In my recent post on The Recession and Employee Relations I suggested that a big question for industrial relations practitioners is what impact the recession will have on employment relations strategies in the short and longer terms. The CIPD has published an interesting report on employee attitudes in the UK titled Employee Outlook: Recovery Yet to Reach the Workplace . In the main, the report suggests quite positive attitudes among UK employees towards their line managers but not towards senior managers. And it suggests some areas of concern for those charged with responsibility for leading employee relations developments.
Job satisfaction: overall job satisfaction remains ‘low’ at +36, compared to +46 last year. Men are less satisfied with their jobs than women and young people are the least satisfied. UK employees in the private sector are more satisfied than in the public sector. The proportion of employees saying that they are under too much pressure at work is up from 41% last year to 44% this year.
Employee attitudes towards line management: employees have generally positive attitudes towards their line managers. However, they are critical of line managers in regard to their performance around coaching, addressing training needs, and giving feedback on performance.
Employee attitudes towards senior management: trust in senior leaders has, according to this survey, reached an all time low at -5. Employees are particularly critical of what they perceive as inadequate consultation by senior managers. Only half of respondents said they were ‘fairly’ or ‘fully’ informed about what was happening in their organisation. Employee perceptions of management leadership are much worse in the public sector.
Employee attitudes and the recession: not surprisingly, employees are afraid of losing their jobs because of the recession. This survey, quite surprisingly, suggests that UK public sector employees are now much less confident over job security than last year. 39% of public sector employees said their organisations were planning to make redundancies compared with just 9% in the private sector.
NCPP employee attitudes survey: it will be interesting to see what the comparable findings are from the current national employee and employer attitude surveys being conducted by the National Centre for Partnership and Performance. Certainly, the previous reports from the NCPP suggested that employees were not satisfied with the extent to which they were informed and consulted on issues affecting them in the workplace in either the private or public sectors.
Comments: obviously these findings are from the UK and don’t necessarily ‘travel’ to Ireland. Also, there are some significant differences that need to be noted between the two countries. For example, the Public Service Agreement 2010-2014 or ‘Croke Park Agreement’, as it is commonly called, precludes compulsory redundancies in the public sector here. Also, it guarantees no further pay cuts before 2014 and provides a mechanism for recovering pay already lost through earlier cuts. Nevertheless, there are also similarities. For example, the ‘moratorium’ on recruitment has already led to the suppression of many temporary posts and will lead to the non-filling of more permanent posts over the coming years. No doubt public servants will argue that this will involve additional workloads and pressure.
Implications: if it is the case that employees in Ireland, whether in the private or public sectors, have similar attitudes towards management as their counterparts in the UK then it suggests that employers here need to attend to their employee relations strategies.
Employee criticisms of line managers in regard to their performance around coaching, addressing training needs, and giving feedback on performance suggest that work needs to be done in these so-called ‘soft’ management skills areas.
Openness with information and a willingness to consult regularly are probably key to effective employee relations. They are the foundation stones of workplace trust which in turn is an essential ingredient in the effective management of change. Despite all the talk about ’employees being our greatest resource’ and so on, many employers here in both the private and public sectors only pay lip service to information, consultation and involvement. This report suggests that continuing to do little by way of informing and consulting employees may present serious problems in the not too distant future as far as employee attitudes towards management are concerned.
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