This article uses a live case study from an NHS organisation where a group of staff have taken the last resort in terms of proposing to withdraw their labour in response to an alleged management culture that they declare to be oppressive and bullying.
Reconnecting with Industrial Relations
On 14 November, Unite the Union announced strikes by 60 porters at Southampton University Hospital NHS Trust in response to what looks at face value to be an anachronistic leadership culture that reeks of scientific management, with a requirement that these staff should advise a manager as and when they go to and come back from the toilet…
Between Intention and Practicality
Typically, if you visit the organisation’s website, you can find a page entitled Our values, vision and mission, a decidedly typical and extremely predictable cluster of corporate boilerplate that paints a positive picture of life in the trust, which the breakdown in industrial relations looks to refute…
https://www.uhs.nhs.uk/about-the-trust/our-values-vision-and-mission
Agenda and Actuality
Under the sub-heading World Class People, one of the organisation’s declared strategic themes, you can find a link to something called Our People Strategy 2022-2026, which is chockful of all the usual HR platitudes and references to national initiatives about how best to support people in trusts and ensure that your HR/OD function is doing that in a positive way.
It includes three strategic aims related to the workforce, Thrive, Excel, and Belong, which act in this instance as a reminder that layer upon layer of this sort of material sits at the heart of organisational administrations but the sentiments expressed very often simply do not show up in the day-to-day practice of the management or the experience of the staff…
Doing things differently
If a company wants to challenge the possibility that there is a gap between their espoused values and their values in practice, the starting point is immediately to bracket off the existing raft of strategic materials that relate to workplace experience – and then begin a serious piece of active research into the actual experiences of the people in your firm.
This needs to be an exercise that goes beyond the tick-box routine of annual staff and pulse surveys, so that you have the actual potential to genuinely hear the voices of your workforce and to thereby gain actual insight into their experiences at work. This presupposes that your company has worked hard to engender a speak up culture that is rendered authentic in light of the fact that – alongside that – you have done the difficult job of fostering and supporting a climate of listening up.
If – for whatever reason – you haven’t supported speaking up through listening up to this point, a reflexive engagement with an initiative to offer the opportunity for a polyphony of voices to be heard can be a starting point.
Further media coverage of the burgeoning dispute in Southampton can be found through the following sources:
Radical OD 