This is a bit of a personal rant, so please read it with that bias in mind.
There’s a weird culture of management arrogance at TVNZ. It’s persisted over the last two and a bit decades of personal experience with the company, despite restructures and staff turnover.
It seems to manifest in two ways:
- distrust of staff, as in management not trusting their reports at the bottom of the hierarchy
- cognitive dissonance between what is and what should be
Consultation with staff for restructuring has never been genuine: the plans are always already made and the “consulting” is actually just “telling”.
Planning for the future has always been an ivory tower exercise by management, apparently because management have the “overview” but then don’t place any value on the worker’s knowledge of the actual work. Staff know there’s plenty of penny-wise pound-foolish bullshit work done “but it’s the TVNZ way so keep doing it”.
In this case there’s one of two root causes:
- ineptitude: no one thought that they’d better check employment contracts for relevant clauses they’d negotiated
- malevolence: they did but chose to ignore them
Given businesses are effectively run like dictatorships, and the public sector orgs emulate privates wherever possible, I’d say good practice in this space is extremely rare.
I’m curious what good practice looks like. I’m not sure I can think of a way it can be handled well, and I’m also not convinced never restructuring is good either.
Genuine worker involvement in these decisions from the start, not just consulting on a fait accompli.
Ultimately that means proper structured worker representation through unions that can meet management at their level. Germany for example, has union representation on company boards. Worker owned cooperatives are another model.
Ah yes, I guess that makes sense. Working with the employees instead of us vs them.