3 min read

VACCINATION TESTS THE RELATIONS BETWEEN COMPANIES AND THEIR EMPLOYEES

For companies who have been operating with a general shortage of workforce for years, it has been extremely difficult to organize work during the crisis. But the issue that put employers’ relationships with their employees to test the most, was vaccination.

Of course, the past year has been difficult for everyone, both personally and professionally. However, there is not much thought about how employers have had to change their work organization almost each and every day. Employees were constantly left in self-isolation and on sick leave, there were in-house outbreaks that took entire departments away from work for weeks. However, demand for a company’s service or products was affected differently – it can be said that, for most companies, it remained essentially the same or even increased.

For employers, vaccination is the light shining at the end of the tunnel. It is what everyone is rushing towards.

For employers, vaccination is the light shining at the end of the tunnel. It is what everyone is rushing towards. Businesses are diligently compiling lists of workers who are critical service providers and bombarding the government with the desire to vaccinate as many workers as possible, as a priority.

However, as the Olerex case, which came to the public this week, showed, the desire of workers to get an injection is not nearly as present. So the issue could lead to a huge employment dispute. For employees, this is an extremely personal decision that they are not prepared to make rashly. And even less at the behest of an employer or even the state. We know that not even every person in healthcare agreed to be vaccinated.

The issue of vaccination divided society long before the arrival of the Coronavirus, and there is a skepticism about vaccines. Are you going to have your child vaccinated? That is a question parents don’t even dare to discuss with each other, because even best friends can quickly get into a fight on this topic.

Thus, businesses need to be much more thoughtful and careful in handling the issue of the Coronavirus vaccine, than they might realize at first glance. Neutral information can be shared with employees, and organizing introductions to the topic and discussions, but the final decision belongs, in any case, to the employee.

Companies need to consider, at the board level, whether there are any positions in their company where vaccination is essential. The Estonian legal environment makes it possible to set a qualification requirement to include vaccination, if a risk analysis is done about the work environment of the respective position. Of course, it cannot be ruled out that the termination of employment following the non-compliance of such a requirement may nevertheless reach the court. But preliminary evaluation suggests that such a restriction may be imposed on certain positions.

If the risk of Coronavirus is significant to a business but, for various reasons, making vaccination a qualification requirement is not a good solution, resources should be directed to encourage people to vaccinate themselves. Here, successful internal communication is a combination of informing, compensating, and maintaining relationships.

With thoughtless action it is easy to flush away an employer’s reputation that has been cultivated over many years.

However, it is clear that a company’s actions in this crisis will give employees a clear impression of the values that prevail in the company, and the leaders who run it. And that impression will stay for a long time. With thoughtless action it is easy to flush away an employer’s reputation that has been cultivated over many years.

3 min read

OTT LUMI: CELEBRITIES SET AN EXAMPLE FOR VACCINATION

The public is not clear on the vaccination plan, nor on the obligations and responsibilities of the parties involved, or the indicators for assessing the success of vaccination activities. If such a plan exists in Estonia, it is skillfully hidden, writes communication expert Ott Lumi.

Society is organized through three functions: communication, the rule of law, and money. The cheapest of these is communication, which is used by smart communities and costs several times less than changing misconceptions that have taken root later.

For example, people are currently being fined for not wearing a mask, but only half a year ago some scientists said a mask was pointless. Now the only thing we can do is to react with money, as the richest countries can afford an endless supply of hospital beds and some state budgets seem to be made of rubber.

The HOIA app turned out to be a disappointment. The lack of a coordinated campaign by developers and the state became fatal..

In Coronavirus communication the most important preventive action, undoubtedly, is to keep infection low. However, the largest prevention project, the HOIA app, turned out to be disappointing. The initiative’s lack of a coordinated campaign by developers and the state turned out to be fatal. Spending only 200,000 euros in circumstances where the volume of the Estonian advertising market exceeds 150 million euros a year, seems ridiculously cheap in a significant crisis. In addition, it is known that the Russian speaking target group primarily uses social media and watches YouTube more than the national average. Yet these channels were drastically underutilized.

In contrast, the success of the Finnish analogue, Koronavilkku, was based on both a good product and joint communication by the state health board and the private sector. Our Northern neighbors have benefitted from their very high level of trust in the state, people’s readiness to contribute to resolving the crisis themselves, and the successful implementation of an extensive advertising campaign.

At present, the spearhead of communication should be pointed towards vaccination. However, the public is not clear on the vaccination plan, nor the obligations and responsibilities of the parties involved, or the indicators for assessing the success of the activities. If such a plan exists in Estonia, it is skillfully hidden, as are the results of the relevant measurements.

A population survey published in mid-January found that 47% of respondents were unsure about vaccination. With such a large number of people hesitant, a large-scale nationwide campaign should have been launched, not the publication of individual opinions. In addition, it remains unclear where and how residents who do not speak Estonian are approached. The injection process of nurses and caregivers, as well as public surveys, clearly showed that there are more who are hesitant about vaccination in the non-Estonian category.

What’s more, the paper Põhjarannik wrote at the end of January that communication about vaccination will not begin in Ida-Virumaa until May. As there would not be enough vaccines in the country earlier than that. And this all happened in a situation where, as is well-known, hostile forces are engaged in disseminating false information in a focused manner, especially to the Russian-speaking target group. There is active incitement for the Sputnik vaccine and against vaccines authorized in the European Union.

Past experience shows that model-based, precisely targeted activities bring success in communication. A good example comes from the United States polio campaign, which took place in several waves and where messages were forwarded by respected and well-known persons, such as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Ella Fitzgerald.

In Estonia, well-known persons like Anne Veski or Mihhail Kõlvart, could also be engaged in informing the Russian-speaking community.

Australia’s still most successful Covid-19 vaccination campaign, “Safe, Effective and Free”, which cost $24 million (€15.4 million), was also based on positive examples. Many ethnicities live together in the country. Indigenous Australians had to be approached differently: respected spokesmen in local communities used social media to convey messages.

Does the tree fall when we hear it and see it, or is it enough when a politician describes how the tree fell?

Among others, the government also focused specifically on women in their 30s, who were more likely to become pregnant. As a result, the number of young women in the target group who considered vaccination to be completely safe, increased by 15%. Social listening was actively used to refute misinformation: social media tried to catch groups who spread misrepresentations, and these were corrected as quickly as possible.

Without a detailed vaccination plan, even the most awe-inspiring communication plan will not work. The Minister of Health and Labor has somehow expressed the idea that a vaccination plan has been around for a long time. But does the tree fall when we hear it and see it, or is it enough when a politician describes how the tree fell?

We can do nothing but comfort ourselves in the thought that we are not alone. The situation in Latvia is similar to Estonia, in terms of both the content and communication of the vaccination plan, but with the difference that Latvian politicians publicly curse officials by name, and have apologized to the people for their administrative inability.

5 min read

Andreas Kaju: State that is and yet is not

This article first appeared in Hea Kodanik 2020 summer edition.

The corona crisis showed well that the State, with a capital letter, is like a phenomenon of quantum mechanics, which at one moment is there and then is not there. It appears when we want it, when we believe in it, when we give it life and legitimacy – and dissipates like a mirage when we no longer believe in it and act accordingly.

Undoubtedly, there is a government all the time, an executive, with its inherent coercive mechanisms to enforce the social compact, the constitution and other laws, balanced by a legislature that scrutinises and reflects the will of the people and a judiciary that understands the law.

At the same time, Estonia is objectively – and also numerically, in terms of the actual functioning of the economy – a country where the vast majority of people living here go about their daily lives completely independently of the existence of the executive branch, with the exception of a few basic public services. Even the functioning of public services has become so self-evident, in a technology-enabled way, that it is easier not to notice them than to make a number of them. They are more background processes that run without user intervention.

It all serves a society in which the Estonian people are the dominant part. These are the people who feel a sense of belonging to this land and, above all, to other compatriots; between whom there is an inextricable common ground, which the Estonian language and, for a smaller part of the population, culture and narrower meanings help to encode and decode.

What crisis taught us about the state

It is only in times of trouble, conflict and war that we all become a state. Common hardships consolidate government, legislature, judiciary and the people. It is in these fleeting moments that the otherwise self-interested activity of each of us, committed to our own lives, freezes for a moment, ready to submit to the imperative of preserving the lives of all rather than ourselves.

So there was something comforting in the first phase of the corona crisis for supporters of the larger state as well as for those whose first instinct is to be sceptical and averse to state intervention. First of all, the people of Estonia showed a willingness to be guided by the common-sense guidelines of the state when it was absolutely necessary. In the same way, people had long ago abandoned them when the government was still discussing possible new orders and restrictions at cabinet meetings (abandoning them, however, as a result of debate among themselves, it must be said).

It is only in times of trouble, conflict and war that we all become a state.

The problem was most obvious with the so-called 2+2 restriction: the government and the Scientific Council discussed in the second half of June whether and how to change the restriction in circumstances where the vast majority of people in Estonia have been behaving in a way that denies the existence of such a restriction for a month and a half. In this way, we saw the extent of the state’s functioning in an emergency situation, and also its limitations. There were moments when the government and the emergency guidelines acted as if they were holding the people at the end of a rope, but the government’s ability to hold the attention of the people and the desired behaviour in the long term was predictably poor.

Estonia is a liberal (this does not mean progressive, the right to life of conservatism also rests on the same principles) democracy in its constitution and in its tradition of practical politics – we have chosen a path for the survival of a nation and culture that rests on respect for the individual rights and freedoms of those who wish to belong to that nation. Most of what concerns public policy in Estonia is ensured through people’s own behavioural decisions and choices. An Estonian pedestrian waits to cross the road behind a red light even when there are no cars and no one is looking. All this is complemented by the peculiarity of a small country – we cannot afford a different kind of state than the one based on people’s own common sense.

The majority of the governing coalition in Estonia felt the same way about the state during the crisis. So that even if we knew that the virus could be stopped if life in Estonia were to be completely halted for 21 days and enforced by the use of the Defence League and the army if necessary, the Estonian public is not prepared to tolerate anything like that. The decision would be reflected in a worse-than-expected result for those involved in the next elections.

Nonetheless, people are prepared to comply, without question, in the short term, with orders and behavioural guidelines that coincide with their personal sense of safety and security. This situation prevailed for weeks – businesses and citizens reduced their contacts to a minimum, traffic density on Tallinn’s streets rapidly halved, according to measurements by outdoor advertising company JCDecaux, and so on. But the problem of compliance arose as soon as people’s individual perception of safety no longer matched the seriousness that the emergency manager’s orders seemed to imply, and restrictions and actual behaviour began to diverge rapidly and increasingly.

There is nothing wrong with this – on the contrary, people were thinking for themselves and acting more or less sensibly in the light of the best available information. The government, instead of pushing back, started to look for ways to ease restrictions after a momentary standstill, although there was talk of party disagreements (any politically interested person can work out for themselves which party preferred more restrictions and which preferred to trust citizens).

By the way, my company commissioned a study from Norstat on its own initiative, the results of which showed that the Prime Minister’s explanations on coronavirus were more reliable than those of leading health officials or the press – at least until Arkadi Popov was appointed as the Emergency Medical Director of the Health Service. Television news was slightly more credible than media portals; somewhat surprisingly, newspapers had the same credibility as media portals – people no longer make a qualitative distinction.

Government and the civil society

The question of whether anything is different with the state and civil society under the current government has been on the minds of active citizens. Undoubtedly, because elections have consequences, and one can only be pleased about that, since people have forgotten about it in the intervening years. Governments have priorities and the basis for supporting civil society is not an issue that can exist outside the scope of government. On the other hand, nothing has changed apart from some disagreements with NGOs on aspects of the administrative organisation of civil society policy implementation. Yet.

The most tangible change is the prevailing insecurity among civil servants in some ministries. In general, there are well-established perceptions in the Estonian administrative culture of what one or the other political party in Estonia stands for (worldview and even more nuanced preferences), which are further framed by the coalition agreement and the government’s action plan. Since the agreement that marks the birth of the current government is based on a small common element, what is not written in it is more important than what is. This creates uncertainty and speculation in some ministries, as it is difficult to accurately predict the will of political leaders. If, on the other hand, you have to go to the minister’s office to get that will on every issue, then the issues start to pile up and on many issues progress stops altogether.

If, on the other hand, you have to go to the minister’s office to get that will on every issue, then the issues start to pile up and on many issues progress stops altogether.

It is not sustainable in the long term for public administration to have to go to the political leadership for guidance, agreement or feedback on every single issue. In such pyramids of power, unsigned decisions pile up on the minister’s desk within weeks. Even in classically and necessarily hierarchical organisations such as the military, leadership today is doctrinally different: in a war situation, strategic leaders express their Will – what they want to achieve as a result of the operation – and tactical leaders make decisions themselves to achieve it in the rapidly changing conditions on the battlefield. It is no longer possible to lead otherwise.

Each government has its own culture and mechanisms for resolving political conflicts. In a coalition, where there is little agreed common ground and many of the issues that still need to be resolved have been left out of the agreement, it is this process, often informal, that is crucial. On the other hand, life has shown that, on many issues, they are of no use either if the confrontation is deeply ideological.

In Estonia, an adult’s ability to cope in times of peace does not depend on the government or on its will. The same should be true of civil society, only more so – the point of civil society should be to increase the capacity of communities to function autonomously, so that we can always manage by relying on each other’s contributions. One way to think about the strength of civil society is to imagine what happens when government (political governance) is turned off. As in the Kingdom of Belgium, where in 2010-11, increasingly protracted coalition negotiations failed to form a functioning government for 589 days.

So what happened there? Nothing happened. Would we be satisfied with the picture that would open up for us of civil society in Estonia under a government that was switched off? What is more, would you believe me when I say that a great many things that, even in the present government, at least on the surface, are disturbing to civil society associations, will dissipate from the receding mire of mist as soon as they are simply no longer believed? It is also a much healthier way to live.

Of course, practical life for many not-for-profit civic organisations is very different from the ideal plan. Their functioning depends on the state, its will and goodwill, many times more than that of the ordinary person. The operation of many associations is unambiguously linked to the willingness of the various authorities to place their trust in society; to give back to citizens the right and the opportunity to organise themselves services in one area of life or another, which were hitherto considered to be the exclusive preserve of the state.

Nevertheless, both civil associations and their advocacy should at all events seek to avoid a situation in which it is no longer relevant whether they are private non-profit organisations or simply cost-effective extensions of the executive branch. Finding the right balance between executive partnership and autonomous action is one of the greatest challenges for civil society.

4 min read

Ott Lumi: Lobby — Hard To Regulate in Sauna

This article was first appeared in Äripäev on April 24, 2018.

In the case of lobbying, it is important to mark first of all that it is one of the areas of consultancy with, for example, around 25 000 people in Brussels and around 15 000 in Washington. Laws and regulations have an impact on a very wide range of business areas. At the top of the list you could list the food industry, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, IT, arms industry, classical industry, etc. Companies compete intensively and are usually influenced by the regulatory environment as one of the important factors.

Government relations experts and advisers are the people who know how regulations are made, who makes them and how to monitor and sometimes influence their development. Regulatory lobbying is therefore a very old profession. The problem is illegal lobbying. It is something that countries and nations have tried to regulate according to their contextual specificities. For example, our Minister of Justice (at the time Urmas Reinsalu – ed.) took the position that lobbying should be better regulated and promised to come up with ideas for doing so. The latest yearbook of the internal security service also speaks about covert lobbying and the importance of keeping all policy influencing activities in the open and public domain.

I am a government relations practitioner as well as a theorist. I am the author of Estonia’s first university lecture course on the subject and have written a few academic articles in the field. But first and foremost I am a practitioner of government relations. I have been advising companies on regulatory issues, both domestic and foreign, for a decade now. As a practitioner in the field, I believe that sensible regulation would undoubtedly be in the common interest of all normal advisers in the business. There is just one big caveat. Namely, only such a regulation really makes sense, which actually contributes to real policy influence disclosure and which all actors are willing to accept.

Only such a regulation really makes sense, which actually contributes to real policy influence disclosure and which all actors are willing to accept.

Three ways to regulate

Broadly speaking, there are three main traditions of lobbying regulation. The first is the Nordic option. In those societies, the regulation of lobbying has been debated at length, but the general consensus view is that regulating such activities is a threat to freedom of expression. Of course, this Nordic position should be seen in conjunction with the fact that the Nordic countries have the best perception of corruption in the world, i.e. that politics is conducted honestly in these societies and that there is a general perception that influencing politics can also be honest. We are talking here about societies in which it is believed that policy-making and the decisive influencing of policy must not only be honest, but also appear to be transparent.

Central European countries are generally classified in the second group. There, the picture of lobby regulation is relatively mixed. Classical lobbying regulation exists only in France and Austria, with self-regulation being the main feature.

Eastern Europe leads the way in regulating lobbying, with rigidly written lobbying regulations in Lithuania, Slovenia and Poland. In the case of Lithuania, for example, this also has a very specific background. Lithuania’s main obstacle in the European Union accession negotiations at the time was the great challenge of fighting corruption, and it was then that American consultants were recommended to Lithuania, and they wrote an American-style lobbying regulation for Lithuania, with accredited lobbyists who have to pass security clearance, rigid reporting, etc., as is the custom in Washington. The lobbying background in Poland is similar. The experience in Eastern Europe speaks of the way in which general misbehaviour is attempted to be tackled through excessive regulation.

All in all, so-called very rigid lobbying laws have been adopted in six EU Member States (as of 2018 – ed.). Ten countries have so-called soft regulations, which mainly means self-regulation on the part of advisers. In the remaining EU Member States, there is no self-regulation, no national regulation and no lobby register. These include, for example, Estonia*, Finland, Latvia, Denmark, and Sweden.

Lobbying depends on cultural background

There is a general consensus that illegal influence on politics, or various forms of corrupt practices, are largely cultural phenomena in nature and background. In the United States, for example, the regulation of lobbying has been an ongoing issue for the last 100 years. The first lobbying regulation, or law, in the United States of America was passed as early as 1946. Since then, one of the themes of every federal election has been to improve lobbying regulation, to make it tougher, to make it more transparent, and so on. This law tries to regulate both the subjects of politics, i.e. the lobbyists and the lobbied, and the objects of politics, i.e. the question of who has the right to have a say and who does not on specific proposed laws or regulations.

The issue of lobbying rules was also on the agenda during the 2016 US presidential election. In January 2017, President Trump enacted a series of new lobbying rules, including a two-year period during which officials are prohibited from advising clients on the same issue on which they previously worked and a five-year ban on lobbying the same agency where they previously worked**.

It is a question of its own what we could achieve if we were to regulate government relations consultancy, or lobbying, in Estonia. As international practice shows, there is no point in going into this in a cavalry charge style. It is also questionable how effective such regulations would be at all. The relevant debate in Finland has come to the conclusion that in a society where real decisions are made in the sauna, registers and the like are of little use.

Greater order would be beneficial

Nonetheless, as a practitioner in the field, I concede that a move towards more order in the field could be a goal. Firstly, it is positive that the number of professional advisers in government relations has increased significantly over the years, which also means that horizontal quality control of the indusry is beginning to emerge. A couple of things could deserve a chance already in a purely symbolic sense.

Firstly, I think that a voluntary register in Parliament would be progressive in terms of political culture. The German experience, where such a register has existed on a voluntary basis since 1972, confirms this.

Secondly, some kind of operational restrictions could be considered for civil servants and politicians, so that they do not become advisers in certain areas immediately after leaving public office. This could also be something that has a practical dimension and would undoubtedly strengthen political culture. Above all, however, legal compliance and political culture are important.

* In spring 2021, Estonia adopted a good practice guideline for dealing with lobbyists. Among other things, it obliges ministries and public authorities to publish the meetings of ministers and senior officials with interest groups.

** Shortly before the end of his term, Trump repealed these rules.