Employee Voice and representation in the workplace

• Employee voice refers to practices designed to allow workers with some "say" in how their organisations are run..
• Alternative terms to voice can be: employee participation, employee involvement or industrial democracy.
• It is useful to see employee voice within the context of the struggle for control of the content and pace of work, which forms the basis of Labour Process Theory. This struggle arises from the interest of management in maximising workers’ effort and productivity, while workers strive for meaningful work and moderate effort.

• What is the goal of employee voice?

For management:
- a means to improve organisational performance
-gives management social legitimacy
-management may be compelled by law to give employees a say in certain types of decisions
-management may be motivated by their own ethical, ideological or religious convictions.

For employees:
-a means of greater job satisfaction through more meaningful job content, more autonomy and discretion.
-an opportunity for higher reward and recognition: formal and informal
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what are the forms of employee voice?

-DIRECT: exercised by individual employees

Categorised under three main headings:
-Task Based Participation

refers to the amount of say workers have in how their own work is organised, it is an everyday part of the job. In a sense, direct supervision is replaced by enhanced worker discretion as to what actions to perform and when.Formally, most direct voice schemes refer to team working arrangements, which receive different names depending on whether they are supervised or not.Because of enhanced autonomy and more meaningful jobs, employee satisfaction, motivation and performance is expected to increase.However, there has been criticism that teamworking schemes lead to an intensification of work through peer pressure and enlargement of job responsibilities (job creep).

-Upward Problem Solving

Upward problem-solving refers to schemes in which employees provide input to solve wider problems in the processes of the company, beyond their own job tasks. The two most common programmes are suggestion schemes and problem solving groups, often called quality circles.

The benefits of this type of voice come from the actual improvements that are achieved, and also from a commitment effect from the additional involvement from workers.Some common problems with this type of scheme is how to reward participation. Sometimes, very significant financial gains can be made for the company, should these be shared with employees?Would this make participation something instrumental for workers? If not, would it be fair?Another pitfall is that there is often high initial interest, but then, once the easiest fixes are addressed, interest declines. Finally, these systems have been criticised because efficiency suggestions may actually make employees redundant.

-Grievance Systems

Grievance systems refer to formal channels to complain for unfair treatment. They tend to be highly formal systems, often regulated in law or union contracts. Among the benefits they bring is that they act as a control mechanism on supervisors, allowing higher management to address issues of bad practice. Second, managing conflicts, rather than ignoring them and allowing them to grow bigger, may help avoid the problems caused by ‘silent voice’.Finally, good grievance procedures increases the perception of organisational justice, which has been shown to be related to employee commitment. These systems however have been criticised in that management are often unwilling to act, and can even retaliate against employees who use them.

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-INDIRECT: exercised through elected representatives e.g. trade unions, workers councils,etc

(slight shift away from the topic, here's some other related stuff on trade unions, just FYI)

So What is a trade union?

They are democratic organisations set up to represent workers’ interests.However, workers’ interests are not a given: each individual has different interests. The collective interests that a union represents are socially constructed, and this is much of what keeps union officials busy. If they are able to successfully construct a collective interest, the main way in which they defend it is through a process called collective bargaining, in which they secure certain employment terms for their members, and sometimes for non-members within the bargaining unit. Apart from this essential function, many trade unions provide members with a wide range of services, and they lobby government in favour of certain policies. In Western economies, unions have been in decline since their heyday in the 1980s, particularly in liberal economies where legislation has been more hostile.

Trade unions have two sources of power:

-Coercive power which derives from the threat of industrial action, such as strikes

-Legitimacy power which derives from their recognition as valid interlocutors on behalf

of workers.

Unions are most likely to be strong among skilled workers, because union members are more difficult to replace, where a strong group identity and a collectivist ideology makes it easier to construct a collective interest, and in those sectors where labour costs are not a large part of overall costs (so employers can afford to make concessions) and where competition is only moderate, so there is less likelihood that companies that make concessions will be driven out of business through higher labour costs.


However since the 1980s we have observed a decline in trade union power. Reasons for this elude to:
- Privatisation of nationalised industries under the regime of Thatcher

- Economic Changes:
i. The spread of globalisation meant that higher labour costs implied that firms could go out of business easily. 
ii. The decline of the UK manufacturing sector. Remaining manufacturing firms became smaller in size and more geographically spread in dispered locations.
iii. The enhancement of the service sector (less requirement for trade union representation)

-Augmentation of technology: enhanced communication as information could be shared more easily. Furthermore, the development of capital reduced to some extent the labour intensity of certain sectors (i.e.. capital replacing labour).

-Trade unions pre-1980s favoured full time working males significantly more than other parties. A more diverse workforce in recent years consisted of  more female participation and ethnic minority groups in the workforce. Key question: did trade unions really have an interest in representing such groups? 

-Shift in mindset/ ideology: less Marxist and Socialist ideologies valued at the time. 
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-SILENT: 

A controversial category of voice which is useful to point out that absence of direct and indirect employee voice has been found to foster resitance behaviours in employees, which can be quite damaging to the organisation. these include absenteeism, shirking, or antisocial behaviour.

• We must also categorise "voice regimes" by looking at the depth and scope of employee participation.

-depth refers to how much actual influence workers can have on how work is arranged ranging from none(only one-way information) to decisive influence.
-scope refers to the substantive importance of the issues on which employees have a voice.