With Royal Mail unable to prevent strike action and predictions that BA cabin crew may strike at Christmas over proposed contract changes, performance culture specialist Nigel Watson urges the troubled brands to realise the problem stems from staff not seeing how they will benefit.
Nigel Watson, MD of Q4 Solutions has worked with many global brands facing a breakdown in communications and claims that both organisations would benefit from a more performance-led culture which would help employees to feel like they were an integral part of the organisation and not a separate entity.
“Unions are great at helping ensure that their member’s interests are protected, but what also tends to happen when there is strong union presence is that communications between the business and employees breaks down. They begin to feel more and more disconnected from the business and its ethos, making it even harder for them to remember why the joined the organisation in the first place or come to an amicable agreement,” says Watson.
Watson believes that the actions to date by BA and Royal Mail are common practice across many organisations and for the majority of time it seems to work ok but that recent events suggest they have found it particularly difficult to strike the right balance between performance, value and the needs of its people.
According to Watson, a good performance-led culture is one where everyone wants the same performance outcome and takes pride in their results and what it takes to achieve those results. For this to happen, everyone needs to have to want it and be able to see a clear ‘what’s in it for me’. When it doesn’t happen, employees become increasingly disconnected from the organisation.
Watson says:
“What BA and Royal Mail could really benefit from is clarity of mission, purpose and communication to avoid losing any more equity in the relationships between people in the organisation. Yes process and controls are important, but they must support the people too and focus on aligning everyone on RTR, getting the Right Things Right. This might sounds straight forward, but is often much trickier than it sounds”.
ENDS
Editor’s Notes
Nigel Watson is one of the most experienced performance culture specialists in Europe. He has been managing director of Q4 for almost a decade and has over 20 years experience in serving corporate household names.
Q4 Solutions delivers programmes of leadership development, workshops, facilitation and coaching. Using acknowledged leaders in their field, Q4 has assembled a formidable array of talent under the overall guidance of Nigel Watson
Nigel’s career has been spent in the people, performance, process arena and he has worked with many prestigious clients, including: Alliance & Leicester, Augusta Westland, BP, BAE Systems, EDS, KPMG, Logica CMG, Selfridges and Vodafone.
Nigel was also part of the company responsible for: training the skippers and crew for the BT Global Challenge Yacht Race, creating a joint civilian leadership school at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and for working with Sir Clive Woodward in developing the shift in behaviours and performance for the England 2003 Rugby World Cup Squad.
For further information visit www.q4solutions.co.uk
For press enquiries please contact Amy Larman on 01603 283 463 or by email amy@mediajems.co.uk.
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