Employee Relations

Introduction to Employee Relations

 According to CIPD (2009) Employee relations has replaced industrial relations as the term for defining the relationship between employers and employees. Today, employee relations is seen as focusing on both individual and collective relationships in the workplace, with an increasing emphasis on helping line managers establish trust-based relationships with employees. A positive climate of employee relations - with high levels of employee involvement, commitment and engagement - can improve business outcomes as well as contribute to employees' well-being.

The managerial focus identified by Marchington and Wilkinson is that employee relations is a study of the rules, regulations and agreements by which employees are managed both as individuals and as a collective group, the priority given to the individual as opposed to the collective relationship varying from company to company depending upon the values of management. As such it is concerned with how to gain people’s commitment to the achievement of an organisation’s business goals and objectives in a number of different situations.

Today, Employee Relations is a much broader concept. It involves maintaining a work environment that satisfies the needs of individual employees and management. Improving employee morale, building company culture, conveying expectations. An effective employee relation involves creating and cultivating a motivated and productive workforce. It’s necessary to keep the dynamics of employer-employee relationship in mind. It covers all the relations between employers and employees in industry. Employee relations also includes giving scope for employee participation in management decisions, communications, policies for improving cooperation and control of grievances and minimization of conflicts.

According to Rubin and Brown (1975), negotiation refers to a process in which individuals work together to formulate agreements about the issues in dispute. This process assumes that the parties involved are willing to communicate and to generate offers, counter-offers, or both. 

Negotiation involves several key components including two or more parties to a negotiation, their interests, their alternatives, the process and the negotiated outcomes (Neale & Northcraft, 1991). These elements are described in the following discussion.

R.G. Shell (2006) identified five styles/responses to negotiation.Individuals can often have strong dispositions towards numerous styles; the style used during a negotiation depends on the context and the interests of the other party, among other factors. In addition, styles can change over time. 

1. Accommodating: Individuals who enjoy solving the other party’s problems and preserving personal relationships. Accommodators are sensitive to the emotional states, body language, and verbal signals of the other parties. They can, however, feel taken advantage of in situations when the other party places little emphasis on the relationship. 

2. Avoiding: Individuals who do not like to negotiate and don’t do it unless warranted. When negotiating, avoiders tend to defer and dodge the confrontational aspects of negotiating; however, they may be perceived as tactful and diplomatic.

3. Collaborating: Individuals who enjoy negotiations that involve solving tough problems in creative ways. Collaborators are good at using negotiations to understand the concerns and interests of the other parties. They can, however, create problems by transforming simple situations into more complex ones.

4. Competing: Individuals who enjoy negotiations because they present an opportunity to win something. Competitive negotiators have strong instincts for all aspects of negotiating and are often strategic. Because their style can dominate the bargaining process, competitive negotiators often neglect the importance of relationships.

5. Compromising: Individuals who are eager to close the deal by doing what is fair and equal for all parties involved in the negotiation. Compromisers can be useful when there is limited time to complete the deal; however, compromisers often unnecessarily rush the negotiation process and make concessions too quickly. 

References

• Armstrong, M. (2006). ‘A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice’, 10th edn., London, Kogan Page, pp. 796-804. 
• David Lax and James Sebenius, 3D Negotiation, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.
• Gennard, J and Judge, G (2005) Employee Relations, 3rd edn, CIPD, London
• Guest, D. (2011), “Human resource management and performance: still searching for some answers”, Human Resource Management Journal, Vol. 21 No. 1, pp. 3-13
• Kuvaas, B. (2008), “An exploration of how the employee-organization relationship affects the linkage between perception of developmental human resource practices and employee outcomes”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 45 No. 1, pp. 1-25.