It sounds obvious, but well-,managed employees who feel part of a team with a shared goal perform better. Sadly, not all employees work under good managers who are able to get the best out of their teams. This week, Jo Swinson highlighted the need for good management as WSB reports:
“The role of good management skills needs to be more prominent in the thinking about productivity,” Swinson said.
One of the biggest challenges we face in dealing with the productivity dilemma in this country is about improving the quality of management skills.
She said the lack of managerial training was an “ingrained issue” for many years and employers should be aware of the difference between employees who excelled in their work and those who excelled as managers.
How we get people in organisations performing to their full potential is largely dependent on the line management they experience. This is something we haven’t got right for decades.
There’s scope for some kind of initiative led by business on improving management skills to address the productivity challenge. There have been successful models done on similar types of issues in the past, but I think a really concerted effort focusing on the quality management skills is just as important or we’re not going to deal with productivity.
It’s good to improve infrastructure and the technical and specific skills but we really need to improve those management skills if we’re going to unlock that business potential,” Swinson added.
The former employment minister highlighted the need for businesses to adapt to legislation such as shared parental leave, flexible working and pay transparency.
It’s absolutely right that the government is going to bring forward pay transparency but getting the details of that right is very important and it needs to be meaningful,” she said. “Single headline figures won’t cut it. There needs to be enough information and businesses need the opportunity to include contextual information explaining the scenario.
The point of transparency is not just about publishing numbers and stringing up businesses that aren’t getting it right. It’s about understanding the problem so that you can then create a solution. Making sure you’ve got enough information to do that analysis is really important.
There are moments when I miss switching on the tv in the morning and seeing one of our ministers, whether it be Lynne, or Steve, or Jo or Norman highlight some bit of liberalism that they are putting into practice. There are things that they did that we can and should always be proud of, even if we had reservations about the coalition as a whole.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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14 Comments
The Liberal party used to champion employee involvement and share ownership.
We need to revive that policy.
John Lewis are a good model.
David Warren
it is very sad how industrial democracy, profit sharing and employee ownership has slipped from the Liberal agends. To think the party used to believe in compulsory co ownership and no we seem to believe all we need is for workers need to be better managed. If Tim’s political hero is Jo Grimond he could do a lot worse than champion the radical policies he advocated in this area.
There’s a reason “compulsory co ownership” hasn’t caught on and it is because many wouldn’t hire others if they had to give them shares, pensions, holidays, good wages, insurance, sickness and parental leave. It gets to the stage where the employee has a getter deal than the employer.
As I have said: employee share trusts are a workable progressive change, many big corporations used to run them, but mainly as a form of tax avoidance. However I think they have their place alongside pensions etc. and they are much better than giving shares outright, which the employees may then sell to strangers.
Good thoughts from Jo.
First rule of management:- people who do a good job feel good about themselves
Second rule of management:- people who feel good about themselves do a good job.
On of the problems facing middle management,those who take their orders from the top, is that the targets they are set within their appraisal systems for their team , rarely include such things as employee training,personal ambition and domestic situations. To obtain commitment from an employee is to make them feel valued.Share ownership works as does representation through works councils .It would be helpful if some trade unions did not view all employers as an enemy and in partnership drove this agenda forward
Question: what is the place of leadership in a democratic society? I sometimes feel that decisive leadership is the way forward.
Economists are puzzled about the reason for the UK’s poor productivity compared with the USA, Germany and France. So I would have liked Jo Swinson to produce evidence to justify her assertion about management being the cause before she proscribes a change in management skills.
Regarding employee share ownership, it is foolish for poorer employees to have all their share ownership in the company that they work for. Much better to hold shares in a fund which invests across many companies and so reduces the risk of loses when your employer goes bust and you lose both your job and your savings in the company shares.
At least eight Prime Ministers in succession have called for ‘Plain English’, but with limited effect.
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/
Clarifying the language helps to clarify the thinking, so do the 8+ PMs actually want that?
Unemployment needs to be considered in productivity figures. It isn’t accurate to say a country is very productive if it has high unemployment.
UK does need to increase its GDP or GNP per capita, but it is no easy task. It would help if people learnt from history, rather than trying to repeat it (such as voting in the likes of Corbyn).
It also needs to be cheaper to train as an engineer. My twin brother is doing so at the moment, but gosh, compared with finance or languages it is so expensive that I am not surprised we have a problem with engineering. We need to look at the accessibility to programming courses as well.
Valid points from Jo, though there’s no answer to the “so what?” in terms of what this means in terms of politics. I generally disapprove of politicians simply lecturing at others to be better at doing at their own thing.
David Warren and Iain BB’s point needs to be underlined.
Whatever the label – Industrial democracy, works councils, worker control, employee participation, co-operative enterprise, and there are plenty others – we Lberal Democrats need to push for a change to the standard image of management of industry and business.
In recent years we have had endless chatter about having an increased number of women on boards of directors. This sonded lke tokenism. It will change little if those women come from the same inadequate public school background of amateurs that the men who have occupied those seats have come from in the past. The same goes for management.
Paddy Ashdown at one time promoted the idea of workers hiring management instead of the other way round.
This concept is worth following up. If a business is doing badly then the workers in that business could then sack the incompetent management. There is a parallel with incompetent leaderships in democratic political parties.
Iain Brodie Browne 25th Jul ’15 – 10:04pm
“David Warren
it is very sad how industrial democracy, profit sharing and employee ownership has slipped from the Liberal agends”
I am not sure that this issue should be given any credence at all. It is part of the suffocating Tory agenda to get vast numbers of workers [who do hard and often unpleasant jobs for less than a living wage] – to work harder to create increased profit for, primarily, global corporations who are sucking the lifeblood from the nation and its people.
From today’s Guardian:
Joseph Stiglitz: unsurprising Jeremy Corbyn is a Labour leadership contender
“Unfortunately the centre-left parties have wimped out. They have joined in saying: ‘Oh yes, we have to have a kinder version of austerity, a milder version of austerity.’ But one of the disappointments of the eurozone, and Europe more broadly, is that you have these elections, these centre-left parties get elected and they have to cave into Germany and so they then do a rhetoric that is gentler but the outcome is not much gentler.”
Stiglitz said in the US research showed that all the economic gains since the early 1980s had gone to the top 10%. “The bottom 90% of the economy has seen stagnation for a third of a century and similar trends – not as bad – are at play elsewhere.
“It’s just very hard to say these centre-left parties – with emphasis on ‘centre’ – have been able to deliver for most people. Their economic models have not delivered and their message is not working. So to me it’s not a surprise that you have seen, say in the United States, which obviously I know better, that [anti-austerity] progressives are getting a much stronger voice in the Democratic party.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/26/joseph-stiglitz-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-contender-anti-austerity
John Roffey 27th Jul ’15 – 7:38am Germany has a coalition government of CDU, CSU & SPD at the federal level.
The original article seems to identify a significant problem but I am not sure it is really proposing much in terms of specifics towards a solution.
David Warren
As far as I can tell most people in the LibDems are supportive of employee involvement share ownership etc. as they appear to be broadly supportive om mutuals, co-ops etc. the issue comes when trying to advocate what you want to change.
I remember Nick Clegg giving a speech that praised John Lewis when it was deteriorating in quality. Praising John Lewis as you and Nick Clegg (as does Cameron when trying to look cuddly) have done/do or praising the Co-Op as Labour do is not doing much. I find people who have worked for John Lewis fro along time feel it is not much different from working for any other large company. The benefits of Co-Ops and workers Co-Ops is greatest where they are smaller and therefore there is more genuine accountability.
Labour cheer the merger that former the Co-Op from the several smaller co-ops but don’t think it produced anything which looks like an improvement. What is needed is more of these starting up to provide some dynamism.
Iain BB
As Eddie says I think you will find that compulsion would not help matters and would look a bit desperate as a policy.
ACGN
I’m not sure I picked up your point, could you expand?
John Tilley
“Paddy Ashdown at one time promoted the idea of workers hiring management instead of the other way round.”
Not a bad idea, if you can find the employees who want to start a business that operates that way. What may be easier to implement is a weighted voting system between investors and employees as there may be some investors who are willing to try sharing power in their investment with people who will get a sense much earlier on when management is not performing. Board employees representation and Employee voting on the appointment/reappointment on senior management could be something that some companies were willing to experiment with.