Connecting and building good relationships between organizations, unions and their leaders is essential to pension planning, and yet seems daunting to many. This is especially true when it comes to money and retirement, because these are long term agreements that affect people’s futures. That’s because all organizations are human, social entities, and these human qualities often have an effect on the range of practical solutions on the table. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
A leadership perspective on pension planning means that successful collective agreement negotiations need to start with good information and deep knowledge, rather than bargaining tactics alone. Knowledge management strategies ask us to look at an organization in terms of the relationships and connections that cause knowledge to be shared, created and evaluated, as a means to this end. While organization leaders need to share key drivers for pension financial success, union leaders need to share key drivers for employee success: both are needed to ensure that a best case scenario is a possibility.
Cases in pension planning and negotiation management show that this kind of scenario can actually happen, and it can lead to creative outcomes that make a positive long term impact. In our new paper on pension management for union-based organizations in 2019, we look at how organizations and unions can shift towards a shared culture where shared knowledge management is likely to take place. We’ll discuss how the creation of more flexible pension plans that actually work for people’s lives and retirement plans is possible, and how it can become an opportunity open to you.
At Marris Miller, we can help your management or your union team develop useful knowledge management processes for union agreements. We want to help you develop critical idea generation techniques for union pension planning despite existing factional differences. Our aim is for both sides of a collective agreement negotiation to work together towards new solutions that take all stakeholders’ values and needs into equal account.