Sharing the Challenge Ahead: Informing and Consulting with your Workforce

Models for informing and consulting with the workforce

In 2001 the EU Economic and Social Policy Council agreed on a directive dealing with information and consultation, covering national level undertakings with more than 50 employees.

In response, the IPA produced this report to identify models for informing and consulting with the workforce, to ensure that employees are informed and consulted on issues affecting them. The IPA’s aim is not to create a single best-set-of-arrangements-for-all formula. Rather, it is to identify the main issues that organisations will need to consider in designing the most appropriate arrangements to suit their particular circumstances.

Therefore, this publication aims to inform the debate about information and consultation at several different levels. Firstly, it is to give policy makers some substantial evidence of current UK practice. Secondly, it should help develop the debate on the structures and processes of information and consultation, away from rhetoric and ideology and towards good practice and useful frameworks. Finally, it aims to clarify how a UK model might look, forming a framework which can be used as a reference point for bodies as varied as employer organisations, trade unions and the UK government.

The examples in this report demonstrate how varied effective employee information and consultation arrangements can be. They also give managers and employee representatives the knowledge that elements of good practice are already well established in the UK and they can draw on these to benefit their own organisations.