Reassessing employee involvement and participation: Atrophy,reinvigoration and patchwork in Australian workplaces

Introduction

Industrial relations practitioners and scholars have long been interested in employee involvement and participation (EIP), although the terminology used seems quite malleable. Thus, Knudsen (1995: 5) suggests that the concept is ‘extremely plastic’ and can be ‘moulded’ into a variety of shapes with ‘a wide variety of meanings for different groups’. Authors have used different labels to cover a broad range of practices, not only including ‘participation’ and ‘involvement’, but also ‘employee voice’, ‘empowerment’, ‘engagement’ and ‘industrial democracy’ (Budd et al., 2010; Poole, 1986; Wilkinson et al., 2010). This has allowed academics to talk past each other, making it difficult to ensure that researchers were talking of the same phenomenon, let alone exchanging effectively with practitioners.

In the last 25 years, we have seen a movement to incorporate EIP as part of a business imperative to improve productivity, but we have also seen the apparent revival of an older strand linked to organisational democracy in modern organisations (see Gratton, 2004; Harrison and Freeman, 2004). It has been argued that: ‘The Age of Management is finally coming to a close. … Autocracy, hierarchy, bureaucracy and management are gradually being replaced by democracy, heterarchy, collaboration and self-managing teams’ (Cloke and Goldsmith, 2002: 3–4).

The presence of strong empirical evidence to support this view, however, is questionable. According to Hespe and Wall (1976), EIP can be focused at Local (work group), Medium (department or workplace) or Distant (organisation) levels. The Local level is where decisions are made with supervisory staff (line managers); the Medium includes those decisions with middle managers and department heads; and the Distant includes top management decision-making – or, in modern corporate parlance, strategic decision-making (Hespe and Wall, 1976: 425–426). However, both within Australia and internationally, much of the research on EIP developed with a focus on the role of unions in ensuring employees had the opportunity to play a role in decision-making at the workplace, organisation or industry level (Freeman and Medoff, 1984; Heery and Frege, 2006). Partly in response to changing union fortunes and their lesser centrality to employment relations in many countries, and partly as an acknowledgement of the hitherto inadequate conceptualisation of voice (Budd et al., 2010), researchers had developed more nuanced themes to the broad body of work on EIP, for example, formalised non-union participation (Dundon et al., 2005; Gollan, 2006), informal participation (Marchington and Suter, 2013; Townsend et al., 2013) and multiple channels of participation (Townsend et al., 2013; Wilkinson and Fay, 2011).

This article offers a development of our understanding of EIP on two fronts. First, drawing from existing models, we present an adapted (from Marchington et al., 1992) and extended framework for understanding EIP in modern workplaces. What is clear from a review of the literature is that while there are multiple channels for EIP, not all channels work the same way, for the same people and at the same time. This article examines the interacting and complementary systems of voice that operate within workplaces. Using the framework, we not only explore the width of EIP in terms of coverage of topics, but also consider the depth of employee input into decision-making.

It is important to understand EIP in the context of specific national traditions and institutions. The Australian industrial relations system offers a large range of different processes, forms and obligations around EIP. For the majority of the 20th century, the system was centralised, involved third-party conciliation and arbitration, and gave priority to collective forms of representation and participation (Deery and Plowman, 1980). Relatively high rates of trade union representation translated into formalisation and codification around such processes as consultation, grievance-handling procedures and managing workplace change (Deery and Plowman, 1980). Very complex and extensive conditions of employment, including EIP, were set out in industry awards and agreements. In this system, there were elaborate processes and rules that were set out for the parties to follow. Disputes over the interpretation and application of these rules were referred to industrial tribunals for resolution. In this context, there was very little space for deviation.

Over the past 30 years, a number of institutional, structural and legislative changes have impacted on EIP procedures and obligations. Wilkinson et al. (2004: 313) documented a significant change in usage of various employee voice mechanisms throughout the UK and Ireland, where it was noted that EIP tended to be less around collective bargaining and more about ‘two-way communication, and exchange of ideas or upward problem solving’. The authors suggest that organisationally, specific forms of EIP are dependent upon the human resource management (HRM) systems in operation at the workplace – hence, reliant upon the motivations of managers at any given time. In Australia, the recent Fair Work Australia legislation and its requirement for good-faith bargaining strengthens and encodes EIP mechanisms at the workplace. Enforceable conditions around good-faith bargaining include regular meetings between the parties, disclosure of information relevant to the bargaining process, responding to proposals of the other party and recognising the other bargaining party (Cooper, 2010). Of course, how far this becomes minimalist compliance rather than a more embedded process of EIP is a matter for research.

While regulation may force management to do things that they would otherwise neglect (Marchington et al., 2001), management are likely to retain some choice, at least in determining the robustness of EIP at the workplace level. Management behaviour, then, lies at the heart of the debate on the management of voice structures. Employers have a range of EIP choices available to them (Bryson et al., 2010) and employees appear to want a range of channels available at the workplace. However, this can result in a variety of EIP and ad hoc practices that reflect history, rather than a fine-tuned EIP strategy. So, EIP is not always embedded in the workplace and can be fragile both in structure and efficacy (Wilkinson and Fay, 2011).

Heery (2010) presents a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the different, coexisting institutions of worker representation, suggesting that their function was rather uneven. While non-union forms of representation might not be a substitute for unions, they can reinforce and complement the representative function of unions. However, this focus is on institutional EIP and does not consider the increasing level of managerial-‘sponsored’ EIP. Pyman et al. (2006) argue that a critical issue is how organisations configure multiple channels of voice rather than base their efforts on a single channel. Furthermore, they question how and why different voice channels complement each other and under what conditions multiple arrangements are sustainable. They conclude that the interaction and coexistence of multiple channels of voice and a plurality of arrangements are most effective and legitimate from an employee’s perspective in achieving organisational outcomes. Moreover, the existence of voice schemes may tell us little about the quality of the process behind the schemes (Wilkinson and Fay, 2011).

Much of the literature looks at EIP as a single unified entity, but this does not always disentangle the various dimensions of EIP. In this article, we extend a framework developed by Marchington et al. (1992) to analyse the extent to which various schemes genuinely allow employees to have a say in matters that affect them at work. What is important here is to be able to unpick the purpose, meaning and subsequent impact of employee participation (Dundon et al., 2004; Wilkinson et al., 2004). To this end, a fourfold framework can be used, including the ‘depth’, ‘level’, ‘scope’ and ‘form’ of various participation schemes in actual practice (Wilkinson et al., 2013). A modified version of this framework is presented in Figure 1.

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Figure 1.

Employee involvement and participation architecture (indicative, not exhaustive list).

The ‘depth’ refers to employees having a say about organisational decisions. A greater depth may occur when employees, either directly or indirectly, can influence those decisions that are normally reserved for management. The other end of the continuum may be a shallow depth, evident when employees are simply informed of the decisions management have made. Second is the ‘level’ at which participation takes place. This can be at a work group, department, plant or corporate level. What is significant here is whether the schemes adopted by an organisation actually take place at an appropriate managerial level. Third is the ‘scope’ of participation, which can range from relatively minor and insignificant matters, such as the classic ‘tea and toilets’, to more substantive issues, such as future investment strategies. Finally is the ‘form’ that participation takes, which may include a combination of both direct and indirect schemes. Taken together this framework allows for a more accurate description not only of the type of involvement and participation schemes use, but the extent to which they may or may not empower employees (Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005).

Looking at multiple channels, we can see how schemes can overlap and coexist. For example, the use of collective bargaining and joint consultation does not mean that managers abandon downward communication techniques. Central to this understanding of participation is power within the employment relationship, differentiated by the methods used (direct or indirect classifications), the level at which participation takes place (individual to boardroom level) and the extent to which any particular technique is employee- or management-centred (Wilkinson and Dundon, 2010).

Methodology and case study organisations

Our research was conducted in five organisations between 2009 and 2011. There was no predetermined definition of EIP, and one of the key objectives was to explore managerial conceptions of EIP. In order to obtain as rounded a picture as possible of employee voice, the organisations reflect differences in size (medium and large), structure (single and multi-site) and representative systems (union and non-union), as well as covering a range of sectors of economic activity. These broad contextual factors have been shown to be important discriminators in other research evidence around workplace practices (Cully et al., 1999).

The case studies are from the hospitality sector (3), the hospital sector (1) and the manufacturing sector (1). Holding three cases in one sector and two different cases means that our cases are not presented as representative selections; rather, they were selected with similarities and differences in an attempt to understand the variations of EIP practice and intent. By selecting some cases that held the industry sector constant (hospitality) we were able to draw similarities and differences within the sector, and by drawing cases from different sectors (hospitality, hospitals, manufacturing) we were also able to understand the nuances of both the similarities and differences between sectors. This approach has led to some interesting findings, as will be discussed later in the article. Further descriptive details of each case can be found in Table 1. In total, more than 130 interviews were completed throughout the five case studies, along with job observation, attendance at various EIP fora and a review of various organisational documents. While access was negotiated specifically at each case study organisation, the interview protocol was similar at each site, with minor modifications to make the protocol site-specific.

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Table 1.

Case study demographic details.

Hotel 1	Hotel 2	Hotel 3	Hospital	Manufacturer
SIZE	275 rooms	300 rooms	200 rooms	500 beds	N/A
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES  (full-time equivalent)	150	250	125	6000	500
MARKET ORIENTATION	Primarily  corporate	Primarily  corporate	Primarily  corporate	Public/  private	Government  and private  contracts
NUMBER OF INTERVIEWS  WITH MANAGERS  (including line managers)	10	8	7	40	6
NUMBER OF INTERVIEWS  WITH LINE STAFF	11	9	10	30	13

In each case study, we interviewed a vertical and horizontal representation of managers and employees, which typically included the senior manager, the senior human resources (HR) manager, department heads and supervisors, and shop-floor staff. Where there was a union presence, we also interviewed union representatives. Interviews typically lasted between 45 minutes and one hour. In each case, the most senior HR manager was interviewed multiple times.

All of our hotel case study organisations operate in capital cities and are part of larger international operations. Situated in the central business district, the hotels are considered primarily corporate hotels, with the majority of their business stemming from conferences and business travellers. The primary departments within each of our three case studies are standard for this type of organisation. There is a front office department dealing with check-ins, check-outs and various other customer service requirements. There is the food and beverage (F&B) department, which covers all the bars and restaurants, room service, and conference functions. Housekeeping employees include room attendants, public space cleaning and laundry staff. Finally, there are administrative staff who are employed ‘back of house’ and are engaged in a range of functions including HR, accounts, sales and marketing.

Hotel 1 is non-union and places a great deal of focus on the relationships between line managers and their employees. Formal meetings occur within departments and across departments, but of primary importance is the capacity of managers to engage with staff directly. Hotel 2 has approximately 15% of their staff involved in the union, mostly from the housekeeping department and the kitchen. This hotel has attempted to increase the level of cross-department interaction through a range of committees and initiatives based around service, safety and environmental themes. Hotel 3 has a comparatively high 30% union density and works collaboratively with the union to resolve issues that arise.

The Hospital comprises numerous separate hospitals on one site – in some ways, they are fairly autonomous. Some of the hospitals are not-for-profit private hospitals, part of a faith-based charity associated with a Church denomination; they receive most of their income from private health insurers and patients. The other hospitals are public-sector ones funded mainly by the state government. In recent years, senior managers within this organisation have attempted to shift towards a high-performance HRM model and see a limited role for the union in participatory practices and decision-making, although they recognise an important role for the union in negotiating agreements and supporting staff in grievances if required.

The Manufacturer operates in a major regional centre and its primary purpose is vehicle assembly. The worksite has had continual manufacturing operations for almost 100 years under three owners, two of which have been in the last 20 years. Employees work in teams and are encouraged to resolve matters at a team level. Each group of workers has daily and weekly meetings and there is a joint consultative committee (JCC) and Health and Safety Committee that spans different groups of workers. Almost 98% of the trades employees and 90% of the whole workforce are union members. A summary of the main EIP programmes in each organisation are presented in Table 2. This information tells us the presence of EIP avenues; it does not, however, give us any sense of the degree to which employees are simply informed and consulted or have a legitimate role in joint-decision making over matters of relevance. This is something that is explored throughout the next section.

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Table 2.

EIP programmes at the five organisations.

Hotel 1	Hotel 2	Hotel 3	Hospital	Manufacturer
Daily team briefs/shift changeover meetings	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Monthly department meetings (*with skeleton crew on duty)	✓*	✓*	✓*	✓*	✗
Annual employee opinion survey	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Employee focus groups	✓	✓	✓	✓	✗
Cross-department meetings (excluding health and safety)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Workplace health and safety meetings	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Whole of staff meetings	✓	✓	✗	✗	✓
JCC or similar committee involving union representatives	✗	✗	✗	✓	✓
Union meetings (aside from JCCs and bargaining meetings)	✗	✗	✓	✓	✓
Enterprise bargaining meetings (with union delegates)	✗	✓	✓	✓	✓

The operation of EIP systems

We now take each type of EIP and examine how the processes operate in the case study organisations. It becomes clear that each workplace places a high premium on informal participation and that the union EIP has atrophied in recent times. What remains in each firm appears to be a mix of communication and consultation, albeit not always part of a strategic approach.

Formal indirect (through union)

It is our final section of EIP – the formal indirect avenue – that appears to have suffered the greatest level of atrophy in our study, while maintaining the greatest differentiating feature between our organisations. While not a longitudinal study, it was a common refrain throughout discussions that the union is less central to the workplace now than in the past.

Hotel 1 is completely union-free, while the remaining four organisations have various levels of union activity. As such, the role of the union and EIP through the union is different in each organisation. At Hotel 2, the union has been involved in a drawn-out, conflictual relationship negotiating an enterprise agreement; while at Hotel 3, the union has high membership for the sector and maintains a positive and productive relationship with the management. This relationship stems from a long-standing relationship between senior union officials and regional HR personnel and is reflected at the workplace level. The role of the union at the Hospital is one somewhat limited to supporting employees when there are grievances, a tumultuous role in a JCC-like forum and a limited bargaining role. At the Manufacturer, approximately 90% of employees are union members and the union plays a role through the JCC and bargaining. Employees at Hotel 3, the Hospital and the Manufacturer all regard the role of the union as central not only to bargaining, but also to maintaining a level of fairness in the workplace. Leaving aside the well-trodden path of explaining what the union does in bargaining, the union is seen as a ‘backstop’ to ensure fairness. When employees feel that important issues are not resolved, first with the line manager, then within the work group or at a workplace level, the union is called. As one employee from the Manufacturer explains:

It’s a watchdog role I suppose. Basically keeping each other honest. If I’m working down there and I have an issue that affects me and I go out to my supervisor or whatever or one of the blokes come to me or I go to my supervisor and I don’t get the desired result, I feel that someone has been unfairly treated, then yeah I will contact the union delegate. They will then come and talk to [the GM] and it generally gets resolved.

An employee at Hotel 2 explains that if there is good communication between the employees and the managers, the union will be the last port of call:

I don’t think there is any power in the world that can come in and solve every single problem, unions cannot do that, it is the way we organize ourselves, if we are communicating. Those issues where you need some sort of legal assistance is where the unions really come into the picture I think.

At one level, we could say that the union sits outside day-to-day management and only gets involved if things go wrong, but equally, the very existence of the union changes those day-to-day dynamics.

In two cases, the Hospital and Manufacturer, a consultative forum with union representation had been in place for decades, but throughout the period of this study, the senior managers involved abandoned this forum because they felt that the meetings had lost relevance. In both cases, the managers were reserving the right to reinvigorate the meetings if they saw a need – evidence that the role of EIP remains in the realm of managerial prerogative. When we tabulate each of the ‘scope’ factors of EIP and analyse the degree to which employees are either ‘informed’, ‘consulted’ or provided opportunities for ‘joint decision-making’, the role of unions becomes apparent. Hotel 3 is, for sectoral comparisons, substantially more unionised that Hotels 1 and 2. Furthermore, both the Hospital and Manufacturer have higher levels of union density and activity. Certainly, not all employees are involved in union activity, so the joint decision-making is partial, rather than complete. Nevertheless, we can see in Figure 2 that the three organisations with the highest levels of union density have the greatest level of joint decision-making for employees. Although it must be said that, despite the well-versed refrain that unions are playing a less relevant role in modern workplaces, it is a factor that influences EIP, union presence and involvement does not, however, translate directly to joint decision-making.

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Figure 2.

The degree of EIP in the five case studies.

Conclusion: Blended voices or talking over the top of each other?

Ramsay (1985) argues that management proposals are an exercise in ‘pseudo-democracy’ insofar as they attempt to impose an instrumental and integrative framework. However, this approach has us comparing real-world participation against some idealised democratic counterfactual. That EIP schemes do not in themselves fundamentally transform the nature of work should not surprise us. Moreover, it appears that many managers and employees do not expect them to. It is more important to assess empirically what the objectives of the schemes are, and what the actual impact is. Equally, it is important to investigate empirically what worker and trade union attitudes are to EIP schemes and why (Ackers et al., 1992).

Adapting the model developed by Marchington et al. (1992), we are able to see the full range of EIP. These range from the informal to the formal and the embedded to the fragile. There are questions about whether informality can survive as a viable mechanism for employee participation in the absence of formal structures, especially if market conditions or senior management philosophies change.

Rather than assume EIP is of a single type, our findings demonstrate a need for researchers to disentangle the various formal and informal channels of EIP and show the reality of the workplace, including overlapping motivations and temporal differences. The notion of an EIP architecture (Marchington, 2008) assumes rather more coherence than we can find. Each workplace demonstrates at best a hybrid system and a patchwork development of EIP channels, with some avenues atrophying while others grow or become reinvigorated. Further, the experience of EIP is dependent upon the motivations of managers and the interactions of workers at any given time. There may be powerful ‘institutional pushes’ (such as regulatory requirements and what is deemed ‘best practice’) and ‘need pulls’ (such as competitive pressures) that urge firms to adopt new practices, including EIP (Lesure et al., 2004).

The EIP arrangements in workplaces are a by-product of the employment relationship – a co-dependent relationship that is continually changing and renewing. Likewise, the EIP in the workplace is under continual development and renewal. What we clearly do see across the cases is a number of schemes and initiatives to engage with workers. Managers appear to believe in multiple channels and are prepared to sustain a number of these different channels. Equally, though, it is also apparent that the range of issues discussed, while wide-ranging, do not cover the full width of the possible range of topics – what is difficult to determine is whether, over time, the range of issues and topics that employees can or might have a say over has grown or diminished. However, we note that the matters under discussion within EIP are largely concentrated on the immediate work environment, and that union presence can influence EIP at more than just a collective level.

Just as HRM may need bundling to produce a pay-off, so EIP may need to be bundled and then embedded (Wilkinson and Fay, 2011). However, given the ever-increasing level of precarious workers in modern workplaces, research must pay attention to how the precarious are provided with opportunities for involvement and participation that are meaningful. Further, the amount of say is mostly information-sharing with some consultation, but somewhat limited joint decision-making. While employees do have some managers no longer seem to have any pretence that this is joint decision-making say in the form Ramsey describes. It is not pseudo-participation. Despite the popular literature that espouses the democratic organisation, the rules of the game appear to have changed.