Prospects for industrial relations in 2011 (3): The challenges facing HR

Does HR lack the skills to deal with industrial unrest?

The simple answer to this question is yes. HR does lack the necessary skills to enter into industrial relations negotiations.

There are a number of levels at which HR cannot cope with, let alone engage with, worker collective action and these more ideological issues need to be dealt with first before one starts talking about whether HR personnel have the necessary ‘skills’ to negotiate.

I have highlighted a number of issues in previous contributions that I will most likely plagiarize in this contribution so I offer my apologies to the reader now.

Ideologically, proponents, supporters and educationalists of HR have been quite successful since the 1980s of individualizing the employment relations. HR major appeal to employers is that they, like the employers, abhor employee collectives and see collective wage agreements as being detrimental to those individual employees who work hard and are more productive than others. Since the mid 1980s this tactic has been employed as a divisive measure to entice people away from collectivism, Trade Unions, to more individualist employment contracts. It has been a tactic used openly to marginalize Trade Unions appealing to individual greed. In many respects this has worked and people are today more inclined to think of themselves more than their fellow employees. We have become a ‘me myself and I’ society and the knock on affects of this are now being seen outside the workplace as in Thatcher’s’ words of 1982 ‘There is no such thing as society’ has now nearly come to fruition.

So ideologically HR cannot understand the need for workers to act collectively they are of the opinion that the interests of both employers and employees are the same. On this premise there is no need for a third party, such as Trade Unions, to be involved in the employment relationship.

This is not to say that HR is not unsympathetic to collectives. They eulogize continually about teams and teams working however, these collectives are formed on the employers and HR’s terms. Thus they are controllable whereas collectives formed on employees terms, Trade Unions, Staff Associations and the like, are not as easily controlled.

(I do notice in the original article strike action is associated with Industrial Relations whilst at other times HR talks about the Employment Relationship. This is not being pedantic on my behalf it actual gives some insight into the mindset of HR people. In their socially constructed world of work employees would never dream of going on strike open and free communications prevent this. So if sections of workers vote to go on strike HR immediately distances them by identifying this group under the banner of Industrial Relations. Something ‘other’ than what ‘we’ are. Alien an anathema something ‘we’ have to put up with till it eventually withers and dies.)

However, let us return to the main discussion. As can be seen from the above a deep mistrust exists between the Trade Unions and HR. At any negotiation it is not only the table that separates the two camps but also an ideological chasm that generates huge mistrust.

On the one side HR offering a counterfeit paradise view of the workplace, whilst on the other the Trade Unions offering a more historically correct view of work as being one of exploitation and work degradation.

A further problem that HR has in workplace negations with Trade Unions is their place within the structure of the organization. Does HR hold a ‘strategic’ or ‘departmental’ position? There is little proof that HR does or even can hold a strategic position in any organization. Again for ideological reasons only this time it is the gulf between organisational profit making at all cost and HR’s supposed claim to treat workers with some humanity.

HR appears to be the meat in the sandwich but they only have themselves to blame, as they are ideologically challenged. They neither accept the fact that workers have to combine to challenge employers nor that employers will strive to turn a profit no matter the human cost.

So unfortunately the role of HR appears to have morphed into one of human accountancy in that it is their job to measure, to gauge, to set targets in fact to quantify employees against some nebulous arrived at benchmark. The increasing importance HR has placed on this role over the years has had a detrimental affect on their image. In that rather than be deemed the ‘caring’ arm of the employer they have become managers’ Rottweiler’s.

Again this does not bode well around any negotiating table.

Finally, HR students are not taught negotiating skills in fact they are not encouraged to critically challenge the underlying tenants of their own subject matter. Critical analysis is not encouraged on CIPD Employee Relations courses so much so that lecturers I know have refused to teach the modules due to the overly descriptive and prescriptive nature of them.

HR is not really equipped to enter into hard-nosed labour negotiations unfortunately.

A few years ago I was (un)fortunate enough to be involved in strike action with one of my clients. Whilst on one level it was quite distressing to be involved in an issue where the relationships with the employer and the staff had broken down. But on another level I was on a massive learning curve, and found the whole experience stimulating and interesting as a result.

At the time there was nobody in the (large, experienced) HR team who had had experiences of strike action before. Some time later and I'm now working with a different client who's asked me to draw-up a set of guidelines on how to manage strike-action, as nobody in that team has had any experience either.

And when dealing with potential strike action -it's not just about knowing the process (ie what the legal obligations are for a union to be able to hold a lawful strike) but about how to make the right strategic decisions and managing the business continuity implications. From my perspective there aren't enough HR practitioners out there with the relevant experience to know if we have the right skills.

Thanks Grumpy Lecturer and Karen for taking the time to comment and share your views here.

@Grumpy Lecturer: Intriguing stuff, as always. What do you think HR can do to prevent itself from being "ideologically challenged," in that case?

@Karen: Thank you for the 'frontline' insight into the issues being discussed here. Do you have any views as to why it might be the case that "there aren't enough HR practitioners out there with the relevant experience to know if we have the right skills?"

I'm wondering whether the situation in the organisations you've described might be similar to that outlined by Rick in the quotation I've used in the original post (above): that, historically, IR professionals tend not to have been replaced, meaning that HR departments in many organisations "lack the skills" effectively to deal with renewed union militancy.

And by the sounds of it, you might find that your own experience in this area puts your skills at a premium in the coming months!

Michael

What do you think HR can do to prevent itself from being "ideologically challenged?”

“Explain to me the underlying ideological foundations upon which HRM is built?” is a question I have posed a number of times to HR lectures and consultants over time and I have yet to get a substantive answer. I have raised this issue on Twitter but again nobody is prepared to offer a logical and rationally justified defense as to the ideological position of the subject matter.

HRM’s attacks on Trade Unions are fine but we know exactly the position of this movement and the people who are paid members. There is no confusion as what underpins their actions and thoughts.

However, even HRM textbooks find it extremely difficult to define the subject in a collectively agreed fashion. One could argue that too much is being claimed by HR proponents and thus the whole subject area has become bogged down with unrelated initiatives by proponents.

Many people find HRM to be a vague and elusive concept - not least because it seems to have a variety of meanings. Pinning down an acceptable definition can seem like trying to hit a moving target in a fog. This confusion reflects the different interpretations found in articles and books about human resource management. HRM is an elastic term (...). It covers a range of applications that vary from book to book and organization to organization. (...) (http://www.hrmguide.co.uk/introduction_to_hrm/defining-hrm.htm)

Even history and development of HRM is contentious in that certain key elements are overlooked. It is variously linked to the Quakers, welfare officers, welfare work itself (CIPD). The Encyclopedia for Business goes as far as to say, “Key principles and practices associated with HRM date back to the beginning of mankind”. (http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Gov-Inc/Human-Resource-Management-HRM.html) For those who are interested in the myriad definitions and histories of HR please see current academic authors of which there are far too many to mention here. But I do implore you to read further than Blogs, websites, HR Journals and especially the CIPD to understand your subject area a little deeper than the current ‘contented cows’ approach many of you take. (Contented cows produce more milk therefore contented workers produce more…. substitute what HR result you are trying to achieve.)

An alternative history and one more recent would go as follows.

Between the 1920’s and late 1930’s Elton Mayo, the lead researcher, and Roethlisberger and Dickson who later wrote “Management and the Worker” (1939) undertook a series of studies to promote the sales of electric light bulbs on the premise of there being a direct correlation between the amount of light and worker productivity. These experiments became known as the Hawthorne Studies.

To cut a long story short Mayo et al soon became to notice a change in worker attitude and productivity which had little to do with electric light and thus started to study the employees to try and understand what was going on.

The research methodology has since been subject of much critical analysis and debate however, the findings of the research have a considerable bearing on HR and its main subject matter today. The main findings of Mayo’s research are as follows”

• Work is a group activity

• The social world of the adult is primarily patterned around work activity

• The worker is a person whose attitudes and effectivity are conditioned by the social demands from both inside and outside the work plant

• Informal groups within the work plant exercise strong social controls over work habits and attitudes of the individual worker

Do not forget that this experiment was being done at the height of Taylorist and Fordist factory production. It was assumed that Taylor’s Scientific Management principles piggybacked onto Fords moving conveyor belt system of mass production had provided management with total control over the speed of production.

What was so revolutionary about Mayo’s teams’ findings was the last on the list above: Informal groups within the work plant exercise strong social controls over work habits and attitudes of the individual worker.

Mayo and his team had discovered the existence of ‘informal groups’ that exerted strong social control over workers as to levels of production. Rather than the total control management thought they possessed through Taylorism and Fordism there was still worker resistance.

I can here provide an example to illustrate this point. Lets take a machinist shop making say shirts. The ‘time and motion man’ would set a target of shirts to be sewn per hour based on the observations of employee machinists. Employees are not stupid they know that if they work at their quickest paste then the rate set would be high. No matter what money was to be earned at this high rate workers knew that such a rate would eventually kill them. Conversely, workers also recognised that the ‘time and motion man’ was not stupid so that working at their slowest speed would not be acceptable. So inevitably a rate was achieved that kept all happy.

Lets return to the story. So its Friday 50 machinists are on average doing, lets say, 20 shirts. A new employee arrives that morning sits down at a machine and immediately does say 30 shirts in the first hour. It does not take a rocket scientist to work out the ending of the story. The rest of the workers, somehow, would convey the message that the socially accepted rate in the workshop was 20 shirts per hour kindly stick to that rate or words to that effect.

What is the moral of the tale? Obviously, management did not have total control over the speed of production. Workers had through their ‘informal groups’ achieved some input into production speed. As Buchanan and Huczynski (2004) state:

Group collaboration does not occur by accident; it must be planned and developed. If group collaboration is achieved, the human relations within a work plant may reach a cohesion, which resists the disturbing effects of an adaptive society.

Work, according to the above, is alien a worker when outside the work environment has some freedom to decide how to live their lives. However, inside the workplace this freedom is removed workers must adapt to the restrictive nature of work as planned by the employer. Thus, according to Buchanan and Huczynski workers will try and resist this pressure to conform to rules and regulations.

Now to get to the point of this piece before you fall asleep a major problem when dealing with ideology or philosophy. The finding by Mayo et al of these informal groups of workers ‘fighting/resisting’ employers over the speed of production was a revelation.

So much so that a whole body of academic writers began to study this phenomenon. Depends on which texts you consult but the main writers in this genre who became known as the Human Relations School or as they are often referred to as ‘The Needs Theorists’ include:

• H. Maslow (1908 – 1970)

• Frederick Herzberg (1923 – 2000)

• David McClelland (1917 – 1998)

• Douglas McGregor (1906 – 1964)

• Chris Argyris (1923 – present)

Some will be known to you others probably not. However, the theme of these writers was that workers had ‘needs’ and that if employers could satisfy these ‘needs’ then it could be possible to turn those ‘informal groups’ from resisting employers to assisting and working with employers. I have provided my version of the most common and probably best known of these writers’ theories below.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The diagram provided by Grumpy Lecturer can be seen in the update note at the end of the original post, above. - Michael, Sunday 26 June 2011]

One can see by achieving the ego and self-actualising levels of the ‘hierarchy of needs’ the theory is trying to entrap workers into committing themselves to their employer. If the new machinist on a Friday produces 30 shirts an hour no longer will social pressure be brought to conform to the socially agreed 20 the rest of the workers will now try an emulate the 30 per hour or even exceed it.

Why because their employer is satisfying their higher order needs of work that is meaningful, work in which they have some power over how it is done, and that they are provided with positive feedback for a job well done.

This is the role HR has taken up with a vengeance.

So the ideological conundrum for HR is this.

Do HR practitioners actually believe that they are acting in a humanitarian way in that they are truly trying to make work a much better place to be for employees. Are they prepared to fight their corner against employers who are trying to exploit their employees?

Do practitioners actually understand what they are doing in that they are assisting employers in their exploitation of employees?

Its make your mind up time!

This is the paradox, which HR practitioners have to sort out between themselves.