British boardrooms failing miserably to engage with workers. It’s hurting their investors

Voting advisor Pirc found that company directors appointed to oversee ‘workforce engagement’ mostly don’t get paid for doing the job. Two in five don’t spend any time on it even as labour shortages start to bite into corporate performance, writes James Moore

Railpen’s latest voting guidelines stress the importance of engaging workers (PA)

It is fairly commonplace these days for companies to have directors charged, among other things, with overseeing “workforce engagement”.

Asking an existing, non executive member of the board to pretend to care about this was the easiest, and least radical option offered up when the former prime minister Theresa May decided to give employees a voice in the boardroom but stopped short of giving the reforms any teeth. So it was naturally the one they cleaved to.

For the record, the others were: set up an employee consultative council (clunky); create a worker director (no, the horror!); or explain why you should be allowed to ignore the rules. Doing the latter creates unnecessary fuss given that option one always looked like a cop out. So it has proved.