MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Teams
UNiFI’s corporate approach to team development stands out in this
area. Faced with bringing together three quite different organisations –
two of them staff associations merging with a union which traditionally
hated staff associations – they made use of the expertise of one or two
key staff and set up project teams to run aspects of the merger
campaign. They then built on this when the new union came into
existence by adopting the idea of project group working as an
instrument of policy. The objectives were that it would bring staff
together to work together (given the existence of three head offices),
would give responsibility to more junior staff and would get some real
jobs done. The jobs listed below were the subject of project group
consideration in July 2000..
UNiFI PROJECT TEAMS
Communicating with members
Organising in the branch network
Organising recognised greenfield sites
Organising unrecognised greenfield sites
Organising large sites
Organising HSBC managers
Organising in partnerships
Negotiating in an organising union
Negotiating in merging employers
Ending divided staff representation
Merger with finance unions/associations
E-organising
Conference motions
Education – generic reps course
Two staff conferences were held to set up, and hear reports from,
project teams, the second one of which was well regarded by staff
attending the staff meeting noted by the researcher. Not all the teams
were a success, some staff did not want to co-operate and there were
suggestions that the idea had not fully survived. However, the attitude
to them was positive and one felt that in UNiFI working in teams was
part of the culture.
In UNISON, the rhetoric of teamwork was also positive. Here teamwork
had been adopted on a corporate basis because an initiative had been
launched to organise regional staff in teams. As one manager testified,
this runs counter to regional officers’ traditional individualistic culture
and in all three regional offices researched, some problems were
identified. In PCS, there were similar cultural issues identified, less than
in UNiFI and UNISON, perhaps because regional offices in PCS have
far more bounded authority than in those unions. In part, they also
arose from the culture of the former CPSA which had not placed value
in teams and, on merger, associated them with the PTC tradition of, as
they saw it, setting up a working party for everything. Despite this, most
comments about working in teams were positive.
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