Employee relations refers to the relationship between employers and their employees. Effective employee relations are critical to healthy and productive workplace cultures, and are proven to lead to improved business outcomes.
What are the key principles of employee relations?
The primary aim of employee relations is to improve collaboration and relationships within the workplace by focusing on:
- Employee safety and working conditions
- Pay and benefits
- Work-life balance
- Rewards and recognition
- Conflict in the workplace
Benefits of nurturing employee relations
Businesses with a proactive approach to employee relations can derive value across the organisation:
- Employee engagement: It has been proven that businesses with better workforce communications have superior rates of engagement amongst their employees. Better employee engagement can include:
- Update, share, and review employee expectations
- Identifying obstacles and issues encourages open communication
- Do not neglect consistent recognition and feedback
- Encourage sharing of thoughts and discussion
- Employee satisfaction: Employee satisfaction tends to go hand in glove with employee engagement. Less engaged employees tend to be less satisfied and poor employee relations can be one of the primary culprits.
- Employee productivity: Employee engagement and satisfaction boost an employee’s productivity. Businesses with well thought out employee relations typically boast higher revenues, productivity, and profits. If employees know their goals and are given regular feedback, they are much more likely to work harder towards achieving their goals.
- Employee retention: Employee turnover is arguably one of the biggest issues businesses face. The cost of an employee leaving a company is significant. Employees who feel frustrated and isolated, and do not know what is going on within a company, can feel insecure and this, more often than not, forces them to consider new job opportunities.
- Employee advocacy: The ability to reach employees’ connections and use the business’s social capital to its full potential can have a tremendous impact on brand awareness, visibility, and productivity. To achieve employee advocacy, employers should be ready to share important content with employees and keep them in the loop as far as is practicable.
- Employee experience: This provides the biggest evidence of a healthy workplace culture. In order to deliver a good employee experience, employers need to be ready to improve communication with their staff. Open and transparent communication makes employees feel involved, which, in turn, leads to greater degrees of employee engagement. By way of contrast, poor employee communications, leads to lack of engagement and honesty, and promotes a feeling of insecurity.
- Employee empowerment: Involving the workforce in as many aspects of the business as possible gives employees autonomy and responsibility to manage their own work and encourages them to make decisions to achieve their own goals. For employees to feel empowered, they need to clearly understand the business mission and vision and understand how their role contributes to the overall success of the business.
- Employee trust: Trust is crucial for successful empowerment of the workforce. Managers and business owners who trust their employees and communicate their strategy and goals regularly often have little issue giving more power to their workforce.
How businesses sour employee relations
Part of being proactive in managing employee relations, employers should also be mindful of avoiding or deterring certain behaviours and conduct which could undermine efforts to nurture positive relations.
- Micromanaging: when people are micromanaged, they tend to become disengaged, which in turn adversely affects their work, leading to greater micromanagement. Avoid it where possible.
- Being unclear: employees need to know and clearly understand their roles and what is expected of them. This allows both employers and employees to work together to meet those mutual expectations.
- Failing to collect ideas: asking employees to submit their ideas helps them to feel they are part of the team, and part of the decision-making process.
- Failing to share the vision: employees need to feel what they are doing is important and part of something bigger. Sharing long-term vision for the business with employees fosters greater commitment and engagement.
- Failure to manage disputes: there will always be situations when people with diverse lives are thrown together in a working environment and friction is caused. Action must be taken swiftly and fairly to resolve any issues as and when they arise.
- Unsafe working environment: part of effective employee relations involves regular reviews of workplace safety policies and processes, together with ensuring all employees know and understand any updates. If an accident does happen on work premises, it is essential for safety guidelines to be followed. It should be remembered that demonstrating empathy for the injured party is vital.
How to implement an employee relations policy
For any business considering implementing an employee relations policy, the first step towards creating a successful strategy is to draw up a set of clearly written policies. This should describe an employer’s philosophy, procedures, and rules for handling staff related matters and include plans for resolving issues.
Successful employee relation policies are not template driven, so in this instance, one size does absolutely not fit all. Policies can vary because of a number of factors, including company size, its location, the industry or sector, culture, and many other factors.
That said, there are several characteristics that define successful employee relations policies:
- Understand the business’s mission and vision and ensure employees understand them
- Show the employee how their role aligns with the businesses mission and vision
- Communicate with employees effectively and frequently
- Provide feedback to employees
- Reward employees for good work
Advice for employers
Show gratitude
Celebrate positive performance, even for something small, such as a member of the team completing a task before a deadline or on time. Saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are also simple, yet effective, ways to make staff feel respected and valued.
Communicate openly
Employees should be encouraged to be open and honest with their managers or higher-level teams. In the same vein, employers, managers and HR should promote a culture of transparency in their everyday dealings.
Invest in development
This not only applies to continuing professional development but refers to outside the workplace. Employees are more productive when they are happier at home, and there are ways an employer can promote and support this. Offering free private therapy, paying their gym membership or encouraging them to take up a hobby or side project, shows employees their employer cares for them and, in turn, increases loyalty and staff retention.
Provide consistent feedback
One-to-one meetings are perfect opportunities to offer feedback on an employee’s performance. But it also means that employees can air their own opinion in a safe space and provide feedback to management on how they could be better supported. For these types of meetings to be of benefit, they need to be consistent; whether the meeting takes place once a year, or once a month, they must be adhered to regularly.
Trust your team
Employees need to feel that their employer trusts them, and that they can trust their employer. Employees who do not feel trusted also felt undervalued and not respected. This is likely to lead to underperformance and decrease staff retention.
Build a share vision
Engaged, motivated, and happier employees are more likely to stay with a business in the long term if they understand the part they play in the business’s success.
Do not play favourites
It will breed resentment and damage a company’s culture and reputation if they treat employees differently according to personal feelings. This is particularly poor practice and should be avoided at all costs.
Does a business need an employee relations professional?
Having an employee relations professional, particularly in larger businesses, is crucial for improved employee communications. Such professionals are either a part of HR or communications departments. Their job is to keep employees informed and ensure that business procedures and policies are followed.
The principal duties and responsibilities of an employee relations professional are:
- To manage employee records
- Share company news
- Share procedure and policy updates
- Monitor compliance with procedures and policies
- Recruit new employees
- Assist in the hiring process
- Encourage employees’ advocacy
- Manage relationships between employee and employers
- Collaborate with employee exit processes
- Assist writing the employee handbook
Employee relations FAQs
What is the role of employee relations?
Employee relations focuses on delivering and creating workplace practices which maintain and develop positive working relationships between a company and its workforce.
What are examples of employee relations?
Ensuring new employees fit into the company culture, providing ongoing support for employees, analysing performance, resolving ongoing conflict, dealing with employee misconduct, and exploring new ways to improve employee well-being are several examples of employee relations.
What are the 4 pillars of employee relations?
Although various sources claim seven pillars, the four main pillars of employee relations are open communication, showing gratitude, providing consistent feedback, and investing in employees. Is employee relations the same as HR? Employee relations are one part of HR’s effective function within a business. Employee relations may be undertaken by the HR team or the business. Many have a dedicated professional who deal with all aspects of the role.
Last updated: 1 June 2022
Author
Founder and Managing Director Anne Morris is a fully qualified solicitor and trusted adviser to large corporates through to SMEs, providing strategic immigration and global mobility advice to support employers with UK operations to meet their workforce needs through corporate immigration.
She is a recognised by Legal 500 and Chambers as a legal expert and delivers Board-level advice on business migration and compliance risk management as well as overseeing the firm’s development of new client propositions and delivery of cost and time efficient processing of applications.
Anne is an active public speaker, immigration commentator, and immigration policy contributor and regularly hosts training sessions for employers and HR professionals