Public sector employers must ensure that they have the right HR capabilities in place to ensure staff engagement and manage industrial relations during a period of unprecedented change, an Acas report has warned.
A discussion paper commissioned by the conciliation service entitled ‘A new era of public service employment relations? The challenges ahead’ pointed out a new era of austerity and changes in government policy were forcing through major changes in traditional employment relations.
But the promotion of a smaller, more restricted role for the state, the emergence of new providers from the private and third sector supplying more user-centred or ‘personalised’ services as well as market-orientated funding would provide both challenges and opportunities to stakeholders.
In addition, such change could call into question the role of the state as “model employer”, while the erosion of long-standing conditions of employment, in particular pensions, posed a “significant risk to the public sector ethos”, the report, written by Professor of Employment Relations Stephen Bach from King’s College, London, said.
“Employers not only face the challenge of maintaining staff engagement in a period of change, but also ensuring that they have the right industrial relations and HR capabilities within their organisation to manage change effectively,” the study continued.
But some employers were likely to view budgetary constraints as providing an opportunity to “engage in wholesale re-engineering of the workforce”, it added.
Although it was currently unclear whether trade unions had come to terms with the scale of the change facing them, Bach said that “adversity may provide the catalyst to fashion a more strategic response to the fundamental challenges they confront” such as the threat to national pay determination.
Whatever the outcome, however, Bach believes that public service employment relations will “differ markedly” by 2020 from those today. But he warned that, if the government wants to “meet its aspirations to deliver world-class public services and to enhance UK competitiveness”, it will find that “ensuring effective public service employment relations is crucial”.
