Focus areas for establishing an effective Staff Committee within EU institutions.

All European bodies are required to have a functioning Staff Committee in accordance with the EU Staff Regulation. There is no recipe how to establish an effective Staff Committee, however there are some tips and certain well-established practices which we are sharing in the article below. Of course, it does not claim to be exhaustive or а complete list, but to provide a good starting point for Staff Committees across the EU board.

So, the main focus areas which should be always considered are open communication, flexibility for staff members in terms of work-life balance and training opportunities and meritocracy which is irrevocably related to communication. Each of them will be explored in more details below.

Communication is the first crucial one as each public institution should aim at being transparent, both externally and internally. However, staff cannot achieve this transparency internally unless they foster open and honest communication. While it sounds like an old topic, it still requires a lot of work and dedication from all relevant stakeholders. Communication should be three ways: (1) top-bottom, with a good flow of information from management to keep staff posted on the hot topics of the day. For this, Staff Committee members should aim to work towards more dynamic and less academic use of the Staff Assembly, with a more panel-like/question time approach. Communication has also to be (2) bottom-up. Each member of the Staff Committee should be an ‘ambassador’ of others’ requests, but he/she should also work towards building a working environment where everyone is comfortable in having their say, as well as a more agile approach in communication with the management. This would allow staff to tackle new issues promptly and following up effectively on existing topics. Finally, a well-established practice is to deepen the interaction with the Association of the EU bodies’ Staff Committee, which aims at sharing and aligning best practices among institutions. As each institution has a lot to ‘teach’ others, but also still a lot to ‘learn’ and improve.

Flexibility is the other aspect with few different dimensions to be taken into account. It is the key to success for staff and not only in terms of work-life balance. Undoubtedly each institutions has skilled staff, as such staff members should be faced with interesting challenges, job opportunities, and not only work on a day-by-day, business-as-usual routine. Moreover, they need to be able to spend their expertise on the job market, either inside or out their respective institution. Therefore, staff committee member should aim at supporting the possibilities for training for requalification of staff members, increased Internal Mobility chances, opportunity for short assignments to other Units and cross-Unit knowledge sharing. All of that should be, of course, in the interest of the service and for personal and professional development of staff members.

Meritocracy in the business realm, generally means that each person’s performance and talent is used to hire, reclassify and reward, without any recourse to sex, race, class or nationality. Meritocracy is directly linked to communication. It is our belief that meritocracyshould be the core of any organisation and should not be limited to the reclassification and promotion exercises, which might not properly reflect the individual merits and qualities. Therefore, staff should be measured against realistic objectives, taking into account their own strengths and weaknesses while at the same time being supported in enhancing their own skills and filling the gaps where they have space and capacity for improvement. Talking about meritocracy lead us to the need staff to be able to evaluate their management performance as it is common practice in various EU institutions since without an honest, two-way feedback system, no organisation or person will implement a properly functioning meritocracy system.

All of the above mentioned is just the touching surface when it comes to establishing an effective, transparent and reachable Staff Committee. All of the aspects (communication, flexibility and meritocracy) should be duly tailored to the needs, size, and structure and core business of the given EU intuition.