Digital unionism means showing leadership and managing change

By the time digital change becomes visible to our members, most of the difficult work has already happened inside the union.

In our experience, tech change projects are mostly about change and less about tech. Problems with the technology itself are rarely the decisive factor in whether projects succeed or fail. That’s more often explained by how change is led, paced and governed – and by whether leadership treats digitisation as an organisational challenge rather than just a technical one.

Digital change always disrupts existing practice

Every significant system change in a union affects how reps and staff work. It alters routines, assumptions and relationships between teams and roles.

When resistance occurs, it rarely comes from an in-principle opposition to digital change. More often, it reflects uncertainty about:

how work will be reorganised
what will be expected of different roles
whether the change will make that user’s daily work easier or harder

If these questions are left unanswered for too long, confidence can evaporate – even when the strategic direction is sound.

Leadership is required long before decisions are final

In system change projects, there’s an important role for leadership in seeing through implementation after key decisions have been made.

That’s obviously important, but our experience would suggest that leadership matters even more at the points when priorities are being defined. Particularly when that means trade‑offs might be unavoidable between what different parts of the union see as important.

At these moments, clarity of purpose is more important than certainty of outcome. Unions make better progress when leaders can articulate why a change is necessary, even while acknowledging that not everything is known at the outset.

Many leaders can feel unequipped to take an active role in digitisation projects, worrying they don’t have the technical skills. Projects can end up being passed to technical managers too soon as a result. But sponsorship from the top is critical. Focusing on the strategy behind the changes, and understanding how the union can most effectively work through changes, are disciplines every bit as important as the technical decisions that will be made during the project.

Honest conversations about capacity matter

Another recurring lesson we’ve seen in the Digital Lab is that digital change often surfaces uncomfortable truths about capacity.

New systems may reduce duplication or enable new ways of working, but only after an initial period of increased effort. Sometimes a change that makes things easier for members will put more work onto the reps or staff who run the process. Or a successful change could result in much higher interaction with members, generating more work downstream to cope with the new demand.

If those realities get glossed over, projects can become associated with stress and overload rather than improvement.

Unions that manage change more successfully tend to be explicit about:

what will not be done during transition periods
where temporary workarounds are acceptable
how progress will be assessed over time

This kind of honesty builds trust, even when the change itself is demanding.

Bring people with the change, not just through the change

In unions, members, staff, reps and elected lay leaders may all experience the same change differently. People are more likely to give change the benefit of the doubt if they can see that their practical knowledge has shaped the project.

That means making space for involvement before everything is settled: mapping who will be affected, asking people where current processes cause pain, using workshops or testing sessions to expose practical problems, and showing visibly how feedback has changed the plan.

It also means recognising that different groups will need different reasons to believe the change is worthwhile. Some will be motivated by new possibilities, others by seeing peers make it work, and others by reassurance that support will be available when the old way of working disappears.

A useful project habit is therefore to treat engagement as ongoing work, not a single consultation stage. Champions, user testing, peer learning and open channels for questions can all help people move from uncertainty into experimentation. They also give the project team earlier warning when the change is creating confusion, anxiety or resistance in parts of the union.

Governance shapes outcomes long after projects end

Digital change does not end at “go‑live”. Systems evolve, priorities shift, and new needs emerge. Unions benefit when they give early thought to:

who owns systems once initial projects are complete
how future changes will be proposed and agreed
how learning from early phases will be captured and built into improvement

Without this, improvements can stall once the project team disperses, leaving unions with new systems but little capacity to support adoption or further development.

Leadership here is about creating conditions for ongoing improvement, not about micromanaging technical detail.

Leadership sets the tone for learning and adjustment

Perhaps the strongest signal leadership sends during digital change projects is how it responds when things don’t work as planned. Progress is going to be more likely if issues are treated as information – signals that processes, assumptions or sequencing need to change.

This approach doesn’t lower standards. It raises them, by making it possible to improve in practice rather than on paper.

Digitisation therefore tests leadership not on whether predictions are accurate, but on whether organisations can learn as they go.