successful’. It reveals how such organizations achieve significantly enhanced
business performance through developing a partnership with their
employees.
There are five main themes or ‘paths’ that the organizations identified as
producing a balanced environment in which employees thrived and sought
success for themselves and their organizations:
- Shared goals – ‘understanding the business we are in’.All employees
should be involved in developing the organization’s vision, resulting
in a shared direction and enabling people to see how they fit into the
organization and the contribution they are making. Senior managers in
turn receive ideas from those who really understand the problems –
and the opportunities. - Shared culture – ‘agreed values binding us together’.In the research, ‘organi-
zation after organization acknowledged that a culture has to build up
over time... it cannot be imposed by senior executives but must rather be
developed in an atmosphere of fairness, trust and respect until it
permeates every activity of the organization’. Once achieved, a shared
culture means that employees feel respected and so give of their best. - Shared learning – ‘continuously improving ourselves’.Key business benefits
of shared learning include an increasing receptiveness to change, and the
benefits of increased organization loyalty brought by career and personal
development plans. - Shared effort – ‘one business driven by flexible teams’.Change has become
such an important part of our daily lives that organizations have learnt
that they cannot deal with it in an unstructured way, says the report. The
response to change cannot be purely reactive, as business opportunities
may be missed. While teamworking ‘leads to essential co-operation
across the whole organization’, care must be taken to ensure that teams
do not compete with each other in a counterproductive way. It is
essential that the organization develops an effective communication
system to ensure that the flow of information from and to teams
enhances their effectiveness. - Shared information – ‘effective communication throughout the enterprise’.
While most organizations work hard at downward communication, the
most effective communication of all ‘runs up, down and across the
business in a mixture of formal systems and informal processes’. Many
organizations with unions have built successful relationships with them,
developing key partnership roles in the effective dissemination of infor-
mation, communication and facilitation of change, while others have
found representative works councils useful in consulting employees and
providing information.
Employee relations strategy l 199