Workers’ Voice Part 1: Managers: Attuned To Change But Tone-Deaf to Worker Voice
By Larry W. Beeferman, Contributing Author/ February 13, 2023
Larry W. Beeferman is a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program (LWP) and an Independent Consultant. He joined the LWP in 2004 to help establish and for 14 years led the Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project (PCSP), focusing on both the design and management of pre-funded retirement plans and the capital stewardship of their and other institutional investors’ assets. The PCSP’s and Dr. Biederman’s ongoing work have included publications, conferences, other convenings, trustee education programs, and presentations on a wide range of topics, with extensive attention to labor and human rights and more broadly, workplace-related issues.
As a professor of law at the Massachusetts School of Law and faculty member at the Western New England School of Law, he taught constitutional and administrative law, legislation and legislative drafting, conflict of laws, cyberspace and the law, and private sector labor law. He helped establish and headed the Asset Development Institute at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, where he formulated an asset-based policy framework for social welfare policy and conducted research and promoted dialogue among diverse constituencies on specific asset-based policies. As Associate Counsel to the Ward Commission in Massachusetts, he led a team which researched and analyzed corruption and mismanagement in the public building process; drafted legislation on capital planning and budgeting, real property management, and project management; and did similar work in reference to political campaign finance reform. He has also written books and articles on matters of law, science and technology, policy, and other issues. He is currently finishing the first of a two-volume study – to be published by Routledge Press – on the interests and role of public and private actors in decision-making with respect to infrastructure projects.
Introduction
Many company-side narratives highlight workers far more than before as crucial to the success of companies. Literally in the words of senior company actors in C-suites, on boards, and among HR professionals, and of advisory and analytic missives to or for those actors from consultants, think tanks, and academics, workers are saluted in contemporary lingo as being firms’ “greatest asset”. That recognition is bound up with insistence on a need for changes in the roles, capabilities, and responsibilities of those various company actors as they relate to workers. Because these narratives are striking and their implications for companies’ financial performance and workers’ well-being are potentially quite significant, they warrant serious attention.
In this and three follow-on articles, we first reprise changes at or with respect to the workplace which the narratives link to changed perceptions about workers’ importance. Next, we reprise proposals in those narratives for new or different roles, responsibilities, and capabilities for company actors in light of that different perception. We then critically assess the merits of the portrait of change offered by the narratives and their arguments in support of proposals for actions by senior leaders to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities posed by change. We then argue that matters of worker voice are central to but missing from the narratives and the proposals for changes in the relationship between senior company leaders and their workers. In light of that centrality, we suggest a different course of action which can redound to the benefit of both.
Company Side Narratives
Company side narratives typically center around the sheer fact of change – particularly rapid and/or ongoing change – in or with respect to the workplace, that is, which has affected what work needs to performed and how, who is sufficiently prepared for and available to perform it, the ability to hire – and on what terms – and retain those individuals, the environment and circumstances under which they carry out their work on an individual and collective basis, etc.
First, demographic shifts in the (1) majority-minority population; (2) extent and nature of workforce participation by and the roles which men and women play at work; and (3) the size and composition of the documented and undocumented immigrant population. There have been ongoing associated changes in the experiences, attitudes, expectations, and capabilities which individuals among those groups bring to the workplace. Those changes have been especially significant when linked with social movements, e.g., the rise of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, which is part of a broader ranging demand for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion at the workplace. This, in turn, is bound up with insistence on the dignity of and respect for workers.
Second, generational change, i.e., from the waning importance of baby boomers (Gen “X”) to the rising significance of “millennials” (Gen “Y”), and “zoomers” (Gen “Z”). Broadly speaking, recent generations are seen as having less unreflective respect for authority, a need for greater autonomy, a greater interest in mobility as compared with across workplaces, a need for a different work-life balance, heightened concern about how companies behave in and beyond the marketplace. In parallel, the “premature” departure from the workforce of older cohorts is seen as posing risks of loss of knowledge, expertise, and institutional memory and distinctive capabilities bound up with extended service. Moreover, distinctive issues are raised by the need to address or accommodate the diverse needs and expectations of and workplace relationships across cohorts.
Third, large-scale socio-economic-environmental changes have greatly altered what workers experience at or with respect to particular workplaces, and in turn, what they – and in certain respects, the larger society – expect from companies. Those changes include gross and increasing inequalities of income and wealth; the inability of workers (and their families) to sustain themselves from full-time work and the even greater inability to do so on the part of those dependent on temporary, part-time, irregular, and “contract” work; lack of or limited access to affordable health care, and insufficient financial security in retirement. In the first instance, companies may not believe that such outcomes, however disturbing they might seem, have any bearing on the choices they make about how they operate. However, at minimum, from a political and social standpoint, such larger outcomes are seen as linked to decisions about jobs, pay, benefits, hiring and firing, etc., in the aggregate of individual company decisions as “buyers” grouped in relevant labor markets based on what that market will “bear”.
Moreover, climate change and the degradation of the environment have disparate impacts on households based on economic status and race. Such changes are aggravating factors in terms of inequality, social and political polarization, and instability, etc. which have led to thinking anew about the “social contract” in the sense of what is expected of companies from workers and the larger society. On the company side that has spurred individual ones to reframe their roles in varied ways in terms of company purposes and the kinds of “value” they create and of notions of “sustainability,” and of “stakeholder” rather than “shareholder” capitalism, etc. – with workers as important stakeholders – and a corresponding need for concrete action consistent with that redefinition.
Fourth, there is the faster pace of innovation and the adoption of transformative technologies in the service of new forms of intensified competition. These have been associated with changes in the knowledge, training, skills, behaviors, and attitudes thought to be required by those kinds of workers seen as needed to effectively engage in that competition. In turn, there is said to be a greater need for “flexibility” and/or “agility” with regard to how work is organized and when and where it is by done; and increased concerns about the interplay of communications and behaviors at the workplace cast in terms of company culture, trust, engagement, or otherwise.
Fifth, the COVID pandemic’s immediate and long-term effects on experience at or with respect to the workplace pose challenges. There is uncertainty about people’s availability for work, how individual work is done, associated concerns about health/mental health and safety, the unreliability of supply chains, the balance between work at home and the nominal workplace and its effect on sustaining effective relationships among workers.
Sixth, however, in the first instance, seen as beneficial for a company, already ongoing changes in the mix of workplace relationships – such as ones involving greater reliance directly on increased part-time, temporary, contract, and labor agency workers; and indirectly on workers at supply chain companies and related developments cast in terms of the “gig economy”. These have posed challenges for how a company successfully manages that mix and acts in the face of “pushback” to the impacts of such changes at the individual worker, company, and societal levels.
“Takeaways” From the Narratives
The typical “takeaways” from these narratives are along the following general lines:
(1) In the face of the noted kinds of changes, companies must reassess and reformulate business strategies calculated to meet the challenges posed;
(2) Workers are cast as more central to the success of those strategies, e.g., they are frequently described as being companies’ “greatest asset” (or some variant thereof) than has heretofore been recognized or acknowledged; and, correspondingly,
(3) Companies need to assess and reformulate strategies for how work is organized and performed and the character of the workplace relationships within which it is embedded to align with those business strategies;
(4) Companies need to be more “worker-centric,” that is, devote far more attention to how, under these changed circumstances, they identify, recruit, and retain those capable of performing and willing to work in new ways in the context of different workplace relationships; and
(5) To identify, recruit, and retain such workers, companies must
(a) learn more about the wide range of people – not only in the aggregate, but in some measure, on an individual basis – who might be prospective workers and how they perform roles at the workplace in relation to the motivations, expectations, and circumstances which they bring to acceptance and performance of those roles; and
(b) by various means – perhaps especially sophisticated analytic ones – apply what companies find about links between such motivations, expectations, and circumstances and anticipate successful enough performance of those roles to formulate and successfully implement workplace-related policies and practices geared toward that end.
In the narratives, the “takeaways” then lead to proposals for changes (or discussion of changes already made) in the capabilities, roles, and responsibilities of important company actors to devise and implement new strategies and concomitant new policies and practices. In turn, the narratives offer some insights into the character of the policies and practices such changes might produce. In the next article, we canvas both.