Employment

Baroness Wheeler Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheeler]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Prosser for securing this debate. With her considerable experience of industrial relations across the private, manufacturing and public sectors, there are few in the House better able to provide us with the broad-sweep perspective that we need in trying to address and tackle these vital issues.

I want to focus my comments today on the importance of leadership and management across industry, the private, public and voluntary sector, if we are to navigate our way through the enormous changes that have taken place and continue to take place. As recent research from Cranfield School of Management found, improving management capability plays a major role in helping employers improve organisational and financial performance. Developing managerial capabilities is a key step for companies and organisations to achieve growth and manage business transformation and change in tough economic times. In this regard, I draw the attention of the House to the record of the Investors in People management standard in helping large and small organisations to build managerial skills and capabilities and improve employee engagement. IiP has a 20-year track record in driving improvements in workforce behaviour and performance. During that time it has changed and adapted, demonstrating its ability to evolve to reflect the changing and differing priorities of employers and their staff. Increasing evidence shows that IiP can help employers to survive, thrive and grow in the wake of huge change and recession.

Since I have been privileged to be a Member of your Lordships’ House, my contributions in the Chamber have been on the voluntary and charitable sector, or on health and social care in my supporting Front-Bench role. However, my working life, before I retired last year, was in organisation development and human resources, as the national director of the public services union, UNISON. UNISON was the first UK union to achieve the IiP standard, practising for our own staff what we want to see for our members in the workplace. UNISON was formed out of a merger in the early 1990s between three very separate independent unions. We faced all the problems of merged organisations, with all our structures and services in triplicate and the challenge to downsize quickly, while maintaining and improving our services to members and providing the better value for their subscriptions that we promised them would result from merger. Of course, we had to do all this in the increasingly competitive and changing world of public service delivery and trade unionism. We needed to develop our leadership capability, upskill our managers at all levels of the organisation and involve and enthuse our staff in our vision for the future. IiP was for us the key tool that helped us journey down a rocky and challenging road.

IiP is currently undergoing a major review under the auspices of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. I declare a non-financial interest as a member of the IiP advisory board which has been appointed by the commission to spearhead the review. Currently, over 25 per cent of the UK workforce uses Investors in People in organisations totalling more than 6 million employees. The Cranfield research on IiP analysed financial performance information from Companies House, case studies and a survey of over 400 employers. It showed four key outcomes from using the IiP framework for business development and managing change. First, IiP supports the development of a learning culture in the workplace. Secondly, it enhances the effectiveness of management development and continuous improvement programmes. Thirdly, it creates an environment where there is more focus on performance and employees better understand their contribution to the organisation and the achievement of its goals. Fourthly, it allows managers greater freedom and discretion to achieve priorities and objectives.

There has always been cross-party support for IiP. My own Labour Government strongly supported IiP through its partnership and learning and skills agendas. I welcome the present Government’s support for IiP and their identification of the standard as being critical in helping to deliver economic growth and improved business results. The advisory board has been given the task of repositioning IiP as an improvement tool for helping businesses to grow and to manage change. With this goal in mind, the IiP advisory board has been refocusing the emphasis of the standard from an essentially assessment tool to a model which works with organisations and businesses to achieve their specific needs and provides a model for managing change, managing growth or improvement, or simply survival. I ask the Minister, how do the Government intend to actively support the IiP transformation programme? What role will Ministers play in promoting IiP to private and public business leaders?

Last year the board led the relicensing of the IiP delivery network. IiP regional centres in the UK work closely with clients in large and small businesses, public services and the voluntary and independent sector. The London IiP centre has, for example, been working with Sainsbury’s, which recently became the biggest employer to use IiP. In the north, the centre has focused on small businesses and in the south, it is achieving good and positive results from work with local authorities and voluntary organisations.

To compete effectively, the UK still needs to address the organisational development of our businesses and invest in the potential and capabilities of our business leaders and managers. The UK lags behind our global competitors in terms of investment in leadership and management skills. For example, Germany’s average public investment in training is €4,438 per annum per manager compared with the UK’s €1,625. Several competitor countries, such as Spain, France, Norway and Denmark, all spend more on manager training than the UK.

Born out of the last recession in the 1980s, Investors in People is a key tool that can help small businesses grow. It provides support to enable leaders to be more ambitious. It can act as the bridge between leaders and their employees, building engagement, acting as a catalyst for new ideas and involving people throughout the organisation.

The targeting of small to medium-sized private and public organisations under the new IiP business model encourages them to focus their work with IiP on achieving business growth. Over 42 per cent of Investors in People’s customers are small businesses, and thousands of these find it an invaluable tool for taking the step changes required to achieve growth—for example, when they expand from 30 to 50 employees. Independent research by MORI showed that 80 per cent of employers using Investors in People agree that it helps all types of organisations adapt to change and growth. How will the Government encourage SMEs to use IiP to help grow their businesses?

In conclusion, the message to employers is to take the time to rediscover IiP. They will find that it has kept pace with the changing world of employment; is highly relevant to the needs of employers today and remains at the cutting edge of best management and staff engagement practice.