What Are the Impacts of Changes in Employee Relations Strategies?
Changing your company's employee relations strategy has a profound influence in several areas of workplace satisfaction. Employee relations strategies change throughout the life of an organization to maintain fresh, timely attention to employees' needs. Beware of how employee relations strategies can negatively impact your company by tuning in to employee opinion, observation and workforce patterns to create a positive impact on your workforce.
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Employee Satisfaction
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Developing an employee relations strategy to improve job satisfaction includes polling employees using opinion surveys, exit interviews and focus groups. However, if your practice initially focuses on one method, changing the strategy is viewed one of two ways: your previous method was ineffective or you are striving to improve using a new employee relations technique. The impact depends on how you use information gleaned through surveys, interviews and group discussions. If you act on employee suggestions and feedback from surveys and follow through to address employee concerns, when you change your strategy to utilize small group discussions, it appears your employee relations specialist is working harder at improving overall job satisfaction. On the other hand, if you fail to make progress using surveys and turn instead to data from exit interviews, it appears that your employee relations area is fumbling around to find the right solution to employee concerns.
Employee Morale
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Employee relations strategies undeniably affect employee morale. It's not enough to simply have an employee relations section within the human resources department. Employee relations specialists' goals include strengthening the employer-employee relationship. Strengthening working relationships requires frequent interaction with employees, putting a face on human resources and demonstrating that the company's employees are human resources' internal customers. Employee relations strategies pertaining to performance management can have a great impact on employee morale. Performance management components include employee feedback, corrective action and development opportunities. An employee relations strategy that neglects consistent application of these components throughout the employee base can cause a downward spiral in employee morale.
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Compensation and Benefits
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Employee relations strategies can impact the correlation between compensation and benefits and performance management. In most cases, employees rely on their performance appraisal as an indicator of salary or wage increases. Companies that overlook performance appraisal deadlines or companies that do not have a well-constructed performance management system in place convey a message to employees that evaluating their performance is not a priority. Employees who sense performance evaluation is low on the list of priorities might also feel compensation is an equally low concern. The actual performance appraisal is a task that both managers and employees often dread. Nevertheless, there must be constructive feedback, recognition and a tie-in to compensation and benefits for your organization's employee relations strategy to have a positive affect.
Recognition and Reward
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Building upon the recognition theme, employee motivators are more than compensation, bonuses and cash incentives. When an employee relations strategy includes creative forms of recognition, the surge in employee motivation translates to greater productivity and employee engagement. Creative forms of recognition range from upper-level executives acknowledging diligent work of front-line employees, or giving more responsibility to employees who demonstrate aptitude, proficiency and initiative. Assigning challenging work and increasing an employee's level of authority and latitude are human resources best practices for recognizing and rewarding talent. Combining a system of recognition with employee motivation always have a positive impact on the workplace.
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References
- Smart Business: Organizational Leadership, Employee Relations; Chelan David; November 2006
- LRI Management Services: Employee Relations - Case Study 1
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management: Employee Relations - Frequently Asked Questions
- Austin Business Journal: Tips to Improve Employee Relations; Suzin Barnes; March 1998
- iStockAnalyst: Improving Employee Relations Should Be Top Priority for 2011; January 2011
- U.S. Department of the Interior: Employee's Guide to Employee Relations
