Partnership in the workplace proves fruitful for companies
A new report published by the National Centre for Partnership and Performance (NCPP) reveals that companies can significantly improve their performance and achieve major organisational change through partnership.
Labour Affairs Minister Frank Fahey launched the report, Working Together - For Change and a Modern Workplace, during a seminar on workplace partnership, at the European Foundation in Dublin.
Working Together includes guidelines that will provide practical assistance for employers, unions and employees who wish to modernise their workplaces through a partnership.
Following a commitment in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness to produce such guidelines, the NCPP, in association with IBEC and ICTU, assessed Irish and international research on workplace partnerships.
It also examined the experiences of four diverse Irish companies, Tegral Metal Forming Ltd., Athy, Co Kildare; Dairygold Co-operative Society Ltd., (Galtee Meats), Mitchelstown, Co Cork; Aughinish Alumina Ltd., Askeaton, Co Limerick and the Jurys Doyle Hotel Group.
NCPP Director, Lucy Fallon Byrne, said the four case studies highlight the real and substantial benefits that partnership is delivering in Irish companies.
These include significant savings on budgets, increased production capacity, reduced overtime, employment security, increased earnings and improved work environments.
Aughinish Alumina, using a partnership approach, has been transformed from making losses of one million dollars a week in the early 1990s to its current status as one of the most efficient alumina processing plants in the world.
The NCPP notes that partnership at the company is a way of doing business. It delivers for employees. Pay and reward are extremely competitive. There is a focus on involvement and training and a concern for employee health and well-being.
Employees have adopted flexible working arrangements with annualised hours and team based systems. There is a positive and constructive working environment. Working together, management, unions and employees, are currently addressing ways to make partnership more deeply embedded.
In the early 1990s, the Galtee Meats pig meat plant in Mitchelstown, part of Dairygold, was faced with rising production inflation, tighter margins and more sophisticated consumers.
The company set about ensuring that it remained competitive. Company and unions agreed to approach this problem on a partnership basis.
