November
2002 - Employee commitment
The building trade has always
used colloquialisms for various jobs - brickies
for bricklayers, sparkies for electricians and
chippies for carpenters. But a builder I met the
other day used a collective noun for all his contracted
employees that was new to me. He referred to them
as "skins".
The terminology sounded impersonal
and somewhat distasteful, in its assumption that
employees could be shed and renewed as easily
as the skin of a snake. But the more I thought
about his description, the more apposite it seemed
in today's workplace. At least the builder was
being honest. People are employed because they
are useful and so long as they are useful they
remain employable. Once their use becomes questionable,
impaired or uneconomic they can be replaced.
People know this. They can see
that much employment is a numbers game, where
the head count fluctuates depending on the strength
of the economy. According to newly published research
from Aon Consulting* this may be the main reason
for steadily falling levels of employee commitment.
Much has been written in recent
weeks about low levels of British productivity
and most studies tend to blame British managers,
comparing them un-favourably with their US counterparts.
Aon's latest research on workforce commitment
in the UK, based on interviews with 1,500 employees,
broadly reflects the findings of other surveys.
But what makes the research more interesting is
that when Aon ran the same kind of survey among
1,700 workers in the US, it produced similar results.
This means that, although the
US has higher levels of productivity than the
UK, both countries have workforces that appear
to be losing both confidence in their managers
and pride in their employers. A brief surge in
commitment after the World Trade Center attack
in 2001 was not sustained, according to the US
research.
A common complaint in both reports
was that employers were doing little to make their
workers feel secure. One in four of the UK employees
was pessimistic about job security for the year
ahead and not much more than half thought they
would benefit personally from any improvements
in their company's performance. A slightly higher
proportion in the US saw no sign that their top
management regarded the retention of the existing
workforce as important. Both reports highlight
this lack of engagement with employees as a serious
failure in leadership but we can see that it is
corporate leadership generally, not "British"
or "American" leadership that is at
fault.
Some of the most revealing findings
in Aon's UK research showed that employees with
the strongest levels of commitment were those
without any formal qualifications. The next most
committed employees were those with PhDs. The
findings look surprising at first glance but they
probably reflect the characters of these different
types of employee. Unqualified employees may feel
it is in their best interests simply to hold on
to their jobs. The PhDs, by their nature, may
be uninterested in jumping ship for bigger salaries
if they have sufficient intrinsic reward in their
existing work.
The research also showed a much
higher commitment to their jobs among unionised
workers than in those outside trade unions. This
may reflect the traditional role of unions in
job protection. Employees may feel they are less
likely to be "picked off" for redundancy
if they have trade union representation.
The publication of Aon's UK study
coincided this week with the release of a study
from the Future of Work Programme run by the Economic
and Social Research Council (ESRC). The report,
Managing Workplace Change** by Robert Taylor,
the programme's media fellow, is based on interviews
with 2,000 human resources managers between July
and September 2002.
Mr Taylor says that the research
supports the view that the traditional employment
model of full-time work is far more robust than
some commentators would suggest. More than half
the larger employers, for example, had recorded
a net increase in their workforces since 1999
and a third expected their workforces to be larger
in a year's time than they are now. But almost
one in 10 managers revealed that some employees
had become self-employed in the past three years,
what the report concedes is a "significantly
high" shift towards more flexible workplaces.
Trends in the use of agency workers
and subcontractors are difficult to discern, since
some sectors report decreases while others have
experienced increases. A comment that "contrary
to much speculation, the use of outworking by
establishments remains uncommon" may be true
- but it is unhelpful because it ignores the inconclusive
evidence of the research.
The report is equally dismissive
of teleworking, noting that "a mere 10 per
cent of managers said a policy had been adopted
to encourage staff to work more from home than
at the workplace". Given that teleworking
is informal and does not, by its nature, tend
to be part of company policy, this proportion
could be quite revealing. Yet it leads to the
surprising conclusion that "these statistics
heavily qualify the sweeping assertions that are
often made about the new world of work being characterised
by a decline in the full-time, permanent job and
rise in the virtual business organisation and
new forms of flexible working in a so-called 'new
economy'."
The study may have a point but
it does not help to substitute one sweeping assertion
for another. In pointing out that there is no
collapse of the full-time permanent job or rapid
growth of subcontracting, it is playing with the
evidence. A fifth of the managers questioned in
the survey said they would be outsourcing more
work in the next 12 months. This does not look
like an insignificant figure. We may be talking
about the relative speed of change rather than
change itself.
Craig Lydiate, director of organisational
measurement at Aon Consulting in the UK, believes
that many workplaces have lost the social cohesion
and sense of community that once existed, even
among large employers. This suggests that the
knowledge of employee concerns in too many big
companies these days is no more than skin deep.
This is a pity, because employees are human beings,
not simply machines or commodities for making
money.
* Both reports can be obtained
by emailing: charlotte.mandel@aers.aon.co.uk
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