5HR01 Employment Relationship Management
No Comments
5HR01 Employment Relationship Management is a unit that teaches students about approaches and practices for improving working relationships and thereby improving people’s lives at work. Promoting positive workplace relationships has a substantial impact on increasing organisational performance.
Learning objectives
Learners will be able to:
- Understand the ideas of employee voice and engagement
- Understand conflict behaviours and dispute resolution procedures by the end of the unit
- Learn how to handle performance, disciplinary, and grievance issues legally.
- Recognise the importance of employee organisations in fostering good working relationships.
Employee voice and engagement in supporting better working lives
Approaches to employee voice and engagement
Employee voice and engagement approaches are derived from various intellectually, affectively, and socially recognised perspectives. Learners will be able to identify engagement factors such as leadership, management involvement, social media engagement, and engagement surveys to determine the relationship between employee voice and engagement. The students understand the influence of employee voice on workers, including those in the gig economy. The concept teaches students how to take an active position in expressing their opinions and ideas to improve job quality. Learners also distinguish between employee involvement and participation.
Employee voice tools that drive engagement, and the relationship between employee voice and performance
Employee voice tools include surveys to gather information from employees, recommendation systems, and participation in team meetings, to name a few. Participation in consultative committees and creating chances for employees to participate in forums are two more techniques that increase employee voice.
Employee voice is linked to organisational success by adopting high-performance work practices, evaluating various performance measurement methods, and considering numerous aspects influencing employee engagement.
Designing of the better working lives concept.
Learners must comprehend the definition of good work, which includes fair and decent work, job quality, and terms that improve working circumstances. The sort of work assigned to employees, the responsiveness of employers to employee concerns, and the assessment of job quality toward increasing organisation performance are all significant principles that design better working lives.
Conflict behaviours and dispute resolutions in work
Differences between conflict and misbehaviour
Disagreements between employers and employees that are not resolved lead to conflict. Strikes, go-slows, protests, and poor employee behaviour are common outcomes of conflicts, and they divert attention away from the usual operating systems at work. Misconduct refers to deliberate unfavourable behaviour on the part of employees. Fraud, absenteeism, tardiness to work and theft are examples of misbehaviour. There are two types of conflicts: official and informal. Differences in leadership styles and arguments emerging from various people’s ideas cause formal conflict. Informal conflicts arise from various sources, including spontaneous disagreements, differing viewpoints, and cultural differences.
Employees and employers take official or unofficial employee action when disagreements emerge. When trade unions become engaged in resolving conflicts, official action is done. When officially resolving issues, union officials adhere to the necessary legislation and legal protection regulations. Unofficial action is done when there is no trade union authorisation and no legal protection for the parties involved in the issue.
Differences between third-party conciliation, mediation and arbitration
Third-party conciliation is a strategy in which a neutral individual assists parties in disagreement in understanding each other and resolving their differences. Mediation entails using a neutral third party to explain the disagreement and offer suggestions to the parties on how to resolve it. Arbitration is a method of resolving disputes in which an arbitrator makes a decision that is binding on both parties.
Lawfully managing performance, disciplinary and grievance matters
Legislation relating to unfair dismissal
Dismissal may be due to difficulties with capability or misconduct. When personnel fail to meet expectations or lack the qualifications required to do specific duties, capability difficulties develop. Misconduct occurs when employees engage in behaviours that violate the organisation’s rules and regulations. To guarantee that the dismissal is justifiable, employers must act fairly when making choices.
Employee grievances and discipline handling procedures
Bad organisational management, a lack of flexibility at work, unjust treatment, poor working conditions, and incidences of harassment and bullying are all causes of grievances. Therefore, employers must manage grievances and disciplinary matters most appropriately to ensure fairness without bias.
Employers that follow protocols and processes when dealing with grievances safeguard their companies against legal action. Employers establish a positive company reputation that encourages other employees to join. Employee frustrations are reduced, and employee resistance to change is reduced when grievances are handled effectively. Staff resignations are decreasing, resulting in higher levels of employee retention.
Role of employee bodies in employment relations
Employers must comprehend the provisions of employment law, including laws relating to information disclosure, legal regulations on collective agreements, and processes in official and unofficial acts to improve employee relations.
Various union and non-union groups represent employees in an organisation. Trade unions are well-organised, with representatives participating in union matters. Joint negotiating committees, work councils, employee forums, staff councils, and pension bodies are all non-union instances. Representatives of trade unions take responsibility for participating in the collective bargaining process to collectively develop rules relating to industrial governance and other agreements that improve decision-making effectiveness.
Reference
Asante, O., 2020. Leadership Strategies to Manage Workplace Conflict.
Bai, Y., Lin, L. and Liu, J.T., 2019. Leveraging the employee voice: a multi-level social learning perspective of ethical leadership. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 30(12), pp.1869-1901.
Dobbins, T. and Dundon, T., 2020. Non-union employee representation. In Handbook of research on employee voice. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Duan, J., Li, C., Xu, Y. and Wu, C.H., 2017. Transformational leadership and employee voice behavior: A Pygmalion mechanism. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(5), pp.650-670.
Gall, G., 2020. Twenty Years of the Third Statutory Union Recognition Procedure in Britain: Outcomes and Impact. Industrial Law Journal, 49(4), pp.657-662.
Holbeche, L.S., 2018. Organisational effectiveness and agility. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance.
Jiang, H. and Luo, Y., 2018. Crafting employee trust: from authenticity, transparency to engagement. Journal of Communication Management.
Nash, D. and Hann, D., 2020. Strategic conflict management? A study of workplace dispute resolution in Wales. ILR Review, 73(2), pp.411-430.
Nechanska, E., Hughes, E. and Dundon, T., 2020. Towards integration of employee voice and silence. Human Resource Management Review, 30(1), p.100674.
Patton, C.M., 2020. Breaking the healthcare workplace conflict perpetuation cycle. Leadership in Health Services.
Pugh, J., 2020. The United Kingdom’s Coronavirus Act, deprivations of liberty, and the right to liberty and security of the person. Journal of Law and the Biosciences, 7(1), p. lsaa011.
Rasheed, M.A., Shahzad, K., Conroy, C., Nadeem, S. and Siddique, M.U., 2017. Exploring the role of employee voice between high-performance work system and organisational innovation in small and medium enterprises. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development.
Saks, A.M., 2019. Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement revisited. Journal of Organisational Effectiveness: People and Performance.
Samuels, A., 2020. Coronavirus Act 2020: An overview by a lawyer interested in medico-legal matters. Medico-Legal Journal, 88(2), pp.86-89.
Sarvaiya, H., Eweje, G. and Arrowsmith, J., 2018. The roles of HRM in CSR: strategic partnership or operational support? Journal of Business Ethics, 153(3), pp.825-837.
Shuck, B., Osam, K., Zigarmi, D. and Nimon, K., 2017. Definitional and conceptual muddling: Identifying the positionality of employee engagement and defining the construct. Human Resource Development Review, 16(3), pp.263-293.
Wang, Y., Zheng, Y. and Zhu, Y., 2018. How transformational leadership influences employee voice behaviour: The roles of psychological capital and organisational identification. Social Behaviour and Personality: an international journal, 46(2), pp.313-321.
Related Articles:
