one NHS hospital put it: “If people cannot read notices and they cannot deal with instructions on things there is risk involved.”
The Leeds University report highlights the need for formal arrangements between employers and unions. The study found that in the in 53 per cent of workplaces where learning agreements are signed, the learning experience and the benefits to the organisation were the greatest. Merseytravel, which runs transport services in the Liverpool area, is a good example. It has seen great strides in the improvement of its workforce’s skills since working with unionlearn. In 2002, one quarter of the staff had poor levels of literacy and numeracy. Today, 98 per cent have an NVQ Level 2 or higher qualification. The improved learning has been linked to a reduction of 2.5 days sickness per employee per annum and far more employee engagement.
We live in challenging times as the UK is fighting its way out of recession and looking towards meeting the economic needs of the future. The UK Commission for Employment and Skills says that in order to achieve world class employment and skills, we will have to attain more than 20 million additional qualifications – equivalent to more than one for every second adult of working age. While our skills profile is improving, we are still in the position where one in eight adults of working age have no qualifications, more than a quarter are not qualified to Level 2 (roughly equal to GCSE) and just below half are not qualified above Level 2.
Unionlearn believes that employee engagement is vital if the UK is to improve its position from having the lowest growth in highly skilled jobs within the OECD. As the McLeod review reports, “59 per cent of engaged employees say that their job brings out their most creative ideas against only three per cent of disengaged employees”. There is a vast, untapped source of talent and people who can make a greater contribution to the business they work in. But, the biggest barrier to employees improving their learning is managers refusing to give them time off their duties. That is why unionlearn is supporting workers to exercise their new right to request time to train.
The Leeds report notes that unions have played an important role in engaging with employers and employees “to help them navigate economic uncertainty and prepare for better times”. Our Skills: Recession & Recovery project has been helping workers to gain skills to improve their employability as well providing them with job seeking techniques. Reps have been agreeing to workers doing fewer hours or accepting pay freezes in order to weather the downturn and stave off redundancies. The report found that joint working with unions increased at almost a third (30 per cent) of workplaces as a response to the recession. At Chamberlin & Hill Castings Ltd, the Black Country foundry worked with the Unite union to set up courses in literacy and numeracy (and one employee is now studying metallurgy at degree level) during down-time caused by the recession.
It is the mission of the trade union movement to create a learning culture in the UK’s workplaces. ULRs are major force for employee engagement and it is unionlearn’s job to challenge the managers who are not engaging with their staff to provide quality training and unleash their talent. We all stand to benefit.
* “Assessing the impact of union learning and the Union Learning Fund: union and employer perspectives,” by Professor Mark Stuart, Hugh Cook Jo Cutter and Professor Jonathan Winterton, of Leeds University Business School’s Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change can be read in full at
http://lubswww2.leeds.ac.uk/CERIC/index.php?id=373
By Tom Wilson, director of Unionlearn
