Improving workplace policies

Jim Mather, Gael's chairman and former minister in the Scottish Government looks at how Scottish Government can learn a few lessons from the civil and military aviation sectors. In this piece, I would like to focus on the review that I am currently carrying out for the Scottish Government and speculate on the possibility that it might well have a beneficial effect on the UK aerospace manufacturing industry. And I say that with some confidence, given that our review will be learning lessons from the military and the commercial aviation sectors and given that aerospace, with its regular and deep interaction with those sectors is likely to be much more open to the lessons that they can provide. The review, entitled: ‘Working together: progressive workplace policies in Scotland', aims to improve workplace policies through effective union and employer co-operation and it will make recommendations on: •        Opportunities for innovation in the workplace which will enhance productivity, workplace development and build a more secure and resilient labour market; •        Existing good practice, the benefits good workplace relations deliver and how they might be more widely adopted and secured; •        Opportunities to promote collective bargaining, workplace democracy, diversity and equality, including the participation of women. In fulfilling this brief, I am particularly keen to see what can be learned from the commercial aviation sector, which, over the last 30+ years, has produced massive improvements in safety and operational effectiveness. In particular, I have been very impressed by Crew Resource Management (CRM) and its ability to gain marked material improvements in overall effectiveness. Especially, as these gains have been achieved in an environment where personnel on the flight deck and in the cabin are constantly changing, unlike other more stable workplaces, most of which are much less effective. I can see real advantages accruing to individual businesses with the vision and systems which could allow them to engage their own relevant stakeholders and emulate the key factors that allowed commercial aviation to reach these high standards. After all they can slipstream commercial aviation and its combination of a role model company, United Airlines as a pioneer and advocate of thinking differently, strong collaborative unions matching the initiating role of the US Airline Pilots Association, a committed regulator in the shape of the FAA and other national regulators, Government Support and a culture that accepted and used simulators. Indeed, given the prize of safer, better services based on more collegiate workplaces, most of us would struggle to understand why people would be resistant to any approach which offers them far better results. So a combination of developing an increased understanding of CRM and more dialogue about its potential seems to me to be both worthwhile and necessary: a process that can be easily started by reading a recent book called ‘Beyond the Checklist'. And I would not merely be suggesting that this is a good thing to do – for recent work by Rajendra Sisodia, based on his book ‘Firms of Endearment' – has identified that businesses that can trigger and harness the intrinsically-motivated goodwill of their staff can dramatically out-perform markets. His data is compelling, citing a portfolio of companies including, Honda, Toyota, South West Airlines, JetBlue, Harley Davidson, Costco, Whole Foods among others, he shows that they out-performed the market by a massive 10.5 times during the period 1996-2011. These companies display behaviours that are there to be emulated and there to be seen as part of the continuing evolution away from ‘command and control management' that is now outdated in the armed forces and well chronicled in books like ‘Power to Edge' and ‘Turning the Ship Around'. Perhaps, in the future we will be able to report on the further deployment of such strategies and the turning of more companies and economies around. www.gaelquality.com