Works councils underutilised
ONE institution that is underutilised by employers is the Works Council and as a result, organisations end up with avoidable productivity and labour relations costs. The damage caused by poor utilisation of the Works Council by employers to productivity and workplace harmony can be huge and in many instances it has resulted in the dismissal of some chief executives and senior managers.
A large number of senior managers who get dismissed for poor performance will have failed to manage labour matters that could have easily been stabilised at Works Council. They spend their energies trying to get rid of the departmental worker representatives, intimidating them into submission and sabotaging them at Works Council instead of using them to build a solid work team.
There are chief executives who have failed to manage Works Council meetings and get them to add value. Instead of using the Works Council for team building, exposing workers to the strategic direction of the business, getting workers to contribute ideas to productivity improvement and attend to employee welfare, the meetings become meetings to tell or meetings to intimidate workers.
The workers retaliate by starting “fires” that could end up burning sections or the whole business, thus creating a failing business.
I have on many occasions met workers who argue that they cannot form or join the Workers Committee because they fear becoming vocal at Works Council thereby risking being targets of dismissal.
Many workers believe the Workers Committee is a place for fools, risk takers and have avoided the Workers Committee because they say once elected to the Workers Committee you will have to participate in Works Council meetings where if you open your mouth the wrong way, you could be dismissed or victimised in many other ways. Where workers have fear, it means that the employer is not managing the Works Council properly. There is a need for the employer to look at how he manages the Works Council and how he draws workers to participate.
There are occasions where the chief executive and his heads of department have no people management skills and they sit in the Works Council because they are heads of department and not because they can add value. The challenge of having untrained executives is that the damage is slow and the day it explodes the board comes hard on senior management and in worse cases, could lead to far reaching consequences as we saw in Marikana in South Africa.
Sometimes boards of directors will have failed in their oversight role. It is the duty of every board member to ensure that all who sit at Works Council are properly trained in key aspects of labour law, labour relations, people management, team building and productivity improvements. To focus on results while forgetting that results are achieved through people does not help.
On many occasions, I have seen employers getting the workers trained on labour relations and Works Council processes and procedures without training managers. This does not help as managers who are not trained will frustrate the workers to a point where the workers give up on helping the organisation and concentrate on doing work despite having great ideas for the business. In conclusion, where both management and workers’ leaders are trained, the Works Council meeting can drive teamwork, business growth and give the organisation a happy team.
Davies NdumisoSibanda can be contacted on:
Email: stratwaysmail@yahoo.com