Employers expect more disputes and strained relations in the wake of upcoming trade union reforms.  

The Employment Rights Bill is due to include measures that make it easier to organise industrial action: a reduced notice period, and only a majority rather than 50 per cent turnout needed for a strike. 

The CIPD’s research among employers found that 54% were anticipating an increase in industrial action in the coming year. There was more concern among employers that don’t have a unionised workforce, confirming the general feeling that relations with trade unions tend to be good. In other words, when there are open channels of communication, when people are sitting down together to discuss the issues, there are fewer concerns about any of the details around processes for calling strikes. Without union relationships, there’s more potential for disruption. 

In its response, the CIPD is calling for the government to do more than just provide more freedoms. The new measures need to be backed up with a statutory code of practice that defines what’s expected in terms of behaviour from both employers and unions, and more investment into the hard-pressed employment tribunal system.  

Trust, not process

The real point here is that none of the planned legislative changes should worry HR in any organisation, they’re just a matter of process. What’s important, where the attention should be, is around the levels of trust. When staff have an issue, individually or collectively, do they feel able to talk with a manager or management (or HR)? As a rule, do people feel listened to and understood? And do they believe that their employer has their best interests at heart, that there’s a shared sense of purpose and belonging to something? When there’s a ‘Clear Air culture’ like this, employees are far more likely to be understand and be on-board with the difficult realities around budgets, what’s not possible and why. 

The principle behind the Employment Rights Bill has to be accepted as a good one: that employees should be listened to, and should have the right to stand up to unreasonable or exploitative pay or working conditions. So the bigger challenge is not around getting ready to defend the organisation from the ‘attacks’ from industrial action, but making sure there is a constructive, positively minded culture in place, one where grievances are dealt with before they have a chance to bunch together in a more general malaise.  

Good conversations are the foundation

This positive cycle is built on good conversation integrity, at all levels and in all situations, as the lifeblood of a workplace, where trust and confidence flows, and that means encouraging and investing in the development of good skills: the soft, people skills like listening, empathy, self-awareness and curiosity, and how to use them to deal with more difficult conversations and to defuse conflict. And by making time for conversations, not limiting face-to-face time to calendar ‘events’, the weekly team slot or by summoning staff to meetings.

Frequent, open and trusting conversations need to be a supported part of the culture. It’s increasingly important given the more dislocated nature of teams and reliance on digital communications that has come with the acceptance of hybrid as a standard way of working.  

And as a backbone of support there needs to be access to mediation and neutral assessment, as the norm rather than as a response to a potential crisis or collapse in relationships, to provide more informal methods for catching conflict early and avoiding tribunal cases. 

Only when a routine of good conversations and practices around disputes are the distinguishing feature of a workplace can there be a genuine sense of psychological safety, and the kind of culture that means any easing of rules on industrial action become much less of an issue.