Have you ever been part of an HR investigation? Whether you were the subject, the investigator or simply an outside observer, there is growing evidence of the significant harm they can cause.
In this episode of our Transforming Business podcast series with Martin Parker, Andrew Cooper and Adrian Neal, editors of Under Investigation: Transforming Disciplinary Practice in the Workplace, discuss the issues with these processes.
They explore the impact employee investigations can have on organisational culture and show that prioritising employee wellbeing, alongside the application of these processes, is not only possible but essential.
Available to listen here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Andrew Cooper is the Head of Programmes for Employee Wellbeing in Aneurin Bevan University Health Board in NHS Wales. Adrian Neal is the Head of Employee Wellbeing in Aneurin Bevan University Health Board in NHS Wales and a Consultant Psychologist.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Under Investigation,
edited by Andrew Cooper and Adrian Neal, is available for £19.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:23 – What is your book doing?
2:30 – What potential harms are there, outside of the person going through the process?
6:19 – What angles are you both approaching this issue from?
8:17 – What stories stand out to you?
13:19 – What should we be doing instead?
17:12 – How does giving voice affect these processes for investigation?
24:59 – How does scale affect the application of these processes?
31:21 – How do these findings apply on a broader scale?
35:04 – Who would you like to read this book?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Martin Parker: Hello, everybody. My name is Martin Parker, I’m a professor at the University of Bristol Business School, and this is the Transforming Society podcast. Today I’m joined by two authors who’ve just edited a book called ‘Under Investigation: Transforming Disciplinary Practice in the Workplace’. So it’s my pleasure to spend some time and have a conversation with Andrew Cooper, who’s Head of Programmes for employee wellbeing at the Aneurin Bevan Health Board in NHS Wales.
He’s also development director for the Health Care People Management Association’s Avoiding Harm programme in the UK, and holds an honorary research role with the University of Plymouth, leading a program of research exploring the impact of the disciplinary process on individuals and organisations.
With Andrew is Adrian Neal, who’s the co-editor of this volume. He’s a consultant clinical psychologist and head of employee wellbeing at the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board in Wales.
Initially working in NHS adult mental health services, he specialised in employee wellbeing after completing an MSC in Occupational Psychology. Adrian has been involved in a number of collaborative projects across the UK, including health, education, government and the emergency services.
So welcome both, I’m really looking forward to having a conversation about the book you’ve edited here. Could you just start off by, I suppose, imagine you’re at a party and you’re just going to give somebody the kind of one paragraph summary of what the book is doing.
So, Andrew, do you want to kick off with this?
Andrew Cooper: Yes, certainly. And thanks, Martin, for the invitation on today’s podcast.
MP: A pleasure.
AC: I guess, in terms of the basis of the book, was taking, perhaps, a novel approach to the disciplinary policy and process, and looking at it more from the impact of the application on individuals taken through it, individuals involved in the process. They might be the investigators, they might be HR colleagues, all the way through to perhaps an impact that it might have on the organisation’s culture.
And certainly, as we’ve sought to build a case for examining the disciplinary policy and process in a new way, considering what that impact looks like on perhaps the economic impact to an organisation. And then on that last piece to really look at how does this impact service users, clients, customers if we don’t get it right?
MP: Yeah, that’s really nice, just to follow that up, Andrew. One of the things I was very quickly struck by is that I’d kind of opened this book, assuming you were going to be talking mostly about the person who is the subject of the disciplinary practice. But as you indicated very clearly there, you see the potential for harm being much more ramified than that, almost like as a kind of a series of concentric circles.
I think you use that diagram at some point, don’t you, radiating out from that person, right through the people who are investigating in society more broadly. Was that, this was as a result of your own observations, your own practice, that you started to understand the problems in that way.
AC: It certainly started with the individual at the center of the process. And Adrian will talk more about that. It certainly started with how somebody who has been impacted and that significant harm. But I guess we’ve been working on this programme for the last 3 or 4 years. And the deeper we got into it, the more conversations we had with colleagues, we would have colleagues come up to us, whether they were HR investigating offices saying, we’re actually harmed by this process, too, you know, from that sense of perhaps, seeing sensitive information, seeing distressing material in terms of an investigation, but also being impacted by looking on at the person going through that process and kind of managing that, that, that distress and anxiety in another person. So absolutely, it started with the individual at the center, but it was as we’ve sought to understand the issue and certainly sought to try and bring change. The picture got wider and we needed to understand it in a much broader way.
MP: So Adrian, I mean in your, again, your practice as an organisational psychologist, you saw the kind of what I just described as a kind of ramified almost sort of a network of harm in a way. Something along those lines.
Adrian Neal: Yeah, absolutely. I guess the easiest route is just years of exposure to people, employees seeking help for psychological symptoms associated being involved in these processes. So, very direct first hand experience of that, including, you know, how difficult it is actually to reduce those symptoms while these processes go on, not unlike legal processes in the criminal civilian world, these are imposed structures, processes that directly impacts people’s quality of life.
And and, you know, do for some lead to mental health problems, which you know, it’s not often, you know, kind of talked about. So there’s a very clear link there. I guess the other angle is, is also seeing a kind of more diffuse systemic impact. So with that kind of more organisational kind of lens, looking at the impact on teams.
So so back to your initial question. You know, if you were to be talking at a dinner party and, you know, somebody asked about the book, the odds are they would know somebody that had been involved in the process if it wasn’t them themselves, but they could, even vicariously could tell you about the impact it had on that small working system.
So for me, these are two things that are avoidable, is the mitigating or reducing or even preventing the impact on the individual and then also doing the same with the system. And then if you look at these big kind of creatures, these big systems like health systems, you know, it’s usually health critical work. Highly sensitive. Funding is usually an issue.
You lose 1 or 2 people and you start having an impact on patients. So then you start to see the ripple effect. Those concentric circles. So I guess where Andrew and I are looking at this, being from different angles, but seeing this ripple of harm, which in our eyes very often is avoidable, which once you’ve gone into that headspace, it’s quite a tricky one not to think about.
So that yeah, that would be my angle.
MP: So you’re both, you’re working alongside each other and you’re having conversations about the problems that you’re seeing, but presumably from slightly different emphases. Adrian primarily in terms of ideas from psychology. Andrew, more HR-y stuff, I guess. Yeah, something like that?
AC: So no, my background has been in the patient safety movement, I spent about 8 or 9 years working in patient safety, which recognised that often a lot of harm that was done to patients certainly wasn’t negligent or malicious, but it was very much around, as Adrian touched on, working in complex systems that often systems didn’t join up.
So one didn’t talk to the other and things got missed and things got overlooked. And the patient safety movement’s been established for the last 40, 50 years. And it’s been really trying to do the join up better to make patient care safer. And I guess what we drew across from the patient safety, and certainly a focus on avoidable patient harm, is what does avoidable employee harm look like? Are we doing things to our employees that if we just stopped and paused, reflected on the system in which they were happening, then actually we could reduce some of that harm. So, so so my background has been very much influenced by the patient safety movement, a real desire and commitment there to make health care safer.
But actually, it didn’t take too much to nudge it into organisational processes, application of HR policy and process, to see whether the join up was and in a sense how we could have a similar conversation.
MP: Wow, that’s really interesting and a really a really productive way of thinking about how you two might be working on a complex problem. So just spinning forward a bit then. So we’ve talked about the kind of if you like the sort of the set up, next I guess is to get into the, into the detail of some of these stories, because your book is a book of stories, and there’s you know, a sense, I think, in which in order to get listeners to this podcast and potential readers of the book in the same space, you need to give us a flavor of these kind of stories.
So is there, are there some that particularly kind of, well, stand out as being interesting or affecting accounts that you’d want to share with the people who are listening?
AN: It’s interesting that you described the book as a collection of stories. I didn’t think of it that way. But yeah, I think you’re right. It is. It’s very embedded in examples and case studies and kind of narratives that we’ve drawn from. It’s an interesting question because I’m actually for me, you know, I had a meeting with somebody last week who is caught up in their process.
And so for me, there’s stories everywhere, they kind of absolutely permeate my, you know, my, my kind of my experience of my work and I’ve been in post 11 years now. One of the reasons, I guess, and looking back, it’s always interesting to join the dots, even before Andrew and I had met, my interest in the impact of organisational processes on employees was there.
So I had initially looked at the impact of organisational change. This is going back probably 15 years. When I was doing my organisational psychology master’s as a kind of move across from clinical psychology. I was looking at the impact of organisational change on a small team, and it is surprisingly similar to what we’re seeing now through the grievance. But in terms of maybe the best example is, is actually a paper we published one of our first papers, and it does make its way into the book in various ways.
But it’s it’s the Alex story, but it’s a it was a case study, a live care, a real case study that we took a 360 degree lens at, so we had eight different professions or professional groups look at the single case study. And it was it was really our first venture into understanding the breadth of impact. So there was, as you said, there’s the obvious one.
You know, the thing you you think first was the, the, the, the impact on the person’s mental health. So we had a clinical psychologist, not me, look at it, but we went all the way through to GP, you know, a leadership consultant, health economist, an HR consultant. So we had a look at right across the spectrum. And I think it both gave us confidence that there was mileage in this, but also it kind of opened the door to the range of possibility.
Although a heart I’m a clinician working in the wellbeing sector, you’re usually, the doors, usually kind of, the horse has bolted usually. You’re doing work to help people recover from, generally if it’s if it’s work related, if the issue is- where as this we see is the opportunity to do something which is quite rare, which is prevention. So if you can do this and prevent even 50%, let’s say, that’s huge. That’s, in the wellbeing sector, that is massive because you are preventing exposure to this, but you can also mitigate. So those 50% people that do then get exposed to it, like the Alex case study, you can see where you can systematically, very prudently minimise harm. But I guess the harm for me is you’ve got that individual story, but you have organisational and team stories because teams have their own narratives, have their own kind of mythologies and histories.
You know, I’ve certainly seen teams split in two, if not more, because of these processes. We we do include one in the chapter on culture, but you see, the stuff have a lasting legacy in teams. And, you know, I was talking to a manager last week about a grievance process that’s happening in one team across a specialist area.
And they’ve got themselves into such a position, they’re now two camps, with a pro and against camp. And there’s one person in the middle with this process hanging over them, and they won’t talk to each other. So the managers are having to find ways to minimise the impact on patient care. So to me, that’s also part of the story.
It’s the story of individuals, it’s a story of systems., it’s a story of teams, but particularly in the healthcare system where people’s sense of who they are is often linked to what they do. I’m sure that is the case in other sectors, but particularly in healthcare. You see that richness of the impacts and therefore the stories are quite powerful.
MP: Yeah. No, that’s really interesting. And I suppose we can talk more about the extensions of these ideas outside the NHS, towards the end. But I was just thinking about the kind of the very particular nature of the NHS and of the kind of grievances that are likely to come in, because, of course, this is an organisation that’s working with some of the most intimate and charged parts of our lives, isn’t it?
As, as, as patients and of course, as employees and so on. So it’s not surprising in a way, that the NHS would be a cauldron for, for these kinds of emotions, I guess. The obvious question that follows from what you said, Adrian, and I’ll ask Andrew to, to to respond to this one, is okay, so it’s a very troublesome process and lots of people can potentially experience harm as a result of this.
What, you know in a nutshell, are you proposing should be done instead?
AC: So just to add to the conversation about stories and that Adrian’s outlined, I mean, stories are incredibly powerful. We learned that, again to take us back to the patient safety movement, that actually, there was a point within healthcare that the term ‘doctor knows best’ drove healthcare. And that actually, it’s only over to the last 20 to 30 years that we recognised that the patients living with a condition 24/7 experiencing the healthcare system actually has quite a lot to bring to their health care journey. And certainly in terms of the book and for this exercise, actually catching those stories was really important because we didn’t usually capture the experience of the individual going through the process. It was like the process reigned. The assumption that the process was in place, there was no changes necessary. And it wasn’t until you actually start asking people, what did it feel like?
What were the things in it that caused you most harm and distress? What were those impacts? That we actually got our sense of understanding of where that level of harm was coming. And I guess that that’s just a broader learning piece that we’d say to anybody, reading the book, not just health care, but if you’re working in a corporate organisation, if you’re working in local government or a university to actually understand what it feels like to go through that process, to understand perhaps where our systems fail somebody because they haven’t communicated to them regularly, that they have dropped a ball on something else, really starts helping you understand where perhaps the change needs to be made? So going back to your question, Martin, the key thing is always to listen first.
Actually what’s happening in the system, what are people experiencing. And I guess that’s where change can start to come about. So I think for us, you know, a really key part, and that’s where it kind of started alerting us to where where some of the real well-being challenges were for people. So for those leads in the investigation, it was a process, taking somebody through it. But for the person experiencing it, every missed deadline of a letter or of a communication would send somebody in to major stress and anxiety.
Promises made and broken in terms of that process had a significant impact as well. So I guess that’s what we used to start saying. How do we how do we run these processes differently?
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MP: There’s an interesting echo for me here that, you know, my background’s in sociology and I think one of the terms in sociology that we’ve seen over the last, 20 or 30 years, I guess, is towards this idea of giving voice. So quite often, people whose voices aren’t heard, women, people of color, whatever, are then kind of seen to be the or providing the possibility of that voice, then opening up a particular kind of process or understanding.
Yeah. And that potentially leading to some kind of social change. And that’s Andrew, pretty much what you’re saying, I think on on that isn’t that the the telling of the story then becomes a really important opening for potential change. Adrian.
AN: Just just to pick up on, I guess, your question, one of the things Andrew and I’ve experienced a lot when we’ve done training, so we’ve worked with a lot of other organisations to help them think about these processes. It’s been an absolute joy because of that kind of cross organisational learning. So local government, other NHS systems. So for us there’s something about okay, so what are you trying to achieve from using this process.
So we’ve evidenced, so we’ve we’ve pretty much created an evidence base where there wasn’t one evidencing impact. So it’s out there, it’s now within access to anyone wanting to look, can’t say it doesn’t. And we reflect that the impact is both individual and systemic, both economic and financial. So thinking okay, so so this is a big deal.
But what we encourage people to think about is not that these processes should be banned. Because actually that’s nuts. These are, they have a place but it’s do you appreciate the impact and therefore do you make sure you are using them appropriately for the right type of end? So what is your output? What do you want to achieve through this?
Whereas, I think historically we’ve seen it’s just the thing you do. We actually have far more useful ways of responding to, I guess, behavior. Let’s say that is and we may want to talk about this a little bit later that is unwarranted or undesired or saying, you know, something that is culturally or organisationally boundary violating. There are a million ways to respond to it much more constructively if you approach it slower and with more nuanced approach.
So you don’t just get the biggest hammer out of the drawer and use it because there’s a consequence. Now, then we’re into that space. And once you’re into that space, you’re thinking, okay, this actually is also about business. It’s about good business. Using resources, protecting resources. So we’ve moved away from… evolved the thinking that this is just about being nice to people because, you know, you don’t want to put through something that’s a little bit stressful.
We’re way out the realm there, this we know that this this can kill people. That’s been rare, but we have there are cases where this has led to death or significant life changing injury, but actually it’s just going to make life miserable for everybody. So if you don’t have to do it, don’t. And if you have to use it, how do you mitigate how do you use it more efficiently to be better at your business?
So I think that’s where it that’s the space we’re in. Both the moral place but also this is really sensible business. Would you, would you agree Andrew? I don’t want to override you, but there’s there’s that interesting balance we’re trying to kind of strike.
AC: Yeah, certainly. And I guess one of the key words that Martin you keep hearing come up from both of us is that system approach. I guess when we started this, we thought again that it was very much around changing the process, kind of in the corner of an organisation. But actually this is about how systems work. And I guess when we when we continued listening to colleagues and certainly started listening to managers who were responsible for, say, the fact finding part of an exercise to make a decision as to whether a discipline policy should be enacted.
Actually listening to them we started to get their back story. And there was a lot of fear that they felt that if they didn’t run a formal process, that somehow or another, they would get in trouble for it. So actually, the default was we have to run this process in order to cover ourselves and of course that goes back to not just system, but culture.
What is it about a culture that is saying this is the only way to address workplace issues? So, you know, we’ve worked with a number of organisations, and one of the first things we say to them is, what is your data telling you? And often they bring their data, and they’ll say, this is how many investigations they’ve run over a set period of time.
Okay, but tell us how many have led to no sanction and as always and, that’s always a clear measure for us and and and often the number of no sanctions is incredibly high in a lot of the organisations we work with is 50-60%. So we’re putting people through a process that we know to be harmful, that we know can cause major anxiety.
And yet the data’s saying we could have addressed it in a more informal way, but actually that came about because it was about understanding how the managers were thinking and operating. So then this isn’t about changing policy. This is about what is the culture of the organisation and how is that impacting disciplinary policy and process. So so when we work with organisations, we’ll say you need your exec team on board.
Your exec team need to sign up to what we’ve called a last resort approach. And that’s not about removing the process from the organisation, but it is about being respectful of it and saying, we will try every other option before we press the formal button. And when the exec team say that managers then hear a different message.
Oh, right, we don’t need to cover ourselves by going down the formal process. Actually, the top of the organisation is saying, we want you to try all the other approaches before you press that formal button.
MP: Which sounds thoroughly sensible when you say it like that, doesn’t it? But I think it’s really interesting to think about this from the perspective of the manager, who, you know, that phrase covering your back or covering your ass or whatever is very often in my experience and I’m sure in yours a real motive factor for people in terms of engaging in these kinds of processes. Adrian.
AN: Just to build really, I guess if you think about culture and you thinking, well, okay, so you know what what what should an organisations, you know, what are their most critical outputs? So so you think, okay, so if you’re working in safety critical systems, NHS is not the only one, what you want is, you know, ability to learn, ability to spot error, ability to evolve practice.
If you have cultures where there’s poor psychological safety or there’s a there’s anxiety or fear around admitting you’ve made a mistake because it might lead to a process that we know is harmful, odds are you don’t. So my so what we’ve also noticed is these the more thoughtful approach to these processes can also help the system learn and feel safer.
So that’s great business for everybody. So so and I guess as in the context of that, we’re also noticing how this might support a leadership culture and also a kind of a desired culture where people are more likely to thrive than just basically slide. These are all high level, highly desirable corporate outputs and pretty tricky. But for us, this is a important cornerstone because if your employees are frightened of saying they’ve made a mistake, you’re in trouble. If you’re in a safety critical system.
MP: Yeah, just so. The other thing I was thinking here, because obviously I was thinking about the application of this to universities as well, which are, you know, increasingly systems working at scale is is the question of scale, because there is something going on here, particularly in an organisation as large as the NHS, or rather a kind of almost like a pile of organisations that makes up the NHS, isn’t it. About the way in which policy and procedure then becomes enacted with less regard to particular sorts of contexts?
Yeah? So in other words, you know, if the policy says something, presumably it has to be applied in every single context that you’re talking about, even though those contexts might be very different in terms of the workplace cultures or the nature of the safety critical systems or the kind of patients or whatever you’re going through. Yeah? Adrian.
AN: Yeah, I mean, that is a fascinating one, I guess. So. So from my experience, and Andrew definitely tell me if I’m getting this wrong, and certainly with greater exposure to HR colleagues, there’s often a lot of interpretation allowed or possible when it comes to kind of going from theory or policy to practice. I guess for us that was quite an interesting revelation.
But it also suggests that this decision making will be affected by local culture and tolerance, particularly tolerance of risk. So so just in the same way that we would, any work with organisations where we have exec sign off to make this, to authorise that and make it permissible to allow their HR practitioners and their managers to actually take some risks and to consider alternatives.
So I imagine systems where there are, I guess, let’s just say very sensitised to risk or particularly threatened or where there’s low psychological safety. It’s probably going to be trickier to be flexible, there’s going to be more rigidity around implementation of ‘this is how we do it’ and less tolerance around the grey. Now, what we’ve seen is there’s a lot of value in those individual appraisals of the context, which you get if you spend more time looking at the context before you, you get the hammer out of the drawer.
But I’m a realist, and some organisations will have very limited tolerance for that. And it might be that universities, because we all know that you know, universities are wonderfully happy places to work in the moment.
MP: Certainly are!
AN: There might be a correlation between that and practice from an HR people policy implementation. I would not be surprised. So so part of us is a part of our work, and this is later thinking is, is this also a cultural intervention? Andrew, kind of talked about it. We think it is. But it wasn’t how it started.
But it, it always needs to be to get in there. But it’s more likely to take root in the system that is receptive, rather than one that is is kind of tied of of threat.
MP: And just to be clear here, the distinction you’re making here is kind of an old one between culture and structure, isn’t it? So the idea that structure is the kind of the bureaucratic aspect of the organisation and is comprised of a set of rules, policies, procedures, and so on. Whilst culture is people’s attitudes in part those attitudes towards those rules, something along those lines.
AN: That’s really interesting. I mean, to me that that is it’s the balance, isn’t it? It’s kind of which is more dominant and which do you which do you prioritize the most? And, you know, I guess we know bureaucracies have their own psychosocial function in a system. And sometimes they’re intentional, sometimes they’re not. I would say some systems become more bureaucratic as a result of their perception of threat.
And therefore that influences culture. I think it goes both ways, but I’d much rather culture to be set as in intentionally shaped, and that to change the bureaucratic processes than the other way around. But, you know, I think I’m not sure how many people would, would look at the whole system to make that intentional. I think these things happen with a lot less intention.
MP: I think they do. I mean, that’s the nature of systems, I guess, isn’t that is there are unintended consequences that no individual actors are unnecessarily responsible for or even conscious of. Andrew.
AC: Just picking up in terms of the policy level, I think we’ve got a major problem with policy, certainly in terms of policy design. So we’ve been undertaking a review of the NHS Wales disciplinary policy, which, which serves, the 70,000 working population of NHS in Wales. And when we started it, we, we thought, what does the literature say? You know, what is in the literature to say what is good policy design looks like, what does good process look like? What does good application look like? And we undertook a rapid evidence review and found very little out there. And I think that’s quite staggering that actually we will be running thousands of disciplinary processes every day around the world. And the HR academic side hasn’t got an evidence base for how they are run.
And for me, somebody said to me recently, in terms of one of their policies, they said the problem with this policy, Andrew, is that it doesn’t carry a health warning because the policy has been viewed wholly from a process perspective. This is about pushing somebody through a process, but it doesn’t have any consideration for the impact of that process on that individual.
So you know, we’ve talked about systems, we’ve talked about cultures. But actually policy design plays a big part in that because actually our managers and our HR colleagues and organisations lean very heavily on that policy when they are delivering these processes. Those policies need to change to reflect some of the harm that we’ve talked about and that address what we believe are the two key parts of a good investigation, good adherence to policy and process, but also a recognition that we need to provide a much better duty of care and support to the individual going through it.
MP: Fascinating. In the last few minutes that we’ve got available to us, let’s just expand this out a bit because, you know, there’s a there’s a danger, I suppose, that some people might think this is just about the NHS or just about the public sector or something like that. But I think both of you were suggesting to me that you see the application of some of these ideas in all sorts of organisations, public and private sector, and presumably voluntary third sector organisations too.
So, Adrian, do you want to say a little bit about how you can see these arguments playing out in other domains as well?
AN: I mean, we’ve certainly had conversations with people from all sorts of different sectors, and there’s generally been consensus we have a problem with this too, which is both reassuring, but also, I guess makes you a bit worried. But, you know, I think it’s it’s back to these the balancing of these really difficult things particularly around, you know, culture of organisation, the state of their policies, how they have historically resolved employee relations issues. Let’s just say.
I think that that will be, you know, each sector has a different thing. You know, we, you, you say in higher education there’ll be traditions that are adhered to and policies and practices and cultures that exist. In industry there’ll be other ones. I, I guess where you have the central denomination between, it’s not the right expression, but you have the central kind of mechanism, which is a person employed to perform tasks for renumeration.
You know, I guess you have the requirement for them to engage in a team to deliver an agreed output. You’ll have that diode, don’t you? You have the employer and employee and you, you you know, you are then in that space. Well, how does the employer respond to the employee if they transgress a boundary, be that overt or covertly?
You know, I think we’re suggesting that what we are learning is applicable to any relationship where you employ somebody, because by virtue it would because you will have an approach, just some organisations are probably really good at it and actually are probably doing what we’re suggesting already without even, you know, without any influence from us. Not that we are influencing everybody.
But, you know, some people are already ahead of the game, but it’s because it’s how they design their work and how they design their how they want to shape their working experience and possibly even linked to their understanding of what they need their employees to do. But I guess in our experience, a lot of people are stuck and they get caught up in this.
How do you respond to boundary violations from an employee, even if it’s I mean, I guess the irony is that often there are no boundary violations. It’s assumed violation. But how do you and you mentioned it in your kind of prologue, how do organisations manage people within parameters that is agreed to be acceptable, and how does power play into that?
How does the psychological contract, how does the nature of the work kind of influence that? And I mean, it is a fascinating kind of area. But I think it’s it’s it’s good business to minimise waste.
MP: Yeah, I agree absolutely. And for me, you know, my, my, my background didn’t, you know, organisational sociology and so on, it seems that you’re pushing against something quite fundamental about the nature of discipline and consequently, the nature of organising something along those lines, because it’s very difficult for us to imagine any organisations in which there is not some kind of disciplinary process in order that everybody’s swimming in roughly the same direction, but at the same time, you’re pointing to the huge forms of damage and waste that are being caused because of the kind of, to me, rather sort of ritualistic or defensive versions of that process.
Drawing to a close then, Andrew, who would you like to read this book? Who do you think is your audience here?
AC: We’ve got a number of audiences we’d like to be reading the book. I think we had this sense that it would be great for the future HR professionals, those that are studying now to be reading it. You know, what’s particularly interesting about this whole subject is taking a step back. It’s only just been under 30 years that, formal legislation came in to say that organisations should have a disciplinary policy in place to run within the organisation.
The Acas guidelines only came out in 2009, and then were updated in 2015. So it kind of feels we’re still in an experiment around the disciplinary policy and process because it’s still relatively new, if we look at, kind of policy design, development and application. So in terms of readers we’d like to read the book, we’d really like the students coming in and kind of not necessarily be informed by the old practice of simply following process.
But as I said earlier, you know, bringing process and the duty of care together so that we run the best investigations, not just for the person going through it, but actually for the good to the organisation as well. We want good investigations to highlight learning, drive out error and to make organisations more safe, effective, productive, profitable. So, you know, we’ve got a new generation coming through, how do we help them understand it?
You know, we want HR colleagues that are working and operating in the system today to be reading it. You know, they’ve got a challenging job. The demands on HR colleagues are increasing, we know from reports into the CIPD they’re under significant pressure, they’re all experiencing kinds of mental health stresses in pressures too. And somehow, I think the processes, the way that we run them at the moment contribute to that.
That actually we put our HR colleagues under pressure because we’ve never stopped to think, is there a different way to apply disciplinary policy and process? But I guess the key group that we’d like to see reading this are the HR leaders in the HR profession. We’ve harmed a lot of people over the decades through the application of disciplinary policy and process.
Sometimes for basic things that we’ve just focused on the policy and process and not realised we’re putting a human being through it. This book, we hope, will be a change, that actually HR will say, yeah, we’ve got this wrong and this book is certainly not about pointing a finger or apportioning blame. That’s what we learnt from the patient safety movement.
This is about being curious about, can we do it better? So that it improves the outcomes for employees taken through it, their organisations and even our HR colleagues.
MP: Wonderful. Tremendous summary Andrew, thank you very much indeed. So that was the Transforming Society podcast. My name is Martin Parker from the University of Bristol Business School, and we were talking about ‘Under Investigation: Transforming Disciplinary Practice in the Workplace’, published by Bristol University Press, edited by Andrew Cooper and Adrian Neal. That was a wonderful conversation, really interesting, and a fantastic example of the way in which practical problems, you know, which we might initially think of as being quite small, quite detailed things, rapidly scale out and become kind of major questions for the way in which we think about organisations and organising.
So thanks very much for listening, everybody. If you want to know more about the book, have a look at either the Transforming Society website or the Bristol University Press website and you can find details there. Thanks very much for listening. Bye bye.