Thank you for inviting me to be here and for giving me the opportunity to talk about the workplace employment relations study.
The remit for this presentation was to talk about the workplace employment relations study—WERS as it is known for short—and its findings in respect of job quality. WERS covers Great Britain, so I should say at the start that most of the findings that I will talk about apply to Great Britain as a whole.
First, I will give you a brief introduction to what WERS is in order to place the findings in context. I will then talk about the changes in various aspects of job quality in Britain between 2004 and 2011. Covering some of the aspects that Martin Taulbut talked about, I will look at changes in job security, work intensity and job autonomy, and some changes in the types of support that employers might provide—for example, training provision and arrangements for facilitating work-life balance. I will then move on to look at relations between managers and employees, which is another important aspect of job quality, and I will talk about some findings in respect of job satisfaction.
I note at the start that I will not be talking about information on wages today, even though pay is, of course, an important aspect of job quality, as we have already heard. WERS collects some information on pay, but there are other data sources that are better placed to give you a more detailed and up-to-date reflection of trends in earnings.
Although I will focus mainly on findings for Great Britain as a whole, we have some selected findings that are specific to Scotland, so I will, of course, also mention those.
I begin with a brief overview of the key findings. In Great Britain as a whole, some aspects of job quality declined between 2004 and 2011. We have seen falling job security and increasing work intensity. Other aspects have shown some improvement. For example, there have been improvements in the control that employees have over their jobs and in some aspects of support. We have also seen some clear differences between trends in the public and private sectors, with employees in the public sector typically faring worse in the period. The findings that we have for Scotland show some similarity to the patterns that we observe for Great Britain as a whole.
WERS is a national survey that maps the state of employment relations and working life in British workplaces with five or more employees. It is unique and comprehensive in that it collects information from managers, employees and workplace representatives—union and non-union—within the same workplace. It is a well-established study: the first survey was in 1980 and there have been six in all, with the most recent having taken place in 2011. Today, when I talk about change, I am going to look predominantly at change between 2004 and 2011—that is, between the two most recent surveys in the series.
WERS is a large study. Almost 2,700 workplaces were covered in 2011, and we had responses from about 1,000 employee representatives and almost 22,000 employees. WERS is an independent study, and the 2011 WERS had six sponsors: the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service; the Economic and Social Research Council; the UK Commission for Employment and Skills; the Health and Safety Executive; and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, with NIESR’s involvement being made possible through funding from the Nuffield Foundation. That mix of funders ensures that the study is independent: it is in all our interests that it is impartial and rigorous. WERS has a good reputation for the quality of the data that it provides and it is endorsed by a range of employer, employee and industry organisations.
I move on to the findings on changes in job quality for Great Britain as a whole. One of the most notable changes that we can see in WERS between 2004 and 2011 is a decline in job security, which is being driven particularly by what has happened in the public sector. In 2004, in both the public and private sectors, about two thirds of employees agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “I feel my job is secure in this workplace.” By 2011, that proportion had fallen to just below half in the public sector, with the number of employees who felt that their job was secure falling from 66 per cent to 47 per cent. In the private sector, we see a slight, but much smaller, fall.
We look at work intensity in a few different ways. Overall, the percentage of employees who agreed with the statement “My job requires that I work very hard” increased from 76 per cent in 2004 to 83 per cent in 2011, and we see an increase in work intensity on that measure in both the private and public sectors. We also ask employees whether they feel that they have enough time to get their work done. The proportion who felt that that was the case remained fairly stable in the two surveys, standing at about two fifths of employees in each survey.
There was a small but statistically significant increase in the proportion of employees in the private sector who felt that they never had enough time to get their work done, from 36 per cent in 2004 to 38 per cent in 2011. Overall, the proportion of employees who felt that way remained higher in the public sector.
In the 2011 WERS, we asked a new question, which was whether people felt that it was necessary to work long hours in order to progress in their workplace. Overall, around two fifths of employees agreed that that was the case; the figure was higher for the private sector than it was for the public sector. That feeling is more common in particular industries—finance, education and hotels and restaurants—and is also more commonly reported by men than it is by women.
As Martin Taulbut mentioned in his presentation, people’s autonomy or the control that they have over their jobs forms an important part of theories about what contributes to employee wellbeing in the workplace. WERS asked employees how they felt about their level of control over five different aspects of their job: how the work is done, the order in which tasks are carried out, the pace at which they have to do the work, the tasks that are done in the job, and the start and finish times. In the private sector, there were some small but statistically significant improvements on all those measures between 2004 and 2011. In the public sector, in contrast, there were increases only in control over the pace of work and autonomy in relation to the tasks that are done in the job.
So far, we have seen a bit of a mixed picture. There have been falls in job security and rises in work intensity, although there have been some improvements in job autonomy. In the next part of the presentation, I will talk about what might be thought of as job supports, the first of which is training.
In a period that covered the recession and the downturn, we might well have expected employers to have cut back on training, and in separate findings that are not reported in the study, around a sixth of employers said that they reduced expenditure on training in response to the recession. However, if we look at the proportion of workplaces that provide at least some off-the-job training for at least 80 per cent of their experienced employees in their biggest occupational group, we find that the proportion rose between 2004 and 2011. Overall, the public sector is still more likely to provide training on that basis, but there was no improvement between 2004 and 2011. In the private sector, there was a rise in the proportion of workplaces that provide such training from 31 per cent to 40 per cent over the same period.
Another question that employees are asked is whether they feel that managers in their workplace encourage them to develop their skills. In that area, there was stability in the private sector—around three fifths of employees felt that they were encouraged to develop their skills—but in the public sector there was a fall from 61 per cent to 55 per cent of employees.
The provision of flexible working arrangements can play an important role in helping employees to balance their work with their lives outside. WERS presents a mixed picture on changes in the prevalence of flexible working arrangements. Employers were asked whether they provided a set of specified arrangements for any employees at their workplace: there is a bit of mixed picture. There was an increase in the proportion of workplaces that offered the option of working from home for at least some of their employees from 26 per cent to 30 per cent over the period. There was also an increase from 11 per cent to 19 per cent in the proportion of employers that offered compressed hours. At the same time, there was a reduction from 62 per cent to 56 per cent in the proportion of workplaces that offered employees the opportunity to reduce their working hours, as well as a decline in the prevalence of job sharing.
The overall fall in the percentage of workplaces that provided arrangements for employees to reduce their working hours was driven largely by what happened in the private sector. Apart from that, the sectors fared fairly similarly as regards changes.
Whether employees decide to take up flexible working arrangements may depend on whether they feel that their employers look favourably on their doing so. The survey asked employees whether they felt that managers understand that employees have to meet responsibilities outside work. There was an increase in the percentage of employees in the private sector who felt that way—the figure rose from 59 per cent to 63 per cent—but there was a fall in the public sector from 61 per cent to 58 per cent.
At the same time, there was a rise in the percentage of managers who agreed with the statement, “It is up to individual employees to balance their work and family responsibilities.” That increase occurred in the public and private sectors, although it was larger in the public sector. Nevertheless, a fair amount of work-life conflict remains evident, with around a quarter of employees agreeing with the statement, “I often find it difficult to fulfil my commitments outside of work because of the amount of time I spend on my job.”
10:15
Relations between managers and employees form another important aspect of job quality, and one way in which managers can support their employees is by acting in a trustworthy manner and seeking to understand their views. We asked employees a set of questions in an attempt to gauge changes in that respect. First of all, we found that, between 2004 and 2011, there was a small rise—from 56 per cent to 59 per cent—in the percentage of private sector employees who felt that their managers were sincere in attempting to understand their views, and there was also a similar small rise in the percentage who felt that managers dealt honestly with employees. In contrast, there was no change in that respect among public sector employees. As the private sector was already faring better in those matters in 2004, the changes have served to widen the gap between the two sectors between 2004 and 2011.
Managers, employees and employee representatives were also asked to rate workplace relations between managers and employees. There is always in this respect a gap between the perspectives of managers and employees, with managers being more likely to rate relationships with their employees as better. Indeed, the percentage of managers who rated relations as very good increased from 50 per cent to 55 per cent between 2004 and 2011. Overall, though, we have also seen a small but significant increase among employees; in 2004, 62 per cent of employees rated relations in their workplace as good or very good, and that figure rose to 64 per cent in 2011.
We also asked employees about their satisfaction with a number of aspects of their job. Our analysis uses the eight aspects of job satisfaction that were consistent between the 2004 and 2011 surveys: satisfaction with pay, the sense of achievement that employees got from their work, their scope for using their initiative, influence, training, job security, the work itself and their involvement in decision making. We combined all those aspects in an overall job-satisfaction scale, with employees being asked to rate their satisfaction on a five-point scale. We also separated satisfaction with pay from satisfaction with the job’s non-pecuniary aspects—in other words, the other aspects that I have just mentioned.
In the private sector, therefore, there was from 2004 to 2011 an increase in employees’ satisfaction with pay and, indeed, an increase in their satisfaction with all other aspects of their job, with the exception of job security. However, in the public sector, there was an increase in satisfaction with pay but no improvement in most of the other aspects of job satisfaction, except for scope for using initiative, and there was a big decline in satisfaction with job security, which reflects the fall in perceptions of job security that I mentioned earlier.
All the findings that I have highlighted are for Great Britain as a whole, but last year one of my colleagues, John Forth at NIESR, was commissioned by ACAS to undertake a study of selected employment relations measures by ACAS region, and the study includes findings for Scotland that cover some of the measures that I have mentioned. Those findings show many similarities to the picture for Great Britain as a whole. For example, in Scotland, there was a fall from 68 per cent in 2004 to 62 per cent in 2011 in the percentage of employees who felt that their job in their workplace was secure, and there was a rise from 74 per cent to 81 per cent in the percentage of employees who agreed that their job required them to work very hard. That, again, is similar to the position in the rest of Great Britain.
There was also in Scotland a rise in the percentage of employees who reported that they had a lot of influence over three specific aspects of their jobs, and there was also an improvement in respect of employees who felt that their managers were understanding of their responsibilities outside of work. Overall, in 2011, levels of job satisfaction in Scotland looked similar to those that were observed in the rest of Great Britain.
I will summarise the main points. There has been a decline in some aspects of job quality in Britain between 2004 and 2011, with a fall in job security and a rise in work intensity, but there have also been improvements in job autonomy and other aspects. However, there are some clear differences between the public and private sectors, with the private sector faring better on improvements in job autonomy and supportive management and showing less of a decline in job security. That said, work intensity has increased in both sectors. As the findings that I have just presented show, many of the factors seem to apply to Scotland as well as to Great Britain as a whole.