TeamResearch News

Unions and Companies Create Successful Plants Together

An article in Industry Week points out that teams including management and union representatives have been the key to both reducing tensions and improving productivity in several manufacturing companies. Many have formed "high performance work organizations" (HPWOs) in which the two sides act as full partners in the running of the plant, including "shared decision-making around the vital functions that are critical to the business, its costs, and the processes used to do the work."

Instituting an HPWO requires:

joint planning,
a free exchange of information that both sides tend to protect,
dismantling of the "us vs. them" mentality on both sides, and
acceptance of the union as "an independent source of power for the workers."

But the results can be worth the pain—in one case, a plant of 130 workers reduced grievance filings from 50-100 per year to zero in the past 3½ years.

Source: Jusko, J. (03), "Nature vs. Nurture: Unique Arrangements Help Manufacturers Break from Traditional Adversarial Union-Management Relationships to Improve Both Business Performance and Company Morale," IndustryWeek 252(7):40 (July 2003).

TeamResearch News summarizes the latest information from studies or expert articles on business teams. It is published as a free service of TeamTrainers Consulting.