Positive Employee Relations

Positive employee relations are about: –

• Communications (ongoing and focused);
• Employment procedures (particularly grievance and disciplinary);
• Negotiating style (based on mutual needs);
• HR culture (based on marketplace success).

Employment procedures are there to deal with difficulties that arise in the employment relationship and at some stage, all employees will have issues that will cause them concern. Even the most perfect of organizations can leave staff experiencing difficulties feeling alone, isolated, de-motivated, and frustrated.

Elements of positive employee relations

• Good Communications
• Trust
• Managing perceptions and beliefs
• An ethical approach
• Clear expectations
• Conflict Resolution

It works best when the capabilities of line managers have been enhanced in the areas of: –

• Communications
• Company Rules and Expectations
• Work assignment
• Conflict resolution
• Self-awareness and personal impact

With enhanced capabilities, you get more regular engagements with staff, a higher level of professionalism, managing through the laws, and providing regular performance feedback become part of the day to day engagements with staff. The aim of positive employee relations is to create a culture where staff and managers may be assertive in the context of a shared understanding and positive commitment to the organization’s strategy and their rights and responsibilities.

Providing Effective Leadership

• Good leaders attract others who are also focused on success. You can become a good leader by inspiring, encouraging, and enabling others to want to follow and help you. They will help you achieve your goals because they know that you will help them to achieve theirs.
• Leadership is getting people to perform to their maximum potential. Leadership is the art of influencing others to their maximum performance, to accomplish any task, objective, or project. A good deal of leadership has to do with your ability to win the minds of the people around you.

Managing Employee Expectations

• Expectations form part of the dynamics in the relationship between an employee and an employer. In general, employees have expectations that center around the belief that their contribution to the organization should be reciprocated. This is known as a Psychological Contract.
• Ultimately, the Psychological Contract refers to the implicit and explicit beliefs that one person holds about what their own and the other parties’ contribution to the relationship is, or should be. For example, you may “expect” an employee to work additional hours if required without complaint when it is busy and/or the office is understaffed although this expectation is never truly formalized.
• It is very important to meet employee expectations, because when expectations are not met the relationship goes out of balance and employees usually find some way of restoring that balance through their behavior, efforts, and/or attitudes.

Manage expectations by

• Set the right expectations during the hiring period.
• Manage the probationary period.
• Effective communication with employees

Building and Maintaining Trust

• Trust has been described as the “glue” that holds workplace teams together and bonds individual employees to company goals. Employees that do not trust the people they work for (and thus the company they work for) can never be optimally productive.
• The best strategy here is to always be building and maintaining trust. In addition to any other criteria, include trust as a lens through which you evaluate your communications and decisions. There are degrees of trust within any relationship and even within the same relationship at different points of time.
• Therefore, even trust-building within a relationship that you are certain are high trusting should never be considered a “wasted effort”. It may sound cliché, but you can never have enough trust.

Practices for Building Trust

• Establish and maintain integrity.
• Treat your employees as partners.
• Focus on shared goals.
• Be someone that employees respect.
• Be consistent.
• Be caring.

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