institute for employment studies

public policy research

Employment relations

The Institute provides a range of research work for employer, employing and employee organisations as well as government departments about the relationships between employers and employees, workplace rights and consultation. Key clients in this area of IES’s work include Acas, the Low Pay Commission, the Department of Trade and Industry (now the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, BIS).

Our employee relations work programme covers the following main themes:

• employee rights at work, including employees’ understanding of their rights and experience of upholding those rights through the Employment Tribunal system and other mechanisms. Key projects in this area include a qualitative study exploring the experiences and views of employees who had been involved in sexual orientation and religion or belief employment tribunal cases, carried out for Acas in 2006.
• pay and conditions of employment, including research into the impact of the minimum wage and equal pay legislation, employees’ working time, and workplace arrangements such as flexible working. In 2006/2007, IES carried out research for the Low Pay Commission into the ways in which firms have made organisational changes, including changes to systems of incentives and rewards, in response to any compression of pay differentials following the 2005 uprating of the National Minimum Wage (NMW). IES also undertook research looking at the specific sectoral and regional effects of NMW upratings. Published in 2007, this was the first study to focus on industries within regions and to look at both the introduction and the subsequent NMW upratings in an integrated framework.
• employee involvement and consultation, partnership working, consultative mechanisms and trade union relations. Key projects in this area include an evaluation of the Health and Safety Executive’s worker involvement initiative, which aims to train new employee health and safety representatives, and improve joint working between representatives and line managers in organisations that already have employee health and safety representation. IES has also undertaken an evaluation of Acas’s Workplace Projects initiative, aimed at improving employment relations within workplaces by involving employers and employee representatives in joint problem solving and joint working. IES also carried out an evaluation of Acas’s Pre-Claim Conciliation Service (PCC), which aims to identify workplace disputes between employers and employees that may become employment tribunal claims, and resolve them effectively before they enter the tribunal system. The findings of this evaluation show cost and time savings to both employers and employees involved in this pilot and a net financial benefit to the taxpayer.

Key contacts for employment relations:

• email Andrea Broughton or call +44(0)20 7470 6177
• email Annette Cox or call +44(0)1273 763 413