Co-producing distrust?
The paradox of consultation in restructuring
I went through my first internal restructure when I was working for a bank here in NZ. I remember the all-staff meeting invite for 10am pinging in my inbox at 9am on a Tuesday and my colleague erupting into some colourful expletives, and a “not again!”. Not again what?, I inquired. “A restructure… that means a restructure! FFS.” We all trotted into the meeting and I saw my teammates eyes rolling as the neatly-prepared preso spun through the script that I’m now so familiar with: new strategy, vision, barriers, design principles, models, structure.
Naïve as I was, I teamed up with another colleague who had not been through a restructure before and we claimed a break-out room for an afternoon to prepare a thorough response for the consultation processes, since the managers had so frequently and emphatically stated that they were “very invested in your feedback and ideas”. We were on fire, it was quite inspiring and
I recall sending of our feedback with the warm certainty that we’d soon hear from the decision-makers and see our ideas incorporated into the next stage plan.
Well, you guessed it – weeks later we all received an email with the final structural design, which happened to match the proposed design to 90%, bar a few updated role- and team-titles. We were shattered, and our colleagues – who had not fallen for this silly trap of false hope – were there to comfort us. Years later I watched bright-eyed and bushy-tailed younger colleagues go through the same process, and I knew I had to let them experience it for themselves, let them make their submission, as my cynical grumblings wouldn’t save them the disappointment.
Consultation is legally required when a “workplace change” takes place.
Employment NZ writes that: “It’s important to read and genuinely consider the feedback received.”
And that’s pretty much as far as regulation can go, I suppose. What happens in practice is often perceived as lip service by the affected employees, as these comments from my survey of 1,400 public service union members from last years exemplify:
“Any views that did not support what they wanted were discounted completely.”
“Consultation: ignored. They virtue signal by having a process, but none of us believe in it anymore. It's a management which insulates itself from consequences.”
“Whilst there was a process of review and they gave an opportunity to express our views, this was limited in terms of what feedback we could provide or what meaningful views could be expressed as they were not taking criticism or willing to reconsider the actual restructure or anything that would actually affect frontline staff.”
Well, people just don’t like change, right? But it’s important that people can have their say.
There is, however, a large body of literature from studies around the world that come to the conclusion that the way in which participatory methods are typically applied in change processes have the opposite effect of the intended.
At the leaders’ pleasure
In theory, participationis supposed to increase employee “buy-in” and reduce uncertainty during change processes. It gives employees a voice in a process in which they tend to be the reactive element, last to be informed of the plans.
Salmi & Mattelmäki (2019) speak of 'in-between spaces' in which a constructive exchange is supposed to take place. But fundamentally, it is the leaders who shape and govern these spaces and how the engagement is carried out in them.
In my dataset of 405 restructures between 2018 and 2021, about a third mention some kind of early workshop or information-gathering with the teams in question. Such sessions tend to be open, asking staff to share what they think works, doesn’t work, or should be done differently in their team. And in two-third of restructures, staff seemed to have first been informed of the plans for change at the point of formal consultation.
Even where employees are asked for their views early-doors, the information is taken away and used by leaders in whatever shape or form they are willing and able to. A few standout examples go through multiple rounds of consultation, closer resembling a discourse between both sides – but it’s barely a handful of cases.
As Turnhout et al. (2020) put it, the current participation practices:
“(…) can end up reproducing, rather than mitigating, existing unequal power relations and (…) often do not contribute to societal transformation.”
And Sahay & Goldthwaite (2024) write:
"Participation provides a sense of agency, yet managers’ framing of participation can lead to unintended resistance when employees feel coerced into the process"
There’s a word: coercion.
I must confess, I have read an awful lot of “organisational change” literature, and 80% of it appears to be academically-worded tracts on how to use dark patterns, persuasion and the right “storytelling” to coax passive employees into going along with the changes as the leaders envision them – even against their own interest. It’s borderline marketing, in large stretches.
But really, can you actually do that? Can a manager convince their staff that a novel idea that has little to no relation to their own interest and concerns is necessary and good, just by being a great communicator?
What about the other side?
As so often, my stories up to this point might read like a Marxist soap-box tirade. But part of the truth, to me, is that a huge element of organisational change processes consist of analysis, projection, discussion and tense, repeating, tiring negotiations between reasonably well-intentioned leaders. More often than not, I’ve seen leader bat hard for the interests of their team members in the face of budget restrictions, or changed requirements.
Trouble is, that process happens backstage. Behind locked doors. And that breeds a fog of conspiracy that leads employees to believe they’ve been had.
I recall an series of three “ideation” workshops that my division’s leadership ran at a large department, each themed as “customer”, “impact”, and “efficiency”. Yeah… I know.
You could cut the cynicism with a knife in the first one, as all stood with their arms crossed in front of them. But the leaders did what they could to show openness and genuine interest, and by the last session there was something like a tiny flame of positivity alight between us. We walked out and looked at one another, asking: do you think this is real? Do you think they’ll listen this time?
A month went by and as the proposed new structure was circulated, all hopes fell away into the deepest depression, as even with the most willing eyes it was impossible to see how the themes, ideas and suggestions from our workshops had in ANY SHAPE OR FORM lead to what was on those pages.
But knowing what I know now – I’m sure there WAS some kind of connection, at some point. But in the fog of war (and perhaps by incompetence to some degree, I won’t lie), red threads got lost. Managers end up being so close in proximity to the plans that they might be incapable of seeing how far removed their solutions are from the shared starting point that they worked hard to create in the beginning.
And in the end, it is still the leaders who have some form of control here. In theory, they also have control over the thickness of that fog of war, confidentiality permitting.
To add to that, Sahay & Goldthwaite (2024) find that:
"Implementers often equated participation with resistance and used different communication techniques to shape how employees shared ideas"
After the hard graft they’ve done negotiating, ANY feedback from staff is bound to come across as ill-informed, as I have described in a previous post on the pernicious cycle of restructuring.
Which leads me to ask... Is the consultation-based approach to organisational change really good for us?
I cited three academic papers here, but I could pile up more. This is really very well researched. If we have so much evidence that the current consultation-setting is counter-productive – then shouldn’t we consider alternatives?
So, should we do away with it?
I’m no employment law expert, but that seems like it won’t move us in the right direction. It reminds me of a line I’ve heard from an agile manager on multiple occasions: “The only thing worse than stand-up, is no stand-up.”
And as these studies report frustration expressed by employees after seemingly fruitless consultation processes – one would need to compare their stats to a control group in which restructures were carried out without running consultation altogether. Then we’d see frustration squared, I presume. So while the studies point us in an important direction, the answer may not be so straight-forward.
Instead
I’ll suggest that it’s misleading to describe processes in which staff are asked for their opinion once, or asked for formal feedback on fully-formed plans as “participatory” processes. They are consultative processes. Staff are being consulted, they act purely as informants to the active parties – managers and their advisors. “Participation” is too broad a term here, and while I’m normally not a fan of semantic discussions, I think in this case it’s a crucial difference. Participation – or dare I even say – collaboration?
At the bottom of this conundrum is a question of power and hierarchical control.
We still work in very rigid forms of organisations in which the only real power comes from formal reporting lines and tiers – each of them affording you more power over other employees. I genuinely don’t have a fully-formed answer here, but I want to point into the direction we may need to follow if we were interested in finding a resolution:
What if we had other means by which organisational power would be distributed? Power can also come in the form of budgets, sign-offs and delegations, and that’s just sticking to “hard” concepts of power, skipping over less obvious forms of power and influence (for the sake of the argument). Could such powers be distributed differently across the people in an organisation, and thus mix up the incentives and negotiations that need to take place when a giant tanker of an institution wants to turn into a different direction, collectively?
And with that, I leave you with a half-formed thought rather than a seemingly simple conclusion – and I fully reserve the right to entirely change my mind on the matter at the next intersection of more knowledge. Because this, truly, is a giant bowl of fish hooks with loads of powers pulling in different directions.