Employment Relations in the Shadow of Recession: The 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study: First Findings

Citation

Jed DeVaro (2014), "Employment Relations in the Shadow of Recession: The 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study: First Findings", Personnel Review, Vol. 43 No. 3, pp. 483-485. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-12-2013-0221

This book uses the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study (WERS) to paint a portrait of employment relations in Britain from 2004 to 2011. Following earlier waves in 1980, 1984, 1990, 1998, and 2004, WERS 2011 includes questionnaires for workplace managers, employee representatives, and employees. Although each wave is its own cross section of establishments, a panel component exists for adjacent waves. The 2004 cross section contained 2,295 workplaces, 989 of which were surveyed again in 2011 (along with additional workplaces, for a total of 2,680). A major improvement in the 2011 WERS is that the 989 “panel” workplaces responded to the entire cross sectional survey instrument in 2011, just as they had in 2004. In contrast, if the practice from earlier waves had been followed, the 989 workplaces would have responded to the complete survey instrument only in 2004, whereas in 2011 they would have received a much narrower survey instrument.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction and overview of the data, a description of the 2004-2011 period, and an outline for the book. Chapter 2 covers the impact of the recent recession on workplaces and what steps managers took in response to the recession. Chapter 3 covers firm births and deaths, and growth and shrinkage of continuing firms. Chapter 4 covers the involvement of employees in workplace change. Chapter 5 is on compensation in the private and public sectors, including pay for performance and the impact of the recession on wages and benefits. Chapter 6 covers the quality of jobs and employment (e.g. job demands, job control, job security, job supports, pay, and changes in job quality from 2004 to 2011). Chapter 7 analyzes employee well-being and how it has changed from 2004 to 2011. Chapter 8 treats the quality of employment relations, including the incidence of conflict, resolving workplace disputes, other potential indicators of discontent, and employment relations and discontent. Chapter 9 focuses on exploring the impact of the recession on workplaces and employees. Chapter 10 wraps up with discussions of continuity and change in employment relations institutions and practices, government policy and legislation, the recession, employees ' experiences, and the role of employment relations. A technical appendix concludes, detailing the study design, sample, questionnaires, sampling weights, sampling errors, and data access instructions.

The book is written clearly and exhibits a uniform style despite having seven authors. It is densely packed with new results, covering an impressive amount of ground for its modest length. In the compact space of only about 200 pages, the book provides a thorough and accessible introduction to the 2011 data that will likely stimulate lots of new research. After finishing the book, readers will have a good sense of what opportunities these data offer for research. The book is full of results that will be of interest to researchers but that are also fully accessible to non-academics. Given the wide scope of the discussion, most of the results presented are cross tabulations, though in some cases the authors comment on multivariate results.

The authors focus on a comparison between 2004 and 2011 without attempting to chart longer-term patterns. Though the reasons underlying that decision are sensible, a cumulative approach that incorporates the earlier waves would also be valuable and would further showcase the unique strengths of the WERS as a long-term project. Although the authors consistently remain true to the themes that pervade the book, to a large extent the design is modular and the ten chapters can be consumed independently, which creates a useful reference for readers interested in particular topics.

Several themes that pervade the text create a sense of continuity across the chapters. One is an emphasis on the importance of distinguishing between the public and private sectors, a point the authors convincingly develop throughout, particularly in the chapters on pay and rewards and on the quality of jobs and employment. Another theme explores the impact of the recent recession on workplaces and employees. Some of the 2011 questions were purposely crafted to uncover the effects of the recession on workplaces and employees. For example, workplace managers were asked the extent to which they agree with statements such as, “This workplace is now weaker as a result of its experience during the recent recession.” Such questions are helpful for getting a feel for the recession ' s impacts.

Although I think the focus on the recession is appropriate and interesting, at times I feel the authors push the theme a bit too far. This tends to happens when statistics from 2004 are compared to those from 2011 (when the 2011 question does not explicitly ask the respondent about effects of the recession), accompanied by language suggesting a “before versus after the recession” comparison. The concern is that a variable might be increasing, for example, between 2004 and the onset of the recession in 2008, after which it declines sharply as a consequence of the recession. Whether its 2011 value is above, below, or equal to the 2004 value is unclear, creating the potential for misinterpreting the effect of the recession.

Although I appreciate the great importance of employee well-being from the standpoint of societal welfare, I struggled to interpret the results of chapter 7. The underlying components of well-being on which the authors focus (job satisfaction, contentment, and enthusiasm) are overlapping and difficult to define concretely. The measures for these components were derived from many survey questions that ask workers their degree of satisfaction (on a Likert scale) with various job aspects. The authors then attach arbitrary numerical scores to the responses, and then sum across the various components. When the resulting additive indexes subsequently appear in regressions, the magnitudes of the partial correlations are not meaningful. The authors interpret the correlations of the well-being indexes with measures of job quality mostly in the context of particular psychological theories, but it is easy to imagine other explanations, and causality cannot be inferred. Whereas the authors conclude from their results that “It is clear that any policy aimed at improving employee well-being needs to take account of the important role of job quality”, I have difficulty extracting policy implications from the chapter.

With the preceding point in mind, consider future waves of WERS. The survey questions underlying the well-being analysis consume valuable real estate in the questionnaires, crowding out other questions that might be even more helpful. If we are interested in measuring employee well-being, for example, a natural place to start is with worker compensation, which is an important component of well-being that has the advantage of being readily quantified and measured. The usual counterargument would be that focusing on compensation would paint a narrow and incomplete picture of well-being. A response to that counterargument is that compensation is obviously important to any discussion of worker well-being, and the WERS questionnaires have considerable room for improvement in the area of compensation measurement. For example, the within-workplace wage distribution can be measured only very coarsely in WERS, and there is little information that would allow one to get a handle on the value of non-wage components of compensation. And in the chapter on pay and rewards, the authors are unable to present any results in monetary units. There is precedent in WERS history for remedying such deficiencies. For example, there is now a detailed survey of financial performance (with actual monetary numbers stated in pounds) to complement the qualitative measure on a Likert scale that has long been present. If a similar approach could be taken to get a better grip on compensation, there could potentially be lots of light to shed on questions concerning worker well-being. It would also allow analyses of the effects of systems of HR practices (which have been nicely measured in WERS for a long time) on the within-workplace compensation distribution, something that cannot be achieved in any other dataset.

Overall, the content of this well executed book is highly relevant and accessible for all who practice, tutor, research, or study in the field of human resource management, both inside and outside of academia, and it should be read by anyone interested in using WERS 2011. The main overarching message I extracted from the book concerned the remarkable stability of employment relations between 2004 and 2011, despite the fact that the period witnessed the largest economic contraction since the Great Depression, as well as a number of legislative changes that had the potential to significantly impact employment relations. Given the magnitudes of those events, it is striking how comparable the lessons are between the 2004 and 2011 surveys.