The Past Leads To The Future

As trends in technology, unions need to rethink how to structure their locals to not only handle these emerging trends, but to take advantage of them. “Old school” union communications will not work. Less then 10% of most local memberships attends monthly meetings, most locals can not afford newsletters, less then 50% of union locals have websites, and the ones that have websites; most our outdated.

Communication Redistribution provides a comprehensive architecture that will give union’s value in exchange for bi-lateral communications to their membership.

Ecosystem

Looking at any union, one must look at the membership, consisting of a network of individuals that can collaborate, locals that communicate with each other and unions connecting to their districts creating a system of cohesiveness.

Technology within a union must be comprised of several devices, systems, services and software applications along with a group of application specific programs and others. Open source applications like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blackberry, iPhone, can bring unions to a more cohesive and informational unit. Each one of these provides valuable insight and value to the union today.

GroupThink

Unions that are highly motivated and cohesive in their goals can use technology tools more effectively. Unions cannot continue to use traditional roles of communication and expect the same results. Members today are higher educated and are accepting of technology and the social collaboration of information.

Group thinking provides the union a new culture whereas all members can share, and move towards a common goal. Issues become available to everyone not just a select few. By allowing members to participate and engage in the decision making process, unions can get optimization and realize better efficiencies in achieving common goals.

By collective awareness and participation unions can receive analytical information as a whole, perform surveys, and get opinions. Having insight into the memberships attitudes toward the goals and values of the union and it process through participation increases the trust issues between membership and the union leadership. Conflicts that are perceived or real can then be measured and evaluated on the merits of the issue.

Distributed governance through communication redistribution can provide various levels of collective awareness, engagement and participation.

Communication Ownership and Authorization

Today’s union should be a collective form of communication from all entities and be considered relevant. This technology allows for unions and its membership the ability to have ownership, validation and a voice.  The relevance of this communication can provide unions with a unified membership seeking a common goal, with the intention that all information is purposeful - and all members need to be connected.

Unions need to refocus on improving from the top down. A coordinated effort with the districts, locals and membership to improved communications must be the ultimate goal today for the union to survive. Members are already using technology to be in constant connection and sync with other members. The increase in communications by various connectivity applications and devices allows for a distributed communications network. With union allowing the districts, locals and membership to collaborate between multiple platforms, union activities will have more flexibility.

The legacy of union structure, policy and leadership must be overcome, and learn to take advantage of today’s technology. Unions, districts, and local leadership trying to be the gatekeeper of information and knowledge is a dying model of success.

As unions try to figure out how to gather all of the information and then distribute it to membership, they still have to understand the meaning of quantitative and qualitative information from all sources. New systems allow for various applications to focus on digesting user information, allowing for two-way collaboration seamlessly.

Today’s communications requires unions to provide a parallel process of systems so that the information can be distributed faster and more efficiently.  By providing information into different and meaningful segments, management of this information is attainable.