MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Resource distribution systems
Because of the lack of a new head office on Vesting Day, a decision
was taken to set up a management suite in the City of London where
senior managers from all three unions would be based for at least a
proportion of their time. In practice, senior managers did not generally
use it for the original purpose intended:-
I was very sad that Holborn Towers did not succeed. I thought
at the time that just to move the GSs and DGSs was a recipe for
failure. All the people they worked with were in different offices
and they were never going to give up their own offices full-time
to go into Holborn Towers. Everybody they worked with was
working in a different office. And I think at least the AGSs
should have gone in there if not some others as well. It would
have been difficult to work out how far down the structure to go
but we never had that debate and the DGSs really didn't move in
there at all. Everybody used the first excuse they could just to
drop the idea. I think it was sad that that was a failure because
with the abolition of Holborn Towers it was inevitable that we
were going to go into Mabledon Place. (Interviewee A)
Although one manager was rather more well disposed to its operation:-
I suppose the only thing I would say was that the Holborn
initiative wasn't brilliant, it had the idea of bringing the senior
officers from the three unions together and was at least a step
forward in terms of providing some coherent leadership. So I
don't blame the people for doing that, given what we had, which
was three different head offices. I think it was probably quite a
good thing to have done but it didn't solve the problem of people
feeling that there was a hierarchy and gearing their allocations of
physical space to where they were in the hierarchy. (Interviewee
J)
There are some coloured descriptions of the consequences of the
decision to allocate head office space between the two old offices:-
Well obviously for us it had fairly drastic kinds of practical issues
in that it is not ideal to try and communicate an organisation's
thoughts and wants and desires when you are miles away from
most of it and therefore from having access to people and it was
very difficult. So obviously there were huge practical problems
but I think more importantly it had a huge impact on people's
feelings about the organisation……..I think the other thing in did
was that it made -- and I have to say I do still feel this in Unison
and I'm not sure whether this is true in the sense that it already
was the strategy -- but it felt to us as though we were regarded
as a function that was not core to the union's key work.
(Interviewee G)
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