News Release 1 (March 2000)

Fieldwork

Call centres

e-commerce

Conferences and seminars

News Release 2 (May 2000)

Employment Roundtables

Ireland

UK

Scandinavia

Germany

Spain

News Release 3 (May 2001)

Key Findings - Innovations in Information Society Sectors : Implications for Women's Work, Expertise and Opportunities in European Workplaces

Developments in the Retail Sector

• Companies are being put under growing pressure by shake-outs and closures, and foreign competition is becoming an ever greater threat.
• The scale of operations in the sector is steadily increasing. The sector is becoming more strongly concentrated, characterised by increasingly large stores, more price-competitive, and with longer opening hours. The position of smaller entrepreneurs with local markets is becoming more tenuous, though they remain important in the south of Europe. This scale of operations-'bigness'-represents the key challenge for today's European retailers.
• Regulation of the sector operates in two areas: regulation of opening hours, and regulation of location and size of stores. Opening hours have been thoroughly deregulated throughout Europe, though they remain politically contested. The location and size of stores is still strongly regulated in many countries.

Developments in the Financial Services Sector

• Mergers and acquisitions are commonplace. In most countries, a handful of large private institutions now dominate the market. Many of these are pan-European. Cross-national strategic alliances between large firms also enable them to achieve market dominance in several countries at once.
• The sector is becoming increasingly homogenous. The diversity of institutions and their functional rigidity is disappearing. Privatisation, deregulation and de-segmentation of the market has created fierce competition between institutions. On the other hand, a host of new entrants to the sector - such as the internet banks and the 'non-banks' - is creating further competitive pressure and a new type of institutional diversity.
• A combination of fierce competition and technological opportunity has led to rationalisation, particularly of branch networks. Closures have been widespread, and there have been large-scale job losses in clerical and administrative areas - jobs in which women are clustered. Service provision is being relocated to back offices and call centres which employ staff who do not need to have experience in financial services. In place of branches, physical service outlets are being established in new public spaces - supermarkets and other high street locations such as coffee bars.

Restructuring Developments in the Two Sectors

• The two sectors are converging in the sense that financial services are becoming more retail-oriented, while a growing number of retailers offer financial services to their customers.
• In financial services, organisations are being restructured to streamline branch networks and to separate front (sales) and back office (service) functions. Routine information processing is often outsourced to specialist IT companies with no financial service expertise but with information processing competence. Sales functions are largely retained in-house. Call centres are increasingly used to handle both sales and service functions. The importance of branch networks as the customer interface is diminishing.
• Not all financial services call centres are organised along tayloristic lines. Some have rejected this model in favour of one which retains employee autonomy, and which minimises their boredom and thus labour turnover. This is often done through team-working and motivational techniques. However, the very nature of call centre organisation tends to routinise work and increase alienation, regardless of the good intentions of the employer. Most call centres have problems of high absenteeism and labour turnover.
• Financial services institutions are trying to develop their customers' consumption patterns, by 'clothing' their customers - guiding them towards the products and services they could purchase. Thus, as financial service provision becomes increasingly impersonal, by contrast the sales and marketing of financial service products is becoming increasingly personalised.
• There is a new division of labour emerging in financial services. Corporate and private portfolios are allocated to different employees, and corporate work has higher status than working with private customers. These jobs are also gender-segregated. In Sweden, it has been found that 72% of staff servicing corporate accounts are men, while 70% of those handling private customers' accounts are female.
• Employees are being transformed into sales agents. They are trained, evaluated and rewarded for product selling, which is now seen as their principle function. Sales targets are set for branches and for individuals.
• Retailing organisations are no longer simply shops. Many retailers in Europe are diversifying. In particular, they are moving into financial service provision, specifically the provision of banking and insurance services.
• Retailing organisations are also attempting to increase the range of sales outlets available to them through innovations like franchising and e-commerce. Many retailers, particularly supermarkets, have developed e-commerce in addition to their existing physical stores, not as substitutes for them. This is often done to compete with the new 'e-tailers' who are entering the market.
• Some retailers are simplifying and flattening their organisational structures. This is primarily affecting middle management jobs, but it also affects the future promotion prospects of more junior staff, who are finding their opportunities diminishing. This potentially affects women particularly strongly.

Technological Developments in the Two Sectors

• In both sectors, information and communication technologies are increasingly central to enterprises' competitive strategies. Some technology systems are 'commodified' and can be bought off-the-shelf as packages and products supplied by external consultants. Other 'core' systems may be developed, or at least customised, in-house.
• In both cases, the process of technological development is out of reach of the female end user at the bottom of the organisation. As decision-making is handled in the higher echelons of organisations, employee influence over these developments is weak. SERVEMPLOI finds little or no evidence of any role by European Works Councils in the process of technological development, although several of the companies studied are large trans-European players.
• Most SERVEMPLOI workplaces are comprehensively 'informatised' - ICTs join up all areas of activity and information is shared between different areas of the organisation.
• Employee monitoring is now an automatic by-product of the information which is generated through systematic computerisation - employees are often unaware of the extent to which this occurs, particularly in retailing. In financial service call centres, employee monitoring is used both to discipline and to motivate.
• Despite their lack of influence over technological development, women employees do not feel threatened by technological change and tend to embrace it enthusiastically.
• Although organisations are networked through information and communications technologies, SERVEMPLOI women are not. The nature of their work circumscribes their links to the rest of their organisation and to the outside world, restricting them to the confines of their immediate workplaces.

Employment and Employment Relations

• Due to the restructuring of the sector and the shakeout of institutions, employment in European financial services has declined significantly in all countries except Ireland over the past ten years. This process looks set to continue as the sector continues to under rationalisation.
• Employment in retail has decreased in northern Europe, but has increased in Italy, Spain and Ireland. This employment growth appears to have taken place principally in large-scale retailing.
• Women working in both sectors are increasingly being asked to work flexibly, particularly part-time.
• Financial services companies are beginning to use flexible working on a systematic basis, particularly in call centre environments where part-time and shiftworking enables them to respond to the flow of customers' calls.
• The extent of 'two-way', or negotiated flexibility, varies greatly between companies, but nowadays many are willing to allow their staff to work the hours which fit in with their domestic circumstances, provided the needs of the company are met.
• Large retail organisations across Europe are drawing increasingly on students as a source of flexible labour.
• Working part-time is one way in which many European women combine paid work with their domestic demands, but they often pay a high price in terms of reduced employability. Part-time workers are less likely to benefit from training and employee development opportunities, are often less visible in their organisations, and are therefore unlikely to enjoy the same progression prospects as their full-time counterparts.
• Many part-time employees cannot reach senior positions simply by virtue of working part-time. Management jobs in both sectors tend to be defined as full-time jobs, and managerial workloads are often geared to long working hours. Some SERVEMPLOI women have deliberately refused promotion or left managerial work because they cannot balance their work and home lives on this basis.

Training, Skills Formation and Employee Development

• Formal training in the retailing sector is brief, and job-specific. It is more extensive in Denmark, Sweden and Germany than elsewhere. Some employers do not train their staff at all; others make training conditional upon employees' attendance record.
• Informal training and learning seem to be the main mechanisms by which process and product knowledge is imparted in the retail sector.
• Women's career progression prospects in retailing are poor throughout Europe. Although the sector is overwhelmingly female, women are concentrated in cashiering and other junior positions and very few reach senior and managerial grades. Few retailers implement systematic progression policies which are designed to tap the potential of their female staff through training, appraisals, skills evaluation and promotion.
• Women who do reach senior positions in retailing find it difficult to combine these with their domestic lives, because of the time demands of the work. This problem is becoming exacerbated by the move to extended opening hours which in turn demand that managerial staff are present in the workplace for longer periods.
• Formal banking and insurance qualifications are declining in importance for financial service work, where increasing emphasis is being placed on 'social capital', such as communications and interpersonal skills. Although in Spain a degree is still needed to enter banking employment, its relevance to the actual work of a banking employee is not always apparent.
• Formal training for financial service work varies between employers and countries. In Scandinavia, training is extensive and includes computer-based training. In Denmark, employers collaborate through to provide training through a jointly-run institution. In other countries, training is more variable, and some branch and office staff receive almost no training.
• Despite the fact that the role of financial services branch staff has become strongly sales-oriented, the main focus of formal training is not on product knowledge but on computer skills and interpersonal skills.
• The occupational hierarchies through which women were excluded from financial service careers are disappearing, as formal qualification-based financial service work declines in importance. The long-term implications of this development for women's skill acquisition and recognition, for their training, personal development and career progression are still unclear. There is some evidence to suggest that some women are moving into more senior positions than in the past, but it is unclear whether this is an opportunity which is now systematically open to all. Call centre environments offer limited opportunities for progression, into team leader and junior management roles, but their flat structures mean that opportunities beyond this are very limited.

Gender Relations and Equal Opportunities

• Both sectors are strongly gender-segregated, and women remain clustered in lower-level positions.
• Women are often seen by both retail and financial service employers as being particularly suitable for customer service work because of their 'natural' interpersonal skills. This work is usually routine and of low status.
• Despite this, women in junior positions are often involved in relatively responsible tasks, including managing and organising activities. However, invariably the value which women with interpersonal and organisational skills add to a company's processes is not fully rewarded.
• New gender divisions of labour are emerging in both sectors, apparently around product lines. In branch-based financial services, women are being drawn into comparatively low status personal account work; in call centres, women are the majority of employees and work as customer service representatives. In retail, gender labels are also emerging around the products sold - though these are not fixed and vary from country to country.