Staff Council Challenges

Some jobs are always going to be tough. A few are always going to be predictable. But many will be usually routine and occasionally very tough.

Routine jobs are not easy, but most of the time it will be possible to navigate along a set path. I was recently chairman of a choir for four years. It was never simple – plenty of egos to massage, some creative opportunities for growth, some common sense financial things – but for all my tenure I was able to rely on templates from the past and a decent team who knew their jobs. But I was lucky. My tenure might have coincided with something critical, such as an embezzlement case or a discipline case against the conductor, for example. That is what I mean about a routine job with the potential to turn nasty.

Such jobs are all over the place. HSE manager may be a good example. The crony George Bush put in charge of water security just before Katrina hit is certainly a great example. The audit function in banks might just have become a bit scarier. Even generally tough jobs sometimes throw up a whole new challenge – take Jeroen van de Veer in 2004 with the reserves crisis. For most of us, it is moments like these that make all the difference, yet it is quite random when the moments will arise and the sorts of skills we will require to develop on the run when the time comes. No wonder luck seems to play such a major role in so many spheres of life.

I would argue that a senior position in a staff council in a place like the Netherlands, neatly fits the profile of a routine job with potential to explode. People accept these roles in addition to their normal workload out of a sense of duty, a wish to develop or some passion to leave a legacy. Most of the time the role can be navigated with some comfort by following an established process and good common sense. Then along comes 2009, and suddenly you are in the eye of a storm.

In Global Solutions, I’m impressed so far with both the leadership and with the (NL) staff council, as we try to Win in the Downturn. We currently have a public impasse and a programme put on hold, so this may appear a strange statement, hence let me explain it. The leaders saw potential trouble ahead and acted quickly to come up with a robust exercise to prepare the business well for storms. This was designed fairly and transparently, and communicated very openly, and always taking care to express that staff council approval was required, in many legislatures including Holland. For their part, the staff council has done their job, scrutinizing the proposal for legality and consistency to agreed fair principles, and has pointed out some potential flaws. Both parties have moved with urgency to seek to resolve the questions, taking care to communicate along the road and to keep the enterprise interest in the spotlight.

What could be better? We have a public change of plan, but for well-explained reasons. We should be pleased that our representatives, on both sides, are working with pace for our benefit. Shape, simplify, accelerate in action. Now let us hope they can close a deal quickly and we can all move on.

For the wider NL staff council, I am further from the action, so I have to be careful about reaching conclusions. But somehow we have all lost when disagreements surface outside Shell. On the staff council side, escalation must have been a tough decision, a dilemma unexpected when the members ran for office. Before condemning this, we should ask ourselves what we might have done, and also be ready to ask ourselves why we didn’t run for office if we thought we could have done better.

The management side has tough challenges too. Here is one thought - I only hope that the key players have in mind the key lessons of Brent Spar. Brent Spar was a situation where Shell leaders were technically and legally justified, but forgot that the court of emotion and public opinion has other dimensions. The current situation over leadership bonuses and share awards is different in many ways, but perhaps similar in some key fundamentals. As I say, I am a long way from the detail, but I hope for the sake of our company and all of us who work for it that our representatives can quickly find a workable way forward in tune with external expectations.

On the fairness of the awards themselves, it is certainly a shame that one set of rules were laid down and then for two years in a row we have had to rely on the small print. Probably the mistake was in the setting of the rules in the first place. And I am someone who has received a share award and chosen to accept it, so I forfeit my right to condemn. I wonder how many managers have given the money back?

The moral of the story – when you take on a job, try to envisage what might come along to make it much tougher. Before accepting, check whether you are ready for that, and then build a support network to give you as good a chance as possible when the crisis strikes.