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Nordea's transformation into a European Company
Information tour for the non-Nordic staff by Nordic trade union representatives
Background
Nordea Union Board (NUB, Nordea's Nordic trade unions internal board) decided in spring 2004 to spread information to Nordea's non-Nordic staff about European Company and especially about the consequences of directive concerning the employee involvement. As according to a.m. directive the agreement between the company and the employees can't diminish the influence of the employees, also the information concerning the Nordic model for co-operation, codetermination and other employee involvement was seen valuable to be presented.
Nordea has today a very advanced model for cross-border employee involvement and negotiation system. It's based on the agreements made by Nordea and Nordic trade unions in Nordea. It gives a good opportunity to discuss and negotiate the matters having interest to several countries. The group-level co-operational body is Group Council. The cross-border co-operation reaches also the lower levels of the organisation through Consultative Committees working in business areas, functions and units. This system covers only the four Nordic countries, i.e. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. For the employees of other countries there is no cross-border body for collaboration and/or negotiation.
The employee involvement model will be negotiated between the company and Special Negotiation Body (SNB) after the company has officially published it's ambition to transform into an SE. At this stage it also will give the names of countries and companies to be included to SE as well as the number of staff in each country. According to the directive can the staff of the countries belonging to SE choose their representatives to SNB. As we do not know yet which countries and companies will join the SE at the very beginning, we saw that the information must be given to all Nordea's European employees in order to secure their knowledge, competence and motivation to such negotiations and to the co-operational work also in the future. The non-Nordic countries where Nordea has any significant number of employees in Europe are Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland and United Kingdom.
The great need of new information and competence for the employee representatives is obvious. Nordea has been the first company to announce it's aim to be a European Company. Employee representatives, even very experienced and trained ones, face the new challenges when starting the negotiations with the company. This was also the reason for EU to support economically this activity by paying the flight tickets and accommodation for EU residents. Nordea Bank Norway paid the costs of Norwegians.
Participants
NUB gave the mandate to "Travelling Team", i.e. three NUB members being Majbritt Garbul Tobberup from Denmark(MGT), Hans Christian Riise from Norway (HCR) and Rauni Söderlund from Finland (RS) to plan the staff infos and the timetable as well as to be in contact with the management of the non-Nordic countries and agree the visits with them. From the Nordic countries Jolanta Szumska from Norway (JS) participated to the meetings in Poland, Per Karlberg from Sweden (PK) to the meeting in Frankfurt and Soren Kobbernagel from Denmark (SK) to the meeting in London. Otherwise the meetings were held by 1-3 Travelling Team members. Karlberg is the Deputy General Secretary of The Confederation of Nordic Bank, Finance and Insurance Unions NFU, all other participants work in Nordea.
The Solidarnosc trade union board members of Nordea Bank Polska participated to the meetings with the management and with the staff. Also President of the Regional Board of Solidarnosc's Lodz region Waldemar Krenc participated to the meetings in Lodz. NFU's partner Giedre Lelyte from Lithuanian trade union LKKDPS as well as the president Regina Vaiciulionyte participated to the meetings in Vilnius. Giedre had also organised that representatives from Latvian trade union LAKRS participated to the meetings in Riga. They were Chairman Juris Kalnins, Ausma Spigule and Beata Jakubova. We like to express our deep gratitude to all the persons from the other unions who supported our work.
Timetable
September:
27 Gdynia, Poland (MGT, HCR, JS, RS) / 28 Warsaw, Poland (MGT, HCR, JS, RS) / 29 Lodz, Poland (HCR, JS, RS) October: 1-2 Tallinn, Estonia (MGT, RS) / 5 Vilnius, Lithuania (HCR) / 7 Riga, Latvia (HCR, RS) / 18 Frankfurt, Germany (HCR, PK) / 28 London, United Kingdom (SK, RS)
November:
15 Luxembourg (HCR, RS) Travelling team and NFU's General Secretary Jan-Erik Lidström met Tomas Nordin, Head of Administration of Poland and Baltic Countries on March 22nd, 2004. In the meeting the aim and arrangements of the non-Nordic information tour was described. Nordin gave a presentation of Poland and Baltic countries not only from the business point of view but also giving a good introduction of the cultures, traditions and challenges of said countries. During the summer and autumn several e-mails were sent to and from Tomas Nordin in order to report our actions.
At early September a majority of the country heads, administrative managers or HR managers of Nordea's non-Nordic countries were contacted by phone by us and a letter describing more closely the aims of our work and preactical issues of the tour was delivered to them by e-mail o September 17th.
Material presented
Hans Christian Riise made slides describing European Company, it's employee involvement directive, elections of SNB, Nordic co-operation and Nordea Group's presence in Europe. These slides were used in the staff infos, sometimes slightly adjusted. The discussions in the meetings were also strongly based on the Nordic experiences and our working models as employee representatives.
Experiences from the meetings with the management
Mostly the attitude of the local management was positive and constructive. They were willing to have a good discussion with us and they shared the information of their country's situation and staff openly. The managers coming originally from some Nordic country knew already well the employee involvement system at least in their home country and they expressed no hesitation towards the bettering influence of their new country's staff. The non-Nordic managers were interested to know more about Nordea's Nordic co-operational culture and models. Some of them, but only very few, were at the beginning a little reluctant. We tried to convince them that Nordic employee representatives' aim is to have a fruitful co-operation with the management and to add value to the group's decision-making in order to make the company better.
Experiences from the meetings with the employees and staff infos
Some of the countries have already an employee involvement and representation system based on national legislation and culture. In Nordea Bank Polska the trade union is also a negotiating party for their collective agreement. Even that the Polish work legislation is not that strong as in Nordic countries, Nordea Union Poland has been able to represent well their members also in other issues. This has strongly been based on the competence and attitude of Nordea Union Poland's representatives.
In United Kingdom the employees have elected two persons to Personal Committee. They meet and discuss regularly with the management of any kind of issues having importance to the staff members. The Personal Committee members are not members of any trade union.
In Luxembourg have the staffs elected a Staff Delegation with 6 ordinary and 6 deputy members according to the national legislation. Some of the Staff Delegation members are union members in some of the four banking sector's trade unions, some are not. In other countries there are no existing employee involvement or representation systems.
To the staff infos participated from about 10 to 180 staff members each. The local management had made the invitations to the infos and they also took care of all arrangements. To some of the infos had the management invited only some of the staff members, being then from the management or from the local employee representatives. Mostly the infos were open to all staff members. The intense of discussion and issues of questions and comments varied very much.
As all countries have named their representatives to Nordea employee representatives' European Company -seminar, we can assume that we have succeeded to motivate our non-Nordic colleagues to be an active part when building an employee involvement system to a European Company. The coming discussions in SNB during the negotiation period will also have an important role when creating a good employee involvement system to Nordea Group. Also the representatives from the countries not being a part of the European Company at the very beginning of the process - and therefore not having a formal role at the negotiations - will have the possibility to express their opinions to SNB.
Rauni Söderlund
(picture)
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