change management Archives - TUC Digital Lab

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 unionism means skills and organisational culture

When digital change stalls it’s tempting to feel we’ve just reached the limits of what the union’s tech systems can do. But progress is just as often limited by whether we have the skills, roles and culture in place to use our systems well.

The same systems have enabled very different outcomes in different unions. The difference lies in how digital capability is understood, supported and embedded across the organisation.

Managing big tech changes in UK unions

Deploying new technology can often be challenging.

But deploying technology that will change organisations and how the people within them do their work is generally a lot more complicated than just the technology itself. As distributed organisations, with many stakeholders and complex democratic structures, unions have a lot to consider.