It is more than a set of good working relationships between union and management because both sides commit to an ongoing way of working and take practical steps to ensure it happens.
The aims and values of partnership and the way it is going to work need to be clearly set out and understood and the expectations on both sides clearly understood by both parties.
The following tips can help managers and unions develop partnership approaches, and are based on experience in trusts across the country.
- Do a joint diagnostic of the strengths and weaknesses of your current state of employee relations – is the relationship between management and trade unions predominantly adversarial or do you work together on issues and challenges. How could the relationship be improved?
- Ensure buy-in and understanding from senior levels in the trust and from senior trade union colleagues.
- Discuss together and set out the benefits for staff and patients that consultation and co-operation between trade unions and the trust leadership in the workplace would bring.
- Develop a joint understanding of the aims and values of partnership and agree the behaviours that will underpin partnership working with particular emphasis on a 'no surprises culture'.
- Ensure all staff and managers and shop stewards understand the partnership approach.
- Articulate why and how partnership working will help manage change.
- Identify the partnership champions who will take the process forward on the union and management side.
- Establish the processes that will take partnership forward – ie the forums in which discussions will take place. Agree how agendas will be set and how issues will be resolved, and how progress on agreed issues will be monitored and outcomes assessed.
- Embed partnership approaches in responding to issues and challenges that arise from your staff survey.
- Embed partnership approaches when embedding the NHS constitution pledges particularly those related to staff engagement "The NHS will strive to actively engage staff in decisions that affect them and the services that they provide, individually and through representatives. All staff will be empowered to put forward ways to deliver better and safer services for patients and their families."
- Develop joint training approaches to make partnership real.
- Agree the interaction between a partnership approach at trust level and employee engagement at ward/unit level.
- Get support from other NHS organisations that have successfully established partnership working.