We are delighted to see more of our clients requesting in-company training programmes to help their managers to be more confident and skilled when it comes to negotiating with Trade Unions.
Our lead trainer’s first experience of trade union negotiations was in the mid 1980s when he was elected as a Shop Steward for the public sector union NUPE and underwent the comprehensive range of training programmes available at the time. Within five years he was elected as a Branch Secretary and held the office for a further four years before developing his management career and taking up a senior HR position.
Since the early 1990s he has either served as a management member, or undertaken the role of management side secretary in a number of joint negotiating and consultative bodies. During the mid 1990s the main thrust of his negotiating experience was around developing and implementing local pay and conditions of service in some highly confrontational circumstances with traditionally placed trade union representatives.
In the late 1990s his passion for personal and professional development, coupled with his graduation from the CIPD training programme equipped him with the skills and knowledge to start designing and delivering workshop sessions on managing negotiations and influencing trade unions. This was successfully launched in a major public sector organisation in Birmingham.
From the turn of the century and in increasingly senior positions, he has managed the employee engagement business of a number of organisations and been responsible at board level for the establishment and maintenance of harmonious industrial relations environments. This included not only managing local and regional approaches to negotiating pay and conditions of services and employment policies and procedures, but also agreeing approaches to Employment Tribunal responses with full time officers.
Between 2006 and 2008 he chaired a joint regional HR and union forum in the North East for establishing common approaches to areas not covered in the newly implemented national terms and conditions of service, as well as chairing the NHS National Diversity Forum, which comprised national officers of the major trade unions as well as senior lobbyists from a wide range of other stakeholder groups to the diversity agenda.
In 2008 he was elected to the NHS National Social Partnership Forum, the tri-partite body responsible for negotiating Department of Health policy into practice. Since 2008 he has worked across industry sectors providing coaching to senior managers on managing the employee relations environment and in particular, facilitating work streams taking the concept of partnership working into reality. Most recently, he has been integral in developing a staff partnership forum, involving senior managers, staff representatives and full time officers from ten organisations in Greater Manchester.
