Employee Resource Groups

What employee resource groups are

Employee resource groups are groups that employees form voluntarily around a shared characteristic or interest, which the organisation recognises and to which it assigns a sponsor from management. Their purpose is to give people in the same situation a place to consult one another, and to carry to management what does not reach it from individuals.

What distinguishes them is that they are voluntary and open, not representative. They are not elected and they do not act on anyone’s behalf, and no member speaks for a group of people who did not choose them. They pass on experience; they do not present demands on behalf of a constituency. That difference is what the rest of the description below rests on.

What they are not, which is the first thing to get right

The mistake to rule out first is to confuse them with a committee that has a place in the law.

The Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل) names a workers’ committee in the establishment (اللجنة العمالية) in one place only, Article 73 of the Labor Law, and attaches a specific effect to it: fines imposed on workers may be spent only on what benefits the establishment’s workers, the committee is the body that disposes of them, and where there is no committee, disposal requires the Ministry’s approval. An employee resource group represents nobody and carries no effect of that kind, so it cannot stand in for the committee or be treated as a substitute for it. An organisation that set up a group and believed it had thereby covered what concerns the committee has confused an optional internal arrangement with a body the law names.

We found no provision in Saudi Arabia, in the sources we reviewed, that requires employers to create employee resource groups, regulates them or attaches any effect to their existence, and nothing that settles how they relate to the arrangements the law provides for inside an establishment. They are an optional management practice that the organisation sets up by its own decision and governs through its own documents, and what is described is practice, not a rendering of any text. Anyone with a question touching worker representation, grievances or penalties should go to the rules on those matters rather than to the group’s mandate. None of this is legal advice.

A resource group is not a quality circle either, though the two are alike in being voluntary and meeting regularly. A quality circle’s subject is the members’ own work at a single workplace, and its output is a recommendation about that work. A resource group’s subject is its members’ experience of the organisation rather than a task they perform, and its members come from scattered departments rather than one site.

Nor is it a complaints channel. An individual’s complaint about their own rights has a written route of its own, the grievance procedure, and harassment has another route with its own time limits and procedures. Moving an individual incident into a meeting of a voluntary group takes it out of its proper route and loses its time limits.

Four features the arrangement rests on

• Voluntary. Membership is a choice; assigning someone to it by decision turns it into a task to be performed.
• Open. It is open to those who share the situation and to those who want to understand it, because restricting it to the group itself turns it into a closed circle to which things it never said get attributed.
• A sponsor from management. A named person able to carry what is raised to where it belongs. A group with no sponsor meets, and nothing it says reaches anyone.
• A written mandate. It sets out what the group covers and what it does not, to whom its outputs go, and within what period they are answered.

The fourth carries the most weight. A group whose submissions go unanswered twice stops submitting, and then its silence is read as contentment. The same outcome is described for suggestion schemes: what silences people is not rejection but the absence of an answer. The misreading at the end is a close relative of the Abilene paradox, in which a room takes quiet for agreement.

What goes into the mandate

The mandate is a short document written before the first meeting, and a missing item in it can produce the failures attributed to these groups:

• The purpose in one sentence, who is invited, and whether membership is open to people outside the situation.
• What it covers and what it does not, named explicitly, so the boundary is not renegotiated at every meeting.
• To whom its outputs go, who is responsible for replying, and within what period.
• What is spent on it, in time during working hours and in money if any, and who approves it.
• What is published from its minutes and what is not. A group that is quoted without any rule stops being a place where members speak, and goes back to how things were before it existed.

The last item matters because what is said in these groups can concern particular people, so passing it on without prior agreement becomes a disclosure its owner never consented to.

Common types and what each is suited to

• Around a shared situation, such as a group for people with special working arrangements. This type is best at bringing to light obstacles invisible to those outside it, and needs the tightest control over what is published.
• Around a career stage, such as a group for recent joiners or for people moving into supervision for the first time. A group of this kind is most useful for revealing gaps in induction, and what it produces is put to use in employee onboarding.
• Around a profession or specialism that runs across several departments. This type is best at moving knowledge between people no structure brings together, and least likely to be read as the demand of a constituency.
• Around a location, such as a group for a branch far from head office. Such a group shows how differently things are applied from branch to branch, a difference invisible in a written policy because what is written is the same.

The four types cannot be judged by one measure: what is hoped for from the second is an improvement visible within months, while what is hoped for from the first is information that may never turn into a decision and still helps in understanding what is going on.

The sponsor: what the role is and what it is not

The sponsor’s role is to open the way to whoever holds the decision, and to make sure what is raised is read and answered within its period. It is not to chair the meeting or decide what is discussed; a sponsor present in that capacity turns the meeting into a presentation to them instead of a consultation.

The most useful arrangement is for the sponsor to attend some meetings, not all, and for their attendance to be known in advance rather than unannounced. An unexpected appearance changes what is said in the whole session, and its effect on what is written afterwards cannot be known.

The scope: what is raised and what falls outside

A group passes on experience and makes proposals; it does not decide. When what it proposes touches pay, working hours, a penalty or duties assigned to a job, it belongs to what the organisation has written in its own documents, not to an agreement reached in a meeting. Penalties in particular have rules of their own, set out in the guide to disciplinary penalties under the Saudi Labor Law, and nothing about them is borrowed from the group’s arrangements.

What is suitable to raise falls into three kinds: the experience of joining and induction, practical arrangements in the workplace, and how clear and accessible career paths are. All of these are things learned from experience that do not show up in a number, and that is where their value lies.

A worked example: cost and minimum size

The arrangement spends hours before it produces anything, and the hours can be counted. Take an organisation of 600 employees and a group for a population making up 12% of them, which is 72 people, of whom 25% take part, giving 18 active members. The figures are assumed to show how the calculation is done, and we found nothing, in the sources we reviewed, that sets a recommended number of groups, a size, or a participation rate regarded as acceptable:

• Attendance: 18 members times 12 meetings times one hour, which is 216 hours a year.
• The coordinator’s time outside meetings: 12 times 3 hours, which is 36 hours.
• The sponsor’s time: 12 times one hour, which is 12 hours.

The total is 264 hours a year, or about 14.7 hours per active member. That is the number to set against what the group produced, not the number of meetings or the attendance count.

The same calculation gives a minimum size. If the population concerned were 20 people and a quarter took part, there would be 5 active members. A group that size is stopped by two absences, and its monthly meeting depends on the diaries of three people. In that case the arrangement exists in name and never gets going, and something lighter works better: an open quarterly session, or a question added to a pulse survey.

What spoils it

• Management creating one with nobody asking for it. The arrangement rests on an existing wish, and creating it from the top produces a meeting attended by whoever was told to attend.
• Loading it with what is not its job, such as asking it to handle an individual case, or holding it to account for an indicator whose causes it does not control.
• Using it in place of a postponed decision. Referring a known issue to a voluntary group gives the sense that something is happening; months are spent, and the issue returns to where it started.
• Restricting it to one population and excluding others. Whatever it produces is then read as one group’s demand against the rest, the opposite of what it was set up for.
• Judging it by membership numbers. The number looks good in a report; what the arrangement should be judged by is what it raised, what was answered, and what changed afterwards.

What can be measured through it, and what cannot

This is a tool that produces words, not figures, and it should not be loaded with an indicator whose causes it does not own. A group asked about how long its population stays in the organisation is being asked about something decided by pay, career paths and the behaviour of managers, none of which it controls. Key performance indicators attached to a group of this kind end up measuring those things, not the group.

Two things are worth looking at: what was raised and what happened to it, and then what appeared afterwards in the measurement tools already in place, such as employee engagement examined for the population concerned rather than for the organisation as a whole. Examining it for the whole organisation hides a small population inside the average, and says nothing about the arrangement created for it.

Related terms

• Abilene Paradox
• Employee Onboarding
• Affective Commitment
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Exit Interview