Deal with Disaffected Employees Directly

When our son was a pre-schooler, he was plagued by repeated ear infections and persistent colds. Each case meant a trip to the pediatrician for diagnosis and appropriate medication and treatment. After several instances, his doctor recommended a permanent fix: a tonsillectomy.

            So that’s what we did. The effect was almost immediate. The ear infections ceased and the frequency of colds dropped to nearly zero.

            Sure, we could have continued treating the symptoms rather than the cause, but our son wouldn’t have been the happy, playful boy he became, nor would he have thrived.

            The same case is often true in business. Recurring problems can point to deeper issues that are not being addressed. And in the case of recurring efforts by employees to organize a union shop, the deeper problem often can be traced to poor communications and an insufficient effort to engage employees in the business.

            A few years ago, a midwestern manufacturer asked for our advice and counsel in nipping in the bud a surging effort to unionize its assembly line workers. I paid a visit to their headquarters offices along with a colleague who specialized in labor union communications.

            We had been provided preliminary background information and insights into the issues and the current situation beforehand, and brought with us a two-part presentation proposing both an immediate solution and a longer-term strategy to stop this situation from recurring.

A Recurring Challenge

As we learned, this union organizing effort seemed to pop up every few years. To date, the company had successfully defeated it each time. This time, it seemed more serious and threatening than in the past.

            The two of us sat down with the operations management team, the head of human resources, and director of corporate communications to hash out the challenge, and to offer our solutions.

            The managers listened intently to my colleague’s recommendations for dissuading the workforce from voting for union representation. I’d worked with him before and knew his ideas were sound, and had previously proven effective.

            My part of the presentation came next and centered on a strategic approach to employee communications to gain the trust and understanding of the workforce in the future, something that was currently missing in this case.

            In essence, my proposal called for more frequent contact by senior managers with the hourly workers through a variety of means, including occasional walks through the shop to engage individual employees in conversations, and town hall type meetings where they could share relevant information about the state of the business and listen to ideas from the employees.

            I also recommended an on-going flow of information, through a variety of means, about the external marketplace and its impact on the company to help employees better understand the larger picture.

            Though the company team seemed to like our ideas, we left without a commitment and went back home to await their response. They never called back. They somehow headed off the union threat on their own. But I later learned that the effort to unionize the shop resurfaced again a couple years later.

Avoiding Their Medicine

Why didn’t the company management team opt for the medicine of more effective long-term employee engagement? Let me guess.

            Like a lot of long-term commitments, it demands that you make changes in the way you operate day-to-day. And in the current business climate, that is not a choice a lot of managers like to make. The kind of choices they do like to make are often those that have a short-term pay-off: cost cuts that improve margins; changing suppliers for higher quality or greater reliability; adding staff and production throughput to address increased demand for their products, and the like.

            But the kinds of changes I was urging were behavioral, asking managers and company leadership to operate outside their comfort zones and spend more of their limited time on the job engaging employees more than they were accustomed to. It would also have meant they’d have to think more about the connections between the employees’ world and where the business needed to go.

            I’m afraid to say that some managers and leaders seem to take their workforces for granted. The individual employee is brought into the company to perform a specific set of tasks and, in return, is paid a fair wage and benefits. Shouldn’t that be enough?

            No. It’s not enough.

            Union organizers find disgruntled employees in dysfunctional organizations and promise them more formal, rigidly controlled engagement with company management on their behalf – albeit with union representatives serving as intermediaries – to level what is perceived as an uneven playing field.

            This appeals to employees who feel cut off from the business anyway and, frankly, have ceased really caring about much beyond the paycheck, and a fair and safe work environment.

            The frustrations that shop floor employees sense when they feel detached from the company’s purpose and when their ideas and insights are not sought are the kinds of aggravations that build up over time, festering to the point where a union organizer finds fertile soil in which to sow his seeds of dissent.