Executive summary: The report demonstrates that health and wellbeing policies at Royal Mail Group have had a number of significant and material effects:  Royal Mail Group has successfully tackled the issue of absenteeism (CHAPTER ONE): Royal Mail achieved significant reductions in absence –...

Incentive pay systems have undergone major changes in recent decades. This paper investigates use of incentive pay systems in British and French private sector establishments in 2004, focusing on payment-by-results, merit pay, and profit sharing, using British and French workplace surveys: WERS...

Much of the academic and policy literature on performance related pay focuses on its role as an incentive system. Its role as means for renegotiating performance norms has been largely neglected. The introduction of performance related pay, based mostly on appraisals by line managers, in the...

The possible impact of management practices on unemployment has been little explored. Normally, those practices voluntarily adopted by competitive firms are considered likely to improve their performance and thus their long term scope to provide jobs. Yet there are a number of areas where such...

The rules and institutions of collective bargaining are widely held to have an adverse effect on employment and thus on unemployment. These views are analysed, and it is argued that many industrial relations institutions provide a much greater degree of flexibility for firms than is often...

Performance related pay has been extended to practically the whole of the Civil Service over the last few years, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer recently announced the Government's intention to enlarge its role even further. Almost no serious work on seems to have been published on whether...

Linking pay to performance is something employers increasingly seek to achieve. This was once seen as an objective which could only be met in the private sector. That is no longer true. In the 1990s the British public services have experienced a revolution which has attracted the interest and...

Flexibility agreements have increased in frequency since the 1970s, and so have coincided with the increase in labour productivity in British manufacturing since then. This article analyses the content and extent of a sample of flexibility agreements culled from the specialist industrial...