When you're working on improving employee-employer relations, you're really....

Letting Genies Out Of Bottles

As I was boarding another indistinguishable airplane at the end of another long day of flip charts, rental car counters, and hurried calls instead of meals, I remembered that I had promised an article for the special education issue of the Journal of AQP.

The deadline was but hours away; yet I had developed merely a mental outline since the commitment date a few weeks ago. Then it occurred to me. I’ve got this wonderful story to tell my colleagues ushering in the quality and participation paradigm. "I’ll do that!" I said to myself and save the clinical reportage for another time or for others better suited or more inclined to do so. But, how can I impart how I feel about what we are doing? How can I explain to others, who look at my schedule and pronounce me insane or addicted to work, what it is like to feel guilty to be paid for something you love to do?

How do you capture in words when one is not a wordsmith, poet, or novelist the wonderment, excitement, creativity, and energy that you see coming to life in school districts that just a few months before may have been better characterized by describing the skeletal remains of two scorpions locked in a mutually victorious embrace in the desert sand? So I thought I’d offer the same description I give anyone now who inquires into what the California Foundation for the Improvement of Employer/Employee Relations (CFIER) is all about: We are letting genies out of bottles.

Watch out for a simple slap dab, top down application of TQM to education... My congratulations to the AQP Journal for the foresight to pull together a special issue regarding what’s happening to education today. I share the Journal’s enthusiasm for the application of the paradigm of quality and participation to public education. I’m concerned, however, that the application of this paradigm to educating and to educational organizations will be accomplished or attempted via the usual top down mandate by management.

Ends and means must be consistent... This has begun to happen already here in California, and I view it with alarm. I fear that unless the elements of the ends sought are integral to the means used to initiate and embrace the quality and participation paradigm it will eventually fail. To be thought of as "just another one of those fads that they wanted us to do" seems to be the fate of so many new ideas in education introduced without employee (union) ownership. This is a syndrome one often finds when you look closely at this very vital institution.

Work on employee-employer relations first... My prescription for avoidance of this syndrome is to focus first upon the soul of the organization: the relationship between employer and employee (union). By establishing the true participation of the employee (via the union when one exists) in the organization’s decision making regarding direction and methods, a genuine shift to the quality and participation paradigm is assured.

Without employee (union) participation at this fundamental decision making level such a shift is seriously at risk. How we in California are bringing on such participation at this seminal level is outlined here.

On genies and cork pulling
In both the statewide and local view a genie has been let out of the bottle. It’s a friendly genie. It’s also a user–friendly genie. Importantly, it’s a genie that is responsible for heartening results during a very difficult financial time. This genie shows the promise of bringing on such a fundamental change in the employment culture that the positive promise of quality improvement through the application of a variety of models of employee involvement can be legitimately realized in public education.

As one who has been wrenching the cork from the genie’s bottle school district by district, I am compelled to share this story with AQP readers even as it unfolds before me. It may well be a story that is premature in its telling. It is certain that you will be looking for further information because yours truly is so consumed in pulling the cork and introducing the genie that little time remains to tell the story, yet the telling of this story is imperative if we are to expect to see the kind of improvement in educational quality we all believe necessary to achieve the desired out-comes in our economy and social conditions.

The genie defined… The genie I’m referring to is the "human relations software" Tom Peters proclaims as so vitally necessary to the success of any organizational change. This genie precipitates such a fundamental change in the seminal relation-ship of an organization, that relationship between employer and employee, that positive, systemic change is inevitable, legitimate, and lasting.

The genie is personified through the application of a collection of non–adversarial principles and processes to the practice of employer–employee relations and collective bargaining. This collection of principles and practices is applicable in both unionized and non–unionized settings. Accurately called interest based negotiations, rather than win-win or collaborative bargaining, this collection of principles and practices is quite contrary to the traditional heritage of employer and employee relationships. The interest based approach eventually erupts in trust, understanding, and mutual commitment in this critical context.

Why were we looking for change and improvement?
As we all know, in the mid-80s private industry was acknowledging a very serious wake–up call from abroad. As our culture seems more comfortable in laying blame than in describing cause and effect, industry began looking for culprits to its demise. One culprit conveniently at hand was public education. However, the sad condition of education wasn’t news to educators. By their own admission the quality of education provided in the public sector left much to be desired. We need not go into those statistics here as we know them only too well.

Do we need a new collective bargaining style in education? This fault finding by industry while injurious to the esteem and sense of worth of many well-meaning and highly educated folks involved in education was taken seriously and efforts were initiated to remedy what was seen. Among those efforts were inquiries into the impact of collective bargaining upon the quality of education.

These investigators determined that the way in which we engage in collective bargaining and employer–employee relations left practitioners fatigued and either presumed or resulted in an adversarial relationship between employer and employee (most usually articulated through the employees’ union).

It was this finding that prompted the investigators to urge collective bargaining practitioners to seek out a more elegant means of engaging in their craft and handling the conflict that was inevitable in attempts to reconcile differing interests.

Overload in California’s public bargaining processes... Within this context the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) in California was faced with its own crisis of a growing case-load. Contrary to expectations at the time the agency was initially conceived (1976) the caseload of conflicts had not decreased. Projecting this caseload growth in the face of declining financial resources in state government stimulated the agency to call upon its constituent groups to join in a search for a less adversarial means of engaging in collective bargaining and employer–employ-ee relations.

The Harvard Negotiations Project... Through a small committee composed of representatives from the major statewide employee and employer organizations in public education the search was on. The inquiry by this committee eventually led to the Harvard Negotiations Project and its publication Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and Bill Ury.

Trying a new way of bargaining
Even though PERB Advisory Committee participants believed that they had discovered a process that may have appropriate application to collective bargaining, a concern existed (which has since been borne out) that its application to the practice of collective bargaining would be difficult without some initial introduction to practitioners.

Making the approach user friendly... As a consequence, this small group transformed itself into a "curriculum committee". It’s charge was to translate the conceptualizations of an interest approach to negotiations into a user friendly form. Armed with funding from the Stuart and Hewlett Foundations and an exhaustive survey of practitioners, the PERB Curriculum Committee did just that.

Its first application was in August of 1989 with union management teams from two school districts spending a week learning the elements of interest based negotiations and the principles of a positive relationship. Since that initial start up, intensive union management relationships throughout public school districts in California and Canada have taken the initiative to attempt their own transformation from adversarial relationships to cooperative ones.

The genie outgrows its home... With curriculum in hand, pilot project under way, and enthusiasm that knew no bounds, the PERB Curriculum Committee set out to introduce this approach to collective bargaining to as many school districts as it could. Along the way it was decided that this was not the central charge of the agency itself. It became evident that the project would best sustain itself by not continuing to reside within the halls of government.

The Curriculum Committee with the help of legislators, PERB, and the organizations comprising the coalition that had brought on the project created a not–for–profit foundation called California Foundation for the Improvement of Employer– Employee Relations (CFIER). This acronym seems apropos in that it was pronounced as in cease firing.

Growing use of the new approach... By the time the foundation opened its door in April of 1991, some 35 employer-employee relationships throughout California had been introduced to interest–based negotiations and positive relationship principles.

The foundation received further funding from the Stuart and Hewlett Foundations to carry on its work for another two years. By charging fees to participating teams to help offset some of the cost of the initial start up transition, CFIER has been able to expand the use of interest-based negotiations to more than 100 employer-employee relationships. These relationships are found in school districts representing a cross section of schools in terms of student population, geography, and demographic variables. The two classic motivations for change are also found in these school districts and unions: breakdown or a strategic decision to improve.

Introducing the process to people and their organizations... The introduction of this approach to employer-employee relations and collective bargaining is accomplished through a variety of offerings conceived by the foundation’s volunteer curriculum committee.

One such offering is the original five-day, intensive introduction to the process and principles. Primarily designed for seriously dysfunctional relationships, the five–day introduction engages the parties in 65 hours of lecture, exercises, and negotiation simulations.

CFIER also has developed a shorter three–day version which it uses to introduce less at-risk relationships to this negotiations model. With the addition of appropriate follow–up facilitation of the process itself, both models seem to be effective to date.

So is it working?
In a word, yes. But I must say that since the project is so new and because the parties most intimate to its implementation have little time for research, there has been no extensive neutral party research. However, in a short study con-ducted by CFIER itself, it was found that formal disputes filed with PERB dropped by 93 percent among the 25 original relationships to initiate an interest based approach. Other research work by the University of California and doctoral candidates throughout the state are showing similar results regarding both subjective and objective evaluations by participants.

Personal stories of positive experience from a handful of clients reinforces the heartening results reflected in the empirical studies. For example, one client reported the saving of over $400,000 in seven months by discovering that it no longer needed to resort to arbitration to resolve grievances. In another case, the client discovered that its grievance case load had dropped by over 70 percent.

More importantly, although it seems unlikely that there could be anything more important than the reduction of conflict between employers and employees in public schools, is the impact upon capacity of the negotiating parties to be creative in their solutions regarding negotiations and operational issues. At a recent annual conference, sponsored by U.C. Berkeley’s Institute of Industrial Relations and CFIER, a number of employer–employee relationships practicing the interest based process eagerly volunteered to report their results to the world.

These management/union teams of negotiators and problem solvers were effusive in their reports of successful and creative solutions being crafted in response to the multi-variate problems they faced. From healthcare to curriculum and beyond, these union and management teams have found and are utilizing a non–adversarial tool with increasing skill.

As a principal consultant to CFIER, I have had the pleasure of introducing and facilitating the interest based approach and practice of positive relation-ship principles. And I am witnessing first hand the transformation of the employer–employee paradigm and the creative consequences of this change.

Success comes from the ends being sought being buried in the means utilized to create them. By operationalizing a few simple principles and techniques, these teams who for so long were at each others throats have begun to work together to solve common problems rather than level the accusatory finger at one another.

What does the future hold for us?
As the rest of the nation begins to show signs of recovery from our very serious economic recession/ depression, California slips deeper into the downturn. Coupling this economic earthquake with the structural deficiencies in revenue (brought on in part by the implementation of property tax relief measures enacted a decade earlier) has created a serious crisis in California’s public education system. It is estimated that approximately one–third of the school districts of the state are insolvent and that the remainder barely survive.

In the face of this inability to solve the chronic and acute problems faced by public organizations by utilizing the usual resource of money, some union/management teams have had the pleasure of crafting creative solutions that meet their mutual interests.

Moving on to improving education - As they continue to resolve usual issues concerning terms and conditions of employment, they have begun to turn their attention and application of the process toward educational quality issues. In fact, it is often the solutions to terms and condi-tions of employment issues that stimulate and precipitate dramatic reform in the provision of education.

The positive influence and experience with interest based relationships expands to new arenas... Just as observers of organizational development have been witnessing the abandonment of traditional hierarchical, authoritarian, organizational designs in favor of more horizontal and participatory structures, one can witness this happening within the school systems utilizing an interest based approach to employer-employee relations, collective bargaining, and problem solving.

We have seen employees holding management accountable and committed to the process. In other cases we have seen management remind employee organizations of their obligation to ensure the participation of their members in a program to which they are committed. In both cases, however, at least within the context of union/management relationships there is a high level of commitment to the process and the results that are thereby realized.

Will the customers be satisfied? The CFIER project is a fundamental response to these demands from the customers of public education: industry and the public. The coalition of teacher and non–teacher unions, management, and trustee organizations that came together in direct response to those pressures opted to be very careful in their search for a solution. Happily, it appears that the results of their efforts will bear dramatic fruit in a time frame that will insure long term success, rather than reaching for the immediate bottom–line gratification.

The acceptance of each other’s right to participate in the management of the overall organization and subsequent abandonment of the adversarial approach to achieve positions (by denigrating each other’s rights and interests) in favor of an approach that has each of the parties seeking to meet one another’s interests, portends solid success for the future.

It is clear to me as an observer and practitioner, that the process and principles of the interest based approach are more amenable to our multi-variate reality than the offer-acceptance approach to negotiations has ever been.

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