Why is it that, in the early years of the 21st century, when we have leading-edge management practices coming out of our ears, white-collar workers with a strong service ethos in a blue-chip private company feel so angry about the way their employer is treating them that they are prepared to resort to the very blunt instrument of a strike?

Is it because, when a company's back is up against the commercial wall, all those nice ideas about having motivated and engaged employees who act as advocates for the organisation simply fall by the wayside? And if so, what does that say about how the organisation really views its staff—greatest asset, or greatest liability?

A recent survey by management consultancy Hudson, found that nearly half of the senior executives interviewed believed that firing five per cent of staff every year would boost productivity and performance, with one in six believing they could get rid of 20 per cent without damaging either performance or morale.

You would like to think that BA doesn't view its staff in such cold, mechanistic terms. Yet the rigidity with which it appears to have imposed its sickness absence policy shows scant regard to employees as individuals.
Around 18 months ago, I interviewed Peter Holloway, head of people and organisational development at BA, about the new policy which, since its introduction nine months earlier, had reduced absence from an average of 17 days per employee per year to just over 10, saving the company around £30m.

Though the purpose of the policy was to encourage regular attendance at work, Holloway insisted that British Airways didn't expect people to come to work if they were genuinely ill, and that managers were given latitude to apply the policy with discretion.

But despite his assurances, absence has crept up again to 12 days, and stories of people being forced to fly when they are unwell abound.
Holloway acknowledged that the absence policy needed to be managed closely and admitted that BA had yet to tackle some of the causes of long-term absence, such as stress, or to put in place programmes to improve the general health and wellbeing of employees.

The causes of BA's long-running industrial relations problems are complex, but the current dispute over sick leave could be symptomatic of a wider problem recently identified by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development as being endemic among UK businesses. In essence, says the CIPD, the top team introduces laudable initiatives and then gets distracted by "more pressing" issues. Staff most affected by the initiatives are not fully consulted and line managers are inadequately trained to manage the changes. The result is low levels of trust, underperformance, low productivity and high staff turnover: the CIPD claims that 47 per cent of staff are either looking for another job or in the process of leaving their current job.

No wonder staff go sick, and using more stick than carrot to reduce sickness absence only exacerbates the problem. It can't be much fun doling out food and drink to grumpy passengers in cramped conditions at 35,000 feet. And you can't help but think that the £80m the narrowly-averted strike by its cabin crew in January cost BA would have been better spent on finding ways to improve the quality of the cabin crew's working lives, and on training managers to implement the absence policy more sensitively.

BA's absence record is hardly the best-and the company is right to address it. But it needs to take employees with it. The airline is struggling in an increasingly fierce marketplace in which the low-cost, no-frills operators are gaining share. To succeed, it must continue to differentiate itself on the quality of its service. And you don't deliver great service if you aren't motivated.

If BA believes its front line people are core to its brand, it needs to invest in them. If it doesn't, it should stop pretending that they are, and outsource the whole bothersome lot.

Jane Simms is the former editor of Financial Director and Marketing Business.