Module 5.1A: Employee Relationships Flashcards
What is HR’s role in employee-employer relationship?
Facilitate communication and serve as an intermediary to employee–employer communication, when necessary.
- Ensuring that employees and employers are aware of both parties’ rights and responsibilities
- Assessing employee engagement and satisfaction levels, with an aim to improve both
- Managing complaints and grievances
- Facilitating dispute resolution
- Ensuring adherence to federal, state, and local diversity and inclusion laws and regulations
- Ensuring adherence with all federal, state, and local labor laws
This lesson focuses on the establishment and management of the employee–employer relationship.
What are Employment Policies?
- Employment at Will (EAW) statement
- Equal opportunity employment statement
- Non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, including procedures for grievance and complaint resolution
What are Benefits & Compensation?
Should be included in the employee handbook.
Examples include:
- Group insurance offerings
- Vacation and paid time off
- Organization recognized holidays
- 401(k) information
What are Operations Information?
- Standard hours of operation and work schedules
- Attendance policy
Performance evaluation process - Disciplinary procedures
Union information, if applicable
What is Behavior/Conduct?
- specific expectations of what is and is not acceptable should be outlined in the employee handbook
- articulating dress codes, workplace conduct, drug and alcohol use policies, and resolution procedures for violations.
What is Health & Safety?
- Building security procedures
- Reporting procedures for accidents, incidents, injuries, and safety concerns
- Digital security protocols, including reserving the right to regulate and monitor organization-owned technology use
What is organizational climate?
Relates to the experience of stakeholders when interacting with organization.
What is organizational culture?
Refers to experience of employees within the organization when conducting operations.
What are mission, vision, values?
Statements that reflect the ideological and strategic business goals of an organization?
Mission - clarifies organization’s main purpose
Vision - articulates goals of what an organization aspires to become
Values - single words that identify organization’s core beliefs
What is employee engagement?
measure used to determine how committed, passionate and satisfied employees are at work.
employee job satisfaction, commitment, and participation in organizational initiatives correlates with employee productivity
What does Satisfaction assessment tools measure?
How employees feel about their boss, leadership, job duties, responsibilities, wages and more
What are staff meetings?
- Useful for determining how content employees are overall
- Formal town hall-style meetings and weekly meetings are both opportunities to gather data
- Lack of anonymity may limit employee candor
- Time-consuming
What are satisfaction surveys?
- Gathers data regarding individual satisfaction related to wages, bosses, responsibilities, etc.
- Helps identify red flags of employee dissatisfaction
- Should be anonymous
- Adaptable and replicable
- Root causes may not be apparent
What are culture surveys?
- Gathers data specifically related to company culture
- Helps identify trends and prevailing attitudes throughout the organization
- Should be anonymous
- Adaptable and replicable
- Easy to administer
What are focus groups?
- Allows in-depth discussion and exploration of specific topics
- Group format may trigger responses individuals may not have thought to include if asked in isolation
- Necessarily limited in scope
- Time-consuming
What are stay interviews?
- Focuses on why employees choose to stay
- Helps identify what employees value
- Interview format offers the potential for determining root causes through active listening
- Lack of anonymity may prevent complete candor
What are metrics?
- Easy to measure over time for tracking progress
- Able to make use of existing employee performance data
- May be earliest indication of red flags
- Unable to identify root causes
What type of policy should be omitted from an employee handbook?
Severance
The term “psychological contract” refers to:
expectations employees have of their employers
What is an open door policy?
encourages employees to speak directly with organizational leadership about suggestions and concerns
Open-door policies build employee trust and should enhance, not undermine, the relationships among employees, supervisors, and executives.
What is participative management?
refers to a style of management that values employee involvement in certain decision-making processes related to their job
recognized as the experts in their job
empowered to solve problems and set goals in alignment with the organization’s long-term strategic objectives.
What is suggestion program?
Whether a physical box with a notepad and pencil attached or a shortcut on employee computers, the most important aspect of suggestion programs is follow-up
What are cooperative strategies?
reframe the labor–management relationship as a partnership
Cooperative strategies recognize that employees and employers benefit from organizational success
Identifying employee achievements through recognition and rewards programs is an example
What are teams and task forces?
encourage cross-department collaboration toward a common goal.
Some work teams are permanent and operate with relative autonomy, while others may utilize a formal hierarchal structure.
temporary teams charged with tackling a specific concern or issue within the organization.
Suggestion programs, town meetings, and opinion surveys best foster
upward communication
The primary intent of proactive and positive employee relations is to reduce the potential for:
union organization
To encourage candid employee response to an opinion survey, management should ensure:
confidentiality of process
An employee suggestion program is most successful when it:
establishes program framework that focuses on organizational goals.
At what stage do many organizations’ employee engagement efforts fail?
creating actionable plans
