New Partnership with TUC and Investors in People
Chris Ball
With the media obsessed with Rooney's foot, it was perhaps inevitable that Investors in People (IiP) would urge managers to morph into track suited coaches for the occasion of the football world cup. Bosses were urged to 'work out their game-plan' to maintain staff morale and protect productivity as the tournament progresses.
Somehow it sums up the opportunism IiP has adopted over the years, using catchy headline pegs to promote an idea which most people find, well - let's face it - rather boring! Even among HR and Training and Development professionals, the IiP standard does not light everybody's fuse.
For all that, as the national standard approaches its fifteenth birthday, it has a lot to be proud of. Certainly, it is widely recognised for what it represents as a seal of good practice in people management, offering tangible benefits to organisations. Take for example Sir Bill Connor, former general secretary of the shop workers' union USDAW in the current issue of the IPA bulletin. Talking of how he was elected on a promise to modernise and professionalise USDAW, Sir Bill writes; 'One initiative we found particularly helpful was Investors in People. We received an unbelievably enthusiastic response from all our staff and the union achieved accreditation in just two years. Through IiP we conducted a training needs analysis and as a result of this we identified a number of skills gaps which we sought to overcome with a comprehensive training programme available to all staff.'
All this should be music to the ears of IiP UK. It is the body charged with custody and development of the national standard which began life back in 1991 under the Conservative government and has managed to steer a line which offends no particular political or stakeholder interest. IiP's raison d'etre is the improvement of organisational performance and competitiveness through a planned approach to setting and communicating business objectives and developing people to meet them. Both the CBI and the TUC contribute to the wide ranging consultation which takes place before amending the standard, with the emphasis on consensus around fair and reasonable measures of good practice.
An example of this modus vivendi came this month with a wide ranging agreement between Unionlearn, the TUC's workplace learning organisation, and Investors in People. It saw the two organisations working together to maximise their respective contributions to promoting learning and skills at work. The agreement was signed on 13th June by IiP UK Chief Executive Ruth Spellman and TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber.
Under the agreement, each organisation has pledged to promote the positive role of the other in getting more workplaces to implement the Investors in People Standard and provide (and advocate for) Skills for Life courses, and the quality of their content. In addition, Investors in People UK will share Unionlearn platforms to run the newly developed Engaging in Investors in People course.
The TUC and IiP have common ground in encouraging learning but the latest development goes further. Under it, the IiP and the TUC '... aim to maximise the potential of workers, and organisations by positively recognising the role of unions, and union learning representatives as well as highlighting the business benefits of employee development.' The TUC will be hoping this support will help them tackle the lack of growth of unions in the private sector and the difficulties they have in appealing to non unionised firms.
In many ways the TUC/IiP agreement is a natural development, which can be understood by following the historical evolution of the national standard and the TUC's own track record of engagement with learning and development. The national standard emerged from a search for solutions to the problem of a national deficiency of skills training. Policy debate grappled with Britain's failure to develop its workers, leaving it economically disadvantaged with too little investment in human capital. Unions and their members, of course, had a live interest in this issue via its impact on national prosperity and the job security of employees. Though political circumstances conspired to keep the TUC outside the delivery suite at its birth, IiP was a creature of the kind of collaboration the unions had long been associated with.
Such collaboration over skills training can be traced back many years. Most significantly, when government intervened in 1964 to set up a national training structure, it was unambiguously tripartite, each industry training board including representatives of the main unions for its sector, as well as government and employers. Significantly, this vision straddled the political divide - the Industrial Training Act setting up the Boards, was introduced by a Conservative administration but a Labour government was in power by the time it was implemented!
This consensus survived changes of administration for twenty years until the abolition of the Training Commission in the late eighties, when differences between the TUC and the Government led the unions to withdraw from the Commission and left to shiver in the cold while the new training infrastructure of TECs and LECs was being established on an employer-led basis. Hence, the various initiatives which served as precursors to IiP, had only minimal union involvement, though by 1990, when a sub-group of the National Training Task Force was established to begin developing the national standard, the TUC was again engaged in the process.
Those with an interest in labour history might go back even further than this thumbnail account. The nineteenth century history of Mechanics' Institutes, Adult School Movement and the Workers' Education Association all attest to independent efforts to widen the knowledge of union members. More familiarly, the TUC and individual unions for years devoted funds to training members and a number of the bigger unions opened their own colleges for this purpose.
The focus for much of this was on training workplace representatives, as opposed to members generally, though there was always a wider dimension too with summer schools, correspondence courses and scholarships offered to a few lucky members. Union engagement with the pioneering Ford EDAP scheme is an example of how unions sometimes pursued the training agenda in collective bargaining, encouraging workers to self educate in their own interests, and pursue learning goals, partly out of a belief that learning of any kind encourages versatility and employability.
Since the election of New Labour in 1997, added purpose has been given to this side of unions' work with the formation of a Union Learning Fund. The ULF is funded by the Department for Education and Skills and administered by the TUC and the Learning and Skills Council. Unions make application for funds for learning projects raising skill levels in the industries they cover. One such project run by British Actors Equity is the Actors' Centre in Newcastle on Tyne. Some 48 classes cover a spectrum of the performing arts, from film and television to theatre or radio. Other examples show an impressive range of such projects, many involving considerable invention and creativity.
The launch of the Union Learning Fund has also led to the rolling out of a new kind of union representative, the Union Learning Representative (ULR). Learning, particularly skills for life training, is being encouraged more widely, using union structures to champion learning and disseminate information on how to access it. Unions have established learning centres, engaged learning organisers and devised a number of other such initiatives. Union Learning Representatives are at the centre of many of these.
The Employment Act 2002 introduced a statutory right to time off for ULRs to carry out their duties. Such rights cover time off for training and are broadly similar to the time off rights granted to other union representatives. Explanations from the DTI stress the benefit ULRs bring to employers as an, 'inexpensive source of expert advice... which will not place a high administrative burden on employers.' ULRs are described as having a key role in workforce development.
The agreement between IiP and the TUC should be seen as part of a broader partnership prospectus which the TUC and many of its affiliates prefer as the default position for unions. Other elements to this include the government's decision to establish a Union Modernisation Fund to help unions to make full and constructive contributions to employee relations. The Partnership Institute, formed by the TUC but now floated off independently, is another piece of the jigsaw, providing advice and consultancy to employers wishing to conduct their employee relations in a partnership mode.
Hence, the TUC's latest innovation, Unionlearn, is part of a piece with other 'product developments, coming out of Congress House. (It is all a bit of a shock to those used to seeing the TUC as the lumbering cart horse.) Unionlearn was established under the TUC's auspices in April this year. It includes the former TUC Learning Services in England, and the TUC Education Service. It's rationale is, '... to provide a strategic framework and support for the contribution unions make to workforce development and lifelong learning.' The TUC hopes it will raise awareness of the value of learning, and the contribution that unions can make to it. Linking up with IiP seems like an inspired move.
But the IiP is doing well in its own terms too. It points to 37,000 recognised organisations up and down the land, with the standard covering some 27 per cent of the UK's workforce. Research commissioned by IiP UK shows evidence of an 'IiP effect' on business efficiency, which is translated into measurable benefits of higher sales and profitability and increased ability to make changes. If unions can benefit from this 'IiP effect,' and bask in the reflected glory of some of the demonstrable benefits, they could see their stock rise among prospective employers.
Certainly, employers following the IiP route appear to be satisfied with the outcome. 94% remain with the standard renewing their vows, so to speak, when the time comes to test their adherence to it. The TUC will like the IiP's research showing that 91% of employers covered by the standard involved their staff in the changes they made compared with only 36% who did so in non recognised organisations. Both organisations however, would be wise to treat the IiP's research with caution. A priority item on their mutual 'to do' list, ought to be to commission research measuring the business benefits of IiP (with and without union involvement) using far more robust econometric techniques than those adopted in the last research project back in 2004.
What then for the future of IiP, as it readies itself for its fifteenth birthday celebrations? In an era which has seen many worthwhile interventions in training and development come to grief because ultimately they were not delivering value for money, this entirely voluntary yardstick appears to be carrying the votes of confidence needed to survive.
The standard must evolve however, to continue to add value. It does so already, but a balance is important. Too many changes and the standard may become too demanding. Too few and it will fail the relevance test. The new 'IiP Profile' addresses this point with a choice of levels to go for, adding greater 'stretch' to those organisations which are up to it. However, the danger here may be that the common denominator may be lost. Choice is a fine thing, but organisations opting for the most basic form of the standard will not want it to be devalued by an up-market version which becomes widely recognised as 'normal'.
The TUC/IiP Partnership could be helpful in providing the means of this evolution. It could lead to unions promoting the standard in some organisations where unions are recognised, either to encourage adoption or perhaps to choose one of the 'IiP Profile' upgrades. Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary commented, 'Together we will actively work to make sure that greater numbers of employers and workers take up the learning challenge and boost their organisation's effectiveness.'
Whether the standard in return provides introduction to unions in non unionised organisations, is open to question. The TUC will doubtless hope that this happens. Ruth Spellman, Chief Executive of Investors in People UK commented, 'We look forward to working with the TUC to help employers realise the business benefits of investing in their people.'
Contacts:
http://www.unionlearn.org.uk/
http://www.partnership-institute.org.uk/
http://www.investorsinpeople.co.uk/IIP/Web/default.htm
1 September 2006
