Dr. Gijs van Houten:

The Deputy asked a very good question. The answers of the other witnesses included part of the answer I was going to give. I could talk forever about how we encourage companies but I will keep it brief and focus on a couple of points. The first is on the training of managers. Managerial education does not sufficiently emphasise the fact that employees are the key asset to businesses. Many business programmes are focused on the financial side of things and human resource management is a separate programme that is a bit of an afterthought in managerial education. That is a key point of focus.

Not only do we need to adjust managerial education, but people also need to be trained to be able to engage in discussions with management. If people wish to have a workforce in which everyone is involved in the decision-making, from the bottom to the top, then everyone needs to be willing and able to engage in that type of discussion. That requires a type of soft skills that have been gaining in importance and attention in recent years but still need to be invested in further.

The third point is on investing in social dialogue structures. If there is healthy social dialogue, it can take the sting out of the discussions at the workplace level. There can be hard bargaining about how to divide the pie in a social dialogue setting and internal discussions can then be focused on how to increase the pie because everyone is happy with how the stakes are divided at the end.