Throughout the last two decades, there have been increasing calls for developing enterprising, innovative managers, who can handle the pressures and stress involved with coping with the cataclysmic effects of change. Along with this is a belief in the fact that the UK has one of the most flexible labour markets in the world. We can, so the rhetoric goes, enjoy the fruits of innovation, empowerment, and motivated working. But is this really so? And if not, what are the implications for the way in which we motivate our workforce and organise our activities? Peter Lawson investigates.

There is a widely held belief that the UK enjoys the benefit of having one of the most flexible labour markets in the world. UK plc’s recent comparative economic success in job creation and reduced unemployment is thought to have been based on a labour market flexibility in which civilised labour standards are maintained by only the lightest of legal, regulatory touches. The resulting flexibility of the UK labour market is seen as a benchmark against which our European partners are being encouraged to match themselves. This has been perpetuated by the rhetoric of managers, consultants and business schools who espouse the ‘innovative and enterprising manager’. Change, we are told, is the hallmark of the post-modern organisation, and woe betide anyone who fails to make the grade of learning how to deal with the pressures associated with it. Yet is this really the case?

There has been little real research into the ‘state of the nation’ in terms of what is really happening. Myth, speculation, management and consultant rhetoric have informed and indeed created our picture of what is happening. Recent in-depth research from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) sheds quite a different light on the situation, and thereby can point us in the direction of real change¹. Let’s have a look at some of these figures and see what that may mean for the organisation that wishes to be creative.

Flexible and changing?

The beliefs about a flexible market have been accompanied by a set of assumptions about life in the workplace for individuals that are perpetuated in our media on a daily basis:

• that the notion of a ‘career’ is outmoded
• a permanent, full-time job for life is a thing of the past; new jobs are temporary, part-time and short-term
• the values based on individualism have superseded the collectivist values that were a strong feature of British work places in the 30 or 40 years following 1945.

However, notions such as these belie the facts. The ESRC report found that:

• In the last ten years the number of employee-based jobs has increased by two million whilst jobs for the self employed have declined by 250,000.
• In 2010 it is expected that more than 80% of all male employees and in excess of 50% of all female employees will still be working full time.
• 92% of workers hold a permanent employment contract compared to 88% a decade ago.
• The number of employees claiming temporary contracts has declined and the numbers employed on fixed-term contracts have halved over the same period.
• More employees work in one specified workplace than was the case in 1992. The proportion of the workforce who work wholly, or partly, at home has increased by only 0.50% in the last decade to 4.1%.

So, it seems that permanent employment contracts are still the norm. What happened to all the hype about teleworking?

Further, job tenure has increased for many categories of employees. Job tenure for higher management and professional workers has increased from 85 to 105 months, whilst job tenure for semi-skilled and unskilled manual employees has increased from 74 to 88 months. Many employees still see their jobs as having a career structure with opportunities for advancement and a large majority of British workers report feeling secure in their jobs. This new information suggests that, whilst acknowledging that the economy has been transformed into a diverse, complex, postindustrial variant of manufacturing economy of a generation ago, the make-up of the workforce has not shifted dramatically.

So what is happening?

Occupational differences between manual and non-manual jobs still persist. Even with massive technological change (which has had a huge impact on the way in which products are manufactured and the way in which we communicate), class is still a major concept through which we need to understand the workplace. Indeed it has been suggested that the UK may be experiencing a move towards less job and social mobility and greater inequalities in the workplace than was the case between 1945 and 1975!

This is backed up by results from the ESRC survey that shows that there is little significant growth in the range of employee benefits on offer. The prevalence of profit sharing has not increased nor has the incidence of private health insurance. Fewer people are able to take a loan from their company and fewer companies offer travel subsidies. There has been hardly any rise in access to occupational pension schemes. However the one benefit showing an increase has been the provision of sick pay beyond the statutory level. The gulf in benefits provision at different organisational levels is highlighted in Table 1.

TABLE 1

The degree of involvement and participation for different occupational groups is variable with about half of all manual employees having no say at all in decisions which affect their work. It is also instructive to record that over half of all workers report that they do not want more say over their work – those involved in designing or implementing ‘empowering’ work-change programmes would do well to listen to these voices.

Growing dissatisfaction with the world of work

In this increasingly unequal world, work is much less satisfying than it was a decade ago. Furthermore, at all levels, work is considered to be more stressful. People report that they are required to work much harder than they were. Indeed, we at ER Consultants are experiencing increasing interest in our services related to stress and work-life balance. The reported decline in satisfaction relates more to pay, job prospects and training rather than to the nature and variety of work undertaken. The research suggests that dissatisfaction is most keenly felt amongst well educated male workers. Perhaps we are about to see emergence of the alienated rather than the enterprising manager.

What happened to the enterprising manager: control or empowerment?

Along with an emerging disaffection has arisen a decline in the sense of personal commitment that employees feel towards their employers. The strap-line ‘people are our most important asset’ first hit us over 20 years ago, and is still ground out with monotonous regularity. Yet there is little evidence that many of the forward-looking, innovative, approaches associated with enlightened people management are being translated into practical programmes of change. There seems a huge gap between the rhetoric and the reality: the way that people are managed or supervised has changed little in practice in the last ten years. More than 90% of employees are still answerable to a supervisor. However the number of employees who are members of a quality circle or other type of performance improvement initiative has increased, as have the numbers who say that they will be consulted about changes that affect the way that they work. Increasing employee discretion has not diminished the degree of management control and surveillance, often by formal performance assessment and appraisal.

Increasing numbers report that their pay, or at least a proportion of it, is related in some way to an assessment of their performance. Performance-related pay may be assessed against individual or, increasingly, team effort.

Continuity or change?

In summary then, the following can be said to be the characteristics of the UK workplace and its context:

• Economy now characterised as postindustrial rather than manufacturing
• Use of computers now essential for many to perform their work role
• There are more employee-based job and fewer self-employed jobs than there were 10 years ago; greater proportion of permanent employment contracts
• Longer job tenure and more job security
• Less job and social mobility
• Work experienced as less satisfying and more stressful especially among well-educated male workers
• Less personal commitment to work organisations
• Little evidence of innovative management practice
• More people reporting pay or part or pay related to job performance
• Little change in the range of employee benefits on offer
• Levels of involvement and participation patchy and skewed to senior jobs.

Can we learn from the past, or do we re-invent the wheel?

These findings suggest that, at the level of the individual enterprise, much work remains to be done to gain the co-operation of employees in workplace change and performance improvement. There appears to be a great need for fresh action to capture hearts and minds in embracing the change that is required to enable UK enterprises to compete successfully in globalised markets. Perhaps this apparent sclerosis in UK workplaces goes some way to explaining the UK’s long-term productivity deficit.

One is tempted, when surveying this evidence, to speculate whether present managers have listened to the experience of their predecessors at all. So what about all those motivation theories that filled our management textbooks? Has there been any impact from all those years of postgraduate management education, and the burgeoning business schools? Very little, appears to be the answer.

One thing however, seems certain. If we wish to ensure that we have competitive and creative organisations, with satisfied employees, then we need a much clearer picture of what is really happening. Our reward packages and working conditions should reflect ‘the state we are in’, rather than live by some hyperbolic rhetoric that bears little resemblance to reality. Truth, and perhaps clarity, are what is required of management if we are to create committed organisations. We need to integrate understanding of the conditions of the market, to the needs and expectations of our workforces, in order to produce pay and reward systems that truly motivate people to work with passion. Psychology and organisational systems need to learn to speak to each another.

¹ Britain’s World of Work – Myths & Realities’ The ESRC Future of Work Programme, 2003

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