In Conversation with...Nita Clarke

April 2023

In the fourth episode of our “In Conversation with…” podcast series for 2023, Lucy Lewis, Partner at Lewis Silkin LLP speaks to Nita Clarke OBE. Nita is the Director of the Involvement and Participation Association, a leading organisation delivering employee engagement, partnership and employee voice in the workplace.

“People want respect and fairness and to be listened to, and to have their diverse needs thought about. That operates in workplaces now in a way I genuinely don’t think it did a generation ago”.

Nita and Lucy discuss the important role employee voice has to play in building organisational trust as well as the challenges and opportunities that the evolving landscape of collective and individual voice presents for employers.

Key takeaways from the conversation:

• Unions are not the only mechanism for employee voice: works councils, employee forums as well as individual employee voice all have an important role to play. Assimilating different forms of employee voice can be challenging but extremely beneficial for employers.

• Employee voice must be informed: to get the most out of employee voice, employers must share strategic information with their workforce to empower them to engage in a more developed discussion.

• Trust is key: to succeed, employers must trust their staff and treat them as serious stakeholders in their organisation. Building a culture of trust and listening to employees also protects organisations from reputational risk.

• Employee engagement can benefit society: effective engagement strategies could help to solve the UK’s productivity puzzle by increasing performance and productivity.

• Management styles need to change: shifting generational attitudes and expectations at work mean that organisations taking a command and control management style will lose out.

In Conversation with…Nita Clarke

Season 3: Episode 4

Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation with…’ podcast.  I’m Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s employment team and, in this podcast series, I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders, to explore their perspectives on the longer-term trends and immediate drivers shaping the world of work.

And today we’re going to be looking at the importance of employee voice, and its role in building organisational trust, and we’ll also look at how the landscape of the collective and the individual voice has evolved over recent years and what opportunities and challenges that presents, both for unions and for employers.

And I’m really delighted to be joined today, to discuss all of this by Nita Clarke OBE.  Nita is currently the co-chair of the employee engagement task force and director of the Involvement and Participation Association - that’s the leading association for delivering employee engagement, partnership and employee voice in the workplace.  Nita also co-authored a significant study in 2009, “Engaging for Success” and that explored four key enablers for engagement in a high-performance organisation, one of those was the employee voice.

Welcome to the podcast, Nita.

Nita Clarke: Thank you very much for asking me to take part.

Lucy Lewis: Well, I thought a really great place to start um, was for you to tell us a bit about your career and the work that you’re currently doing at the IPA.

Nita Clarke: Yes, happy to.  So, my background is … I was for 17 years um, a senior official with Unison, the trade union and one of its predecessors, and then in 2001 I was asked by Tony Blair to go and work with him at Number 10 as his advisor on trade unions and associated employment matters, and I was there with Tony until he left as Prime Minister.

And then I was very lucky, I got the job of director of the Involvement and Participation Association, and the IPA is a small not for profit charity um, but, has always held the view that sanity is possible in industrial relations and employment relations, despite evidence to the contrary and we we’re … the organisation we’re 120 years old and we work with companies and organisations to develop partnership models at work, um particularly partnership between trade unions and employers. But at the same time I was asked in 2008/9 to work with a wonderful guy called David MacLeod and we produced a report for that government on employee engagement and why it mattered and what it could deliver and, how it related to performance and productivity in organisations. And so, I’ve continued to work with David on the broader issue of employee engagement.

But within the IPA, what we’ve particularly been focusing on, within the um … broader engagement agenda is this importance of employee voice, and it is very interesting how interest in employee voice from employers, public, private and third sector is now so much stronger than it was in the past.  I mean, in the past it was sort of seen as, well if you’ve got a trade union that’s what you did, how you did employee voice, but now there’s a recognition of just how much more important and complex it is and that’s a lot of work we do with organisations, helping them diagnose what their current arrangements, architecture for employee voices, but also the culture within which employee voice is operating in the organisation and helping them develop and think about … and develop new ways of listening to voice.

TRADE unions: What will be their role in the future of work?

Lucy Lewis: Thank you, Nita. We completely share your experience on the Future of Work Hub. We are really seeing a direct increase in employers really genuinely wanting to engage and wanting to listen, wanting to harness the opportunities for the employee voice and it’s great to have an opportunity to talk to you about that and to talk to you about the different ways of achieving that, the different ways of, and mechanisms for, harnessing collective engagement, but also direct employee engagement.

And before we look at those, I thought there was value in taking a bit of a step back and  looking at how that landscape of the collective, but also the individual, voice has changed in recent years and, you know, certainly in the UK over the last 12 months, we’ve seen a resurgence in organised labour activity, strike activity, and we know that picture is replicated in the US. There’s an increase in unionisation in the US and I thought there was value in starting with trade unions.

We, in the UK, are experiencing this current spike in industrial action, I think 1 February was the biggest strike day for … for more than a decade.  But the sort of general context has been, a perception at least, of a decline in trade union power since the 1980s, and I know that since then there have been steps in the opposite direction, particularly under the new Labour Government we saw, you know, statutory trade union recognition, we saw more protection for employees at strikes.  We also actually saw, in the years up until 2021, we saw an increase in trade union membership, particularly when you look at female members, you look at public sector workers but, again, since 2021 that membership  number at least has declined, and I’m really interested to hear your view on what is the role of trade unions now?  How is that likely to develop in the future? And particularly, what’s the direction on trade union membership? What are the areas that employers should expect unions to get involved in?  And if you’re planning a workforce engagement strategy, how should you use your unions in that strategy?

Nita Clarke: I mean I think, you know, err ... I take, well I suppose you might say the slightly old fashioned view that you … that trade unions are an absolutely essential part of civil society.  And that they play an extremely important role within organisations and within the labour market.  And I think that, you know people who thought that trade unions had sort of, you know, had lost their, had lost their voice and their salience I mean I think, the current economic circumstances have proved just how wrong that … that is.

Because at the end of the day you know, when faced with cost-of-living increases that people across the economy are facing, working together with colleagues which is after all what trade unions are, to try and redress that and to try and achieve decent pay increases is still absolutely essential, even in our up to date economy.  So, I think that, you know, trade unions still fulfill and will continue to fulfill an absolutely vital role in bringing together collective voice because only a trade union can negotiate around pay conditions, holidays and so on and ... and it’s about redressing the balance of power in the workplace.

Now having said all of that and, you know, we do a lot of work supporting trade union recognition and development, but in a sort of positive context - you know it’s important to know that there are lots of other mechanisms for employee voice which can be and often are extremely valuable because the truth is that, in the private sector certainly, um, you know, there are parts still that trade unions find very difficult to reach.  Now, we can talk about how they can manage that but, you know, we’ve seen an increasing interest in things like works councils, employee forums, other forms of collective voice and I think that these can be extremely valuable too and I don’t see a contradiction between um…trade union recognition in an organisation and the development of staff councils or employee forums, because I think the two work together, and there are lots and lots of examples of this, you know, can be sort of double-effectiveness and, you know, certainly most trade unions that I work with have absolutely, not only don’t have a problem with having staff councils, but actually often welcome them.

What is the influence of trade unions?

Lucy Lewis: Thanks Nita and it’s really interesting, and I know you’re a big advocate for this multifaceted approach and I definitely want to come and talk to you about that and we’ll come on to talk about staff forums and also talk about the individual voice which, you know we see that rising as well.  But before we move on from trade unions and you’ve made some really interesting points, particularly as you say, trade unions are the only ones that can really negotiate around some of these core terms and conditions and we’re seeing the influence of that in the UK and the US particularly at the moment.

Do you think there are opportunities for unions to grow influence and to grow membership outside those kind of core fundamentals that they’ve always been involved in?

Nita Clarke: I think that’s a very good question and actually, if you look at one of the two huge success stories for trade unions, have been in the area of health and safety – where trade union representation is absolutely embedded in effective health and safety operations in … in so many organisations and it’s never been , um you know, it’s been an absolutely accepted um relationship between trade union health and safety reps and an organisation and, and ... very successfully in my view.  Um, so I think that that’s one area which is extremely important, the other of course… I was very heavily involved in setting up union reps around training and education in the workplace, so that unions have a role in … because I think this is also very important for unions, I mean I think it’s, you know, they also have to understand where the workforce is today, as opposed to where the workforce might have been 20 years ago.  And it’s absolutely clear that one of the things people want from work, whether they’re working, as it were, for Apple Mac or for McDonald’s is personal development and training.  And therefore, one of the most successful innovations has been unions um, having a role within the workplace in developing um, training offerings, career offerings and so on, um, because after all one of the things I think they’ll probably want from their trade union is to help them get on at work.  And getting on at work means access to things like um, training and development and there’s been, you know as I say, extremely successful trade union penetration into that area in workplaces.  So, I’d say, if you look at health and safety and if you look at training, these are two areas where unions, as it were, increase their reach extremely effectively.

TIps to make work forums successful

Lucy Lewis: Thanks Nita, that’s really, really interesting and I can really see that the value of that and particularly on training and re-skilling, and we look at the kind of, change in skills that are required for the future economy, I can see how … how critical that is.

I’m going to take you back, because I’m keen that we talk about all the different types of voices to the employee forum or works council, you mentioned a little bit about this in the context of talking about unions and, you know, lots of employers, that really want to listen and engage with their employees, they have looked to establish work councils or employee forums, they see that as a way of doing that and you know, you shared your views really helpfully that, actually, you don’t have to have one or the other and works councils or employee forums can work really well alongside unions.

I’m interested if you’ve got any thoughts, because lots of the employers listening to this will have workplace forums of some sort, and some of the feedback we get is that they’d like those to be working better, that they’d like them to be more effective and I wonder if you’ve got any examples, or tips you can have for employers that are looking at their works council, their employee forum and … and trying to make that work better? What works well, what makes those works forums really successful?

Nita Clarke: That’s a very good question and, quite often, you know, we … we have both employers and staff forums coming into us and saying, “Look, we’re stuck at the tea and toilets discussion, and actually what we need to do is to find ways of engaging far more around strategic issues within the organisation.” 

I’d say a couple of things. Firstly, to have effective employee voice it has to be informed employee voice, in other words whatever structure you have, whether it’s trade union or a works council, if you’re not imparting information to the representatives and indeed to the workforce as a whole, then how can they engage in the more developed discussion that you may want to have with them, if in fact you’re not sharing strategic or, you know, daily information with them?  And that’s the biggest thing that happens it seems to me is that organisations set up structures, whether it’s a staff forum or a works council or an informational and consultation machinery, they set up a structure but then they don’t; as it were, have the operational requirements to really make them work. And that’s why the terms of reference of a council, the role of the rep, how representative the rep is - all of these things are incredibly important, it’s not just a question of setting up a structure, it’s a question of having an architecture that actually works.

Now, having said all of this, some employers get a bit anxious because it’s like, you know, they’re opening pandora’s box because, you know, it’s one thing to have…to have a staff forum, it’s another thing to really find yourself under challenge from the workforce so, it’s also a…the culture within which any of these forms operates, seems to me to be incredibly important, you have to have openness.  You have to have trust, you have to have accountability.  People in leadership positions need to be strong enough to hear things you know, as Paul Simon, wasn’t it, said, you know “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”?  I mean people have got to be prepared to receive some messages that they may not like.

Now when people do staff surveys what is quite interesting of course, is that you get staff surveys and you get a result you don’t like, what can you do?  You can put it in a drawer.  You don’t have to do anything with it, it gets thrown into the too difficult box, but having a kind of living organism like a, you know, a staff forum or a works council I mean, you know, you really have to be committed to dialogue, to listening and to feeding back because the other thing that quite often happens and the… the frustration is that, issues get raised in the staff forum, I use that as a sort of generic term, and then they just disappear. And there’s no feedback and there’s no sense that the leadership of the organisation has any response and, that can be incredibly demoralising because, you know, if you’ve gone to the effort of talking to the people that you’re representing and you’re raising issues, I mean they can be big issues or small issues, and nothing then happens and it all disappears into a bit of a vacuum, you know that really undermines the…the role of…of any collective representation. So, I mean, I think my point here is that you’ve got to have the architecture but you’ve also got to have the culture, got to have the environment within which this can work. Otherwise, frankly, you’re just going to cheese people off and, you know, you’re going to undermine trust, you’re going to undermine accountability.

Lucy Lewis: Now I’m going to come to ask you for some top tips but I’m slightly cutting across that and getting to it earlier because what you’ve said brings to mind one of the things that we say quite often to employers and there’s generally quite a lot of focus around, and increasingly so actually, around training reps and you’ve talked a bit about reps having the right skills and understanding what their role is and what the architecture that they sit in. I’m interested in your thoughts about training managers because, you know, as you quite rightly say, you need to be prepared to hear things that you might not like, things that you might need to action, that’s really part of the … the trust. There has to be a response to these things.  And I don’t know whether you would advocate for training managers, that seems to be a bit of a gap sometimes when these employee forums are set up. The focus is on training the reps but not necessarily the people that are going to be receiving the message.

Nita Clarke: Yes, I think that’s a really good point and, certainly at the IPA, we do quite a lot of joint training for exactly that reason. It is too, I mean, because there…there is a sort of asymmetry of power whether you like it or not. Because no employee rep with the best will in the world is going to have access to the sort of information that a leader or a manager does. So, first thing, you’ll have to establish a sort of commonality of understanding of, you know, what the challenges facing the organisation and so on are. But, you know, look in some organisations, you know, which are still very command and control, leaders don’t necessarily listen to their own teams, never mind listening to a staff forum, and it is difficult because, you know, we still have a very strong leadership model which is about tell, as opposed to listen. And, you know, a lot of managers, a lot of leaders still think that that’s the key part of their prerogative you know, is to be able to determine what happens rather than to listen to a plethora of views. So, I mean … those organisations that have got that culture, I think find this easier.

But I think that …that if you’re going to do this, you know, set up forums in your organisation, you’ve got to be prepared to listen. And you’ve got to be prepared to respond, and you’ve got to be as ever humble enough to accept that there are different views out there and…and listen to them and take account of them. And it is very interesting how, in a lot of organisations we work with, the biggest challenge is precisely this that, it… it’s not that managers or leaders don’t want to listen, is that they don’t necessarily have the kind of … either the emotional or, indeed, the kind of leadership organisation to make listening effective. Quite often actually that’s true, as I say, in terms of how they approach the organisation as a whole, never mind their relationship with the staff, you know, with the staff representative body. But having said all of this, of course, styles of management are changing and in … in organisations and I think that that should make it easier to listen to your staff.

What are the benefits of direct employee voice?

Lucy Lewis: Yeah, I agree with that and the expectations of leadership and what leaders are and, you know, what’s perceived to be a good leader, I agree that’s changing and, actually, that’s a perfect segway because I wanted, before sort of bringing all these…these things together, I wanted to touch briefly on the direct or the individual voice. Because, again, that’s something that we are seeing developing significantly, particularly in the last few years and, as you know, societal values change but, we’ve talked quite a lot on the podcast before about how employees’ expectation of work, their expectations of their employer, their expectations of their leaders, how those things are changing and that’s sort of being combined with things like social media, which makes it easier for groups of employees to, if you like, self-organise, to exert individual pressure but in a more collective way and we’re seeing that direct voice become more impactful.

Part of it is…is market pressure so, you know, there were skills shortages, that has an adjustment on the balance of power. But we’re definitely seeing employers needing to respond to this shift…this increase importance of the individual voice and I’m interested to hear any thoughts that you might have about how employers can harness that as an opportunity. How they can see it as something positive and, how they can use it to really develop engagement in their business, rather than to put it into a category of people… individuals griping about things or, you know, there’s another issue for me to deal with, but seen as a positive way of harnessing engagement?

Nita Clarke: Yeah, I think it is a really, really important point too. The truth of the matter is, if you want to know how to do something better, it’s usually quite a good thought to ask the person who’s doing it. Now, which is why in my view, individual voice around task and around what I do on a day to day basis and how I work with my team is incredibly important. Because, that is how you get innovation, that’s how you get people taking, you know, ownership of the…um of the role and of the job and, you know, I mean obviously a lot of those um Japanese techniques of continuous improvement are based on that. But I don’t think we’re particularly good at that necessarily in this country and I think that its the individual voice about, which is partly as I say about owning the task that … that I do, but it’s also, I don’t want to get into an argument about the sort of generational changes but, the truth of the matter is, you know in…when I was starting work and this was for a trade union, I mean when the general secretary said to me “jump” I mean my  simple reaction was to say “well how high?” Now you say that to my kids and they’re going to say “well, why? Tell me why you want me to jump?  I’m not…not necessarily going to jump but I need to have…I need to have a reason”.  And I think that, you know, respecting the…the individual and what they can do, goes to  goes to the heart of some of this because, if you just treat people as widgets as sort of disposable counters on a board then, you…you’re not going to get the best out of them, you’re not going to get engagement, you have to treat people, you know, as, sort of serious stakeholders in your organisation and you have to trust them and you have to respect them and do all of those things which is where the broader employee engagement agenda of course comes in.

But I…I do think, but again it comes back to management and leadership styles. Those organisations that still believe that sort of, you know, command and control and because I say so, because I’ve got the pips on the shoulder, that still effectively operate in that way I think are going to lose out because there’s no question that people want respect and fairness and to be listened to and to have their you know their diverse needs thought about, I mean there’s no question that…that …that is that operates in workplaces now, in a way I genuinely don’t think it did a generation ago.

advice for employers adopting a multifaceted approach

Lucy Lewis: Thank you, Nita, really, really fascinating. And it’s a perfect segway into getting back to this sort of, multifaceted approach which you’ve talked about and I know that you advocate for and I was actually, going to ask you to give some practical tips but you’ve been brilliant at that throughout this, I think you’ve given some really meaningful practical tips about changing culture and how you make this work so I…I wanted to ask a slightly different question instead. It’s obvious, listening to you the value of a multifaceted approach if you’re clear about how you, use all those voices and…and what sort of engagement you’re asking for and looking for. I’m wondering if you’ve got any advice about a challenge that, possibly is just a perceived one, but definitely is something that people are concerned about - that if you have a multifaceted approach, you’ve got lots of different voices that potentially cut across each other that maybe pull you in different directions, you know, the…the union approach on negotiating pay might cut across, you know a woman’s network view on promotion and progression and where they want, you know your limited finances to be spread, you know, more investment in certain things. I don’t know if you’ve got any advice or tips for employers about, if you adopt this multifaceted approach, how you deal with some of that tension?

Nita Clarke: I think that’s, again a really, really important question and it’s a sort of a new challenge in a way because, you know, as you say, we now have a plethora of voices and…and one of the things we haven’t touched on but the development of staff networks around particular groups has been so fascinating – you know self-organised groups within organisations I mean its…it’s a…you know, it’s…it’s a whole subject, sort of, you know of its own which, I think, is definitely worth thinking about.

Look, in my view this is…what is leadership in an organisation about? Part of leadership is…listening to the different voices, and then coming to a view about what the organisation should do. So, just as a leadership team will listen to external voices, with shareholders and other stakeholders, so listening to the plethora of voices, and then making judgment calls about where to go on some of this is… is…I mean that’s the job of leaders. The job of leaders isn’t to, in my view, isn’t to sort of suppress what people or ignore what people are saying, it’s to make sure that…a…I mean I always say when I do work with leadership teams, yeah. Every single issue that you are talking about in the leadership team – what is the impact likely to be on staff?  I don’t mean statutory consultations and such, I mean have you thought of what this is going to mean for your staff?  How are you going to deal with…deal with the…the fallout from this? And, in my view, on every single leadership agenda and indeed on every board agenda, so it should be…well what…what are we hearing from the workforce about this? All the different ways, because again, one of the things we haven’t even touched on but … in my view a key role of the line manager, is not just to as it were, cascade information down from the leadership team, its to (you can’t cascade up, but you know what I mean) it’s to feed back up to the leaders what they’re hearing on the ground.

So there…there are all these different channels and I agree it can…it can sometimes feel like there’s a cacophony of voices but you know, part of the…it goes with the paygrade of leaders to find ways of synthesising and making decisions based on what they’re hearing and making choices. I mean that’s … that’s what leaders do isn’t it? And I think that my point is that one of those factors in making decisions needs to be “what are we hearing from the workforce and what do the workforce think about this?  And how is it…how is this decision going to impact on the workforce?”

And I mean now look I would just say this, listening to your workforce is the best guard against reputational risk that you have because, if you trust your…a culture of trust…your employees will tell you what is going on in the organisation. So, before the proverbial hits the fan and you’ll find yourself in, you know, in the court of um of public opinion and public enquiry because something has gone very badly wrong in the organisation, you know listening to your employees…they will tell you when things are going wrong providing you create an atmosphere of, or a culture of, trust within which they will tell you.  And look, I mean I hate to say this because I, you know, you’re a legal firm but it is much cheaper to listen to your employees and really get them to tell you the truth than it is to bring in either lawyers or very expensive PR people – you know after something has gone wrong and you find yourself on the front page of The Times.

WHAT is missing from the current conversation about the future of work?

Lucy Lewis: Thanks Nita, I think that’s a really, really useful insight and it takes us back to that really important issue of trust you know, so much of the modern workforce is based around trust and so much of what employees expect from their employers is based around trust and it’s a…it’s really nice to take the discussion back to a kind of simple but full circle recognition of the importance of trust in the modern workplace and the workplace of the future.  It’s obvious that we’ve only scratched the surface but the insight you’ve shared has been really fantastic and I’m going to finish the discussion by asking you a question I’m asking all our 2023 podcast guests and that’s in the last few years we’ve seen the spotlight on the future of work and we’ve seen the huge number of opportunities and challenges that lie ahead but what I’m interested to hear, from you is what you think is missing from the current conversation about the future of work?  What do you think is not getting the attention it deserves?

Nita Clarke: Well I would say still that the people issues are not necessarily getting the attention that they deserve. I mean, you know, fundamental to the success of any organisation, it’s not that people are your best asset it’s that people are you only asset because at the end of the day, you know, however good your systems or your capital investment is…if the people who work in your organisation either don’t care enough or, actually have things put in the way of them doing the job that you want them to do. Then you are just chucking money away.

And, you know, we’ve been focused on employee voice today, but the importance of really effective engagement strategies and…and I think it matters both for the individual but I think it matters for the country because actually I think at the heart of some of our, the productivity puzzle, the performance puzzle in the UK is, if we got better higher levels of employee engagement you know, that would...would really, really help in terms of performance and productivity.  And it’s…it’s not a simple lever to pull, it’s a lever that we have and that still it seems to me to be a kind of potential missing ingredient in how, you know, in how this country um goes forward.

Lucy Lewis: Thank you, Nita.  Thank you very much indeed, that’s a brilliant thought to end on. It’s not just good for employers, it’s good for the wider economy of the country, to really invest in your people strategy and your engagement strategy. 

If you’d like to find out more about Nita’s work with the IPA, you can visit www.ipa-involve.com. Thank you, Nita.

Nita Clarke: Thank you.