Public and Commercial Services Union

What is mapping?

Mapping is a strategic tool to help you organise successfully. Mapping should provide you with a picture of the areas where you need to focus attention on recruiting members and activists so there are union contacts in all parts of the organisation.

The information you gather will give you an accurate idea of the areas you need to focus your organising and recruitment activity on so you can begin to develop a step-by-step approach to building the strength of your branch.

Mapping also provides your branch committee with an opportunity to get ordinary members involved in building the branch - providing a sense of shared ownership and responsibility.

How to map your workplace

There are a number of different ways you can map your workplace – from drawing up a floor plan and marking down the information about where people sit, to developing a spreadsheet to keep and update the information you gather.

What is most important is that you undertake the mapping exercise with the intention of collecting as much information as you can to help you plan your recruitment and organising work and build a stronger branch.

Why do it?

Undertaking a mapping exercise will enable your branch to develop a coordinated strategy rather than recruiting on an ad hoc basis. It should provide you with a picture of the areas where you need to focus to recruit members and where activists are needed so there are union contacts in all parts of the organisation.

The information you compile will help you work out what your organising goals should be and help you measure the success you have in achieving them. Once you have completed your map, it will provide valuable data on the make up of your workforce and help identify areas that need attention.

A mapping exercise should be completed as part of the campaign process -  to help identify target areas for campaigns and indeed help formulate the campaign itself. For example, if your map shows that your accounts department has a high percentage of young employees but very few of them are members you know where your focus should be.
 

Who does it?

As mapping is about gathering information, you need all of your activists (and hopefully some interested members) to participate. Try to ensure that the people involved have knowledge of a wide range of different work areas.

You can build your team by getting lots of people involved in the mapping. The very fact that you are out there mapping as a team, talking to people, seeking information and asking their opinions means you have started to tackle the fundamentals of organising.

How do I do it?

You may be able to begin your mapping exercise at your desk  - but remember that mapping is essentially something that can only be done by getting out and talking to people. Get your activists together along with a list of employees. Spend a minute discussing what you know about each one of them.

You don’t have to collect the information in one go. You can build up your database over time, extend it as necessary and amend it as and when the information needs updating.

What information should we collect?

Your map should be tailored to your workplace and what you want to learn from the information. You can decide what information you need but there is some key information that you should include>

For each work area:

• Who works there? (including gender, race, age)
• What is their working pattern? (are they full or part time, permanent / contract / casual/ agency temp?)
• What is their grade / pay / job?

Are they:

• A member (are they active or potentially active  - ie. would they distribute information?)
• A non-member (and what their attitude towards the union is)
• A rep.

As with all your records, you will need to consider the implications of collecting and keeping this information in relation to the Data Protection Act.

How do we collect the information?

You can collect the information however you want. You may find it easier to complete each section or work area using a floor plan then transfer the data to a spreadsheet after you have collected it.

You'll  find a list of employees useful especially if you also have a list of members so you can cross-reference. Many employers will provide this information either on request or routinely depending on their agreements with PCS.

Although it may seem like a big task, if you get members and reps in each section involved collecting the information for you, it won’t be so onerous.

Clearly define what you need done and why, so that members have a set task to undertake. Explain that, once you have collected the information the first time it should be relatively easy to keep it up to date and will not be such hard work.

Analysing the information

There are a number of questions you can ask once you have collected the information on your workplace and identified your members and representatives.

In the first instance you will probably only want to focus on identifying the areas where you have lower membership, a lack of representatives, or where there are particular issues.

Over time however, you should use the information you collected in your mapping exercise to carefully target your campaigns and recruitment efforts, and to build your representative structure. The following questions should help you identify areas that you need to focus on:

• How does the membership in different areas compare to the staffing in those areas – consider gender, working patterns, grade, ethnicity etc?
• Is your membership spread evenly across the organisation or concentrated in a few areas? Are these the areas that you have active reps in?
• Are men and women recruited in proportion to the gender balance within the organisation as a whole?
• Are all grades / jobs represented or are you recruiting from certain grades /jobs and not others
• Are you recruiting part time and contract or temporary staff as well as full time staff?

You should ask the same questions of your rep structures to gauge the strength of your branch.

Grading

You may find it helpful to grade the staff you have identified as working in each area. A useful way to do this is to grade staff as follows:

• those who have already joined the union - 1
• those who will probably join easily or have previously indicated that they will join - 2
• those who you think will join over a particular issue or will take some persuading – 3
• those who will probably not join - 4
• hostile staff and management - 5.

Be careful how you share this information paying attention to the Data Protection Act as mentioned above.

Structure

This process can help give your campaign some structure. For instance, you could ask all those who you have graded as 1 to try to recruit those you have graded as 2. This should not only result in more members but also will help encourage others to become active. Make sure you set up an opportunity for the 1s to come back and tell you how they did and what they learned from it.

When acting on this information, start by addressing the 2s, then the 3s. If you have been successful, you may want to talk to some 4s, but you may need to accept that the 5s will probably never join.