Workers’ Voice Part 2: Managers: Attuned To Change But Tone-Deaf to Worker Voice
By Larry W. Beeferman, Contributing Author/ February 22, 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.
The preceding article canvassed company-side narratives about significant changes at or with respect to the workplace, which require, if not demand, new workforce strategies and concomitant new policies and practices. In turn, those narratives argue that such changes require corresponding shifts in the roles, responsibilities, and capabilities of important company actors; and suggest ways in which performance of those roles may lead to different relationships between and better outcomes for companies and workers.
Changes in Roles, Especially CHRO-related Ones
Prominent in the narratives is the need for a move away from ”traditional” CHRO-related roles, e.g., the mechanics of hiring and firing, administration of payroll and benefits, employee relations, and oversight of employee satisfaction and engagement. There are associated remarks about CHROs not being heard in the C-suite; of working at a remove from core decision-making; and of having lower status and influence in comparison with others, e.g., CFOs. Reflective of that limited role are reports of CEOs not being well attuned to what CHROs are doing and unclear about the matters on which CHROs spend their time, as well where it should be spent.
By contrast, the narratives urge that CHROs/CHRO-related professionals be positioned to contribute to strategic decision-making (and correspondingly, play less of an administrative role); to identify business opportunities and challenges – and how to seize and meet them – linked with the worker experience; to engage with actors across the business organization for the coordination and alignment of all the factors which link the worker experience to company performance; and to help address workplace issues as they might be tied to a range of issues, e.g., risk generally, and brand, reputational, or political risk, in particular.
The need for such changes in roles is seen to require different capabilities and career paths for CHRO-related professionals. That is, they need to shift away from often being mostly involved with implementation of HR-specific tasks such as hiring, performance management, compensation plans, training, and development; and being little involved with strategic problem-solving and gauging business opportunities and challenges. By contrast, CRHOs are frequently described as requiring greater business acumen and the “financial literacy” to understand and portray the link between policies and practices to financial outcomes for the company. They are seen as needing to be nimble and innovative in helping the company navigate rapid change; and able to formulate a workforce strategy in light of the company’s market position and industry dynamics, including competitors’ workplace policies and practices, as well as the company’s mission and values. They are pressed to have the ability to devise workplace policies and practices keyed to the changes in the workforce the company has or which it seeks; exhibit the wherewithal to engage effectively with the CEO and peers on business issues and offer innovative ideas, and, where required, effectively communicate them; and have more expert knowledge about (increasing) regulatory and reporting requirements. All of the foregoing are cast as being in the service of the achievement of enterprise level outcomes.
Changes in Tasks and Capabilities
At a more granular level, and responsive to particular readings of how to respond to the challenge of the kinds of changes described – and in some cases the speed or ongoing nature of them – narratives define new tasks for CHROs as including identification of new sources and uses of “talent”/judging people and formulation of means to improve workers’ ability to do better or perform in a new job; at least for that portion of the workforce with which the company sees the value of a sustained and broad gauge relationship, offer them modalities akin to traditional career paths and support in advancing along them; ascertain ways to ensure flexibility which might include more decentralized operations and independent decision-making and relying less on command and control and more on trust and delegation in terms of how work is done and when; better understand and determine ways to address people’s greater concern about who they work for, the conditions of work, relationships at work, and being valued more (reflected in notions of creating the appropriate company “culture”); craft policies which afford workers greater flexibility in where, when and how they work; and recognize and address differences on the part of executives and workforce with respect to important matters, e.g., on what workers want. However, per the discussion above, whatever the renewed and closer attention to workforce-related matters attended to, the emphasis is generally on CHROs looking at through a lens focused on their import for the company overall, particularly in financial terms.
The Special Role of “People Analytics”
In the service of much of the foregoing, CRHO-related professionals are also viewed as needing to effectively employ or manage those who use “people analytics” concepts, tools, and methods. That need is the result of a perceived increased importance of collecting and analyzing data about workers, their capabilities, the pattern of their work (and perhaps life) experience, thinking, behaviors, actions, attitudes, emotions, aspirations, perceived needs, etc., as they might translate into more or less work motivation, creativity, efficiency, job or career satisfaction, etc. The goal may be simply descriptive, e.g., revealing a troubling pattern of voluntary turnover. However, the ambition is more likely to extend to diagnostic, e.g., assessing why the pattern has occurred, or even to being predictive, e.g., projecting how enhancement of prospects for career mobility within the company will reduce voluntary turnover (to the company’s financial advantage). Especially with regard to the latter two, sophisticated tools for the analysis of such data are used to identify weaknesses or failures of particular workplace-related policies and practices and to formulate new ones calculated to ensure greater success for the company.
The means or occasions for obtaining such data range from collection of direct responses to conventional engagement or satisfaction surveys or from more frequent – even daily – “pulse “spot” targeted versions of them to digitally tracking individual computer use or other activities, e.g., “focus” or meeting time, or the timing, content, and extent of communications or collaboration between and among workers within networks established by the company or which workers have fashioned for themselves. The latter are ostensibly with the permission of workers. Although there are references to workers being informed about the findings from a company’s analysis of such data and use of those findings, the actual practice is not clear. Similarly, while the collection and use of the data may be cast as redounding to workers’ benefit, materials focusing on outcomes overwhelmingly dwell on financial outcomes for the company. (Insofar, as a practical matter, those who press for people analytics may feel the need to make the case in the latter terms to relevant superiors, perhaps that should not be surprising.)
Lastly – and in anticipation of the subsequent discussion – quite striking is the rare, if non-existent reference to unions (or any other forms of collective worker action) and collective bargaining in the narrative and discussion of its implications for roles and practice. The reasons are likely several-fold. The subject is likely not on the screen of those of who craft, embrace, and act in light of the narrative because of (1)(a) the power of the ideological and cultural influences which shape their understanding of the subject and its implications in terms of what is warranted and feasible and (b) whatever the views of HR-related professionals (or others relatively high in the leadership of the company), they view it as essentially a non-starter in the C-suites and/or boardrooms of their companies and do not see themselves in a position to question that; (2) the general relative weakness of the labor movement in the United States, despite the sharp uptick of union organizing efforts and work stoppages in the last couple of years; (3) the specific industries on which the narratives seem to be largely focused being ones which – for a variety of reasons, the nature of the industry and the kinds of jobs it offers, the demographics of those typically employed in it, the corporate ideology of founders and leaders of companies, and insufficient experience of existing unions with the foregoing – have been a relative absence of union organizing efforts, e.g., the tech sector.
With the foregoing in mind, in the next two articles, we critically assess the narratives as such, the interpretation of them, and, in turn, offer a different view of the import of a different understanding – focused on worker voice for roles and practice.