Collaboration Leads To Better Relationships

Communication Redistribution is a model to provide unions the ability to create benefits and value to the membership through participation. Instead of giving membership the option to “op-in” to receive information, unions must provide full systems that are bi-directional communications, thus giving strength to the entire union.

Allowing membership to engage with issues, activities, will allow the union to cultivate and analyze information. This process will provide the ability for outreach into the political processes on issues and expect union wide response instead of limited response, as is the current trend.

Today’s technology will provide membership with a sense of ownership, which will provide a willingness to encourage others that might not participate to participate.

The ability to capture the opportunities and benefits for unions today cannot wait, to receive the value of this technology. The union’s entire organization needs to remove the blinders and gain a new perspective of its membership, locals and districts. Breaking down the “gatekeepers” of information, and the district and locals lack of communication channels cannot be tolerated any longer. Unions along with their district and locals must encourage participation by providing other sources of communication and distribution channels, to achieve their goals.

Membership collaboration will need to be encouraged, measured and cultivated by education workshops, meetings and promotion. This will allow the union to have a true distributed governance and allow the membership to provide ideas and comments, in which the union will receive the ultimate network of ideas.

Communication redistribution provides a new role and allows unions to use the efforts of their work, not to just work. The value of communications takes on a totally different status when information and responses from members are immediate or current, unlike days or weeks. The collection of information can then be harvested and analyzed to the relevance of the issue, giving the union feedback that was not possible before. The results of this efficiency of gathering information allows for better collaboration and quality decision-making.

The ability of unions to rethink the value of its membership opinion, thoughts, needs and knowledge allows for a better union. A better understanding of the membership by the union at all level provides for a better decisions making based on the majority and not a select few. Accountability, responsibility and action are required on all parts with communication redistribution, leaving no one to blame but themselves. The old opinion of membership vs. leadership is no longer valid, as collaboration allows all to be on equal ground.

The framework to successful communications can be optimized by providing a few elements:

Bringing union relationships with membership to a jointly agreed system through application and process efficiencies. Optimizing the system through participation and collaboration of ideas, concepts and results, the relationships will become stronger and more effective.

Unions will be able to be in a state of readiness with its membership by collaboration at a much higher level, creating more opportunities with more resources. Challenges can be addressed with greater participation, by allowing the exchange of knowledge at a greater level of understanding of the membership. Unions will be able to align with the proper partnerships needed to achieve their goals with validated information harvested by the quality of communication redistribution.