Employee Relation

• Employee relations


  All those areas of human resource management that involve relationships with employees – directly or through collective agreements when trade unions are recognized
• Employee relations strategy


  • Employee relations
  • Industrial relations
  • Employee voice
  • Communications
  • Recognition
  • Procedures
  • Consultation
  • Participation
  • Formal
  • Informal
• Dimensions of the employment relationship

  • Parties: managers, employees, employee representatives
  • Substance: Individual - job, reward, career, communications; Collective - trade unions, consultative committees
  • Operation: level, process, style
  • Structure: formal rules/procedures, informal understandings and expectations
• Elements of employee relations


  • The management of the employment relationship generally through the organization's formal and informal employment practices
  • The informal as well as the formal processes that take place in the shape of continuous interactions between line managers and individuals and their representatives
  • The development, negotiation and application of formal systems and rules for collective bargaining and handling disputes
  • The creation of an employee relations climate that is acceptable to all parties and includes the development of mutual trust, openness and the maintenance of harmonious relationships
• Goals and strategies: Management and Unions

  • Management: Control, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Flexibility, No strikes
  • Union: Participation, Job Security, "Fair" Wages, Protected Rights, No lockouts
  • Common Interests: Survival, Competitiveness, Profitability, Equity
• Employee relations policies


  • Trade union recognition
  • Collective bargaining
  • Employee relations procedures
  • Employee voice
  • Partnership
  • The employment relationship
  • Harmonization of terms
  • Working arrangements
• Company strategies in labor relations


  • Union suppression
  • Union avoidance
  • Union substitution
  • Businesslike union-management
  • Union cooperation
• Procedural agreements


  Set out the respective duties and responsibilities of managers and unions, the steps through which they make joint decisions and the procedure to be followed if they fail to agree
• Substantive agreements

  Set out agreed terms and conditions of employment
• Partnership agreements


  Involve both parties (management and trade unions) agreeing to work together to their mutual advantage and to achieve a climate of more cooperative and therefore less adversarial industrial relations
• General trends in managing with trade unions

  • Learn to live with unions
  • Give industrial relations a lower priority
  • Feel it is easier to continue to work with a union because it provides a useful, well-established channel for the handling of grievance, discipline and safety issues
• Characteristics of union-free employee relations

  • Employee relations generally seen as better
  • Strikes almost unheard of
  • Labour turnover high but absenteeism no worse
  • Pay levels generally set unilaterally by management
  • Dispersion of pay higher, more market-related and more performance-related pay, greater incidence of low pay
  • No alternative forms of employee representation
  • Employee relations conducted with a higher degree of informality
  • Managers generally felt unconstrained in the way they organized work
  • More flexibility in the use of labour
  • Employees more likely to be dismissed and higher incidence of compulsory redundancy
• Features of conciliation


  • Conciliator tries to remove the difference between the parties
  • Persuades the parties to think over the matter with a problem-solving approach
  • Only persuades the disputants to reach a solution and never imposes his/her own viewpoint
  • Conciliator may change his approach from case to case as he/she finds fit depending on other factors
• Conciliation machinery in India

  • Conciliation Officer
  • Board of Conciliation
  • Court of Enquiry
• Conciliation Officer

  Appointed by the appropriate government, enjoys the powers of a civil court, expected to give judgment within 14 days of the commencement of the conciliation proceedings, judgment given by him is binding on the parties to the dispute
• Board of Conciliation


  Appointed by the appropriate government, an adhoc body consisting of a chairman and two or four other members nominated in equal numbers by the parties to the dispute, enjoys the powers of civil court, expected to give its judgment within two months of the date on which the dispute was referred to it
• Types of arbitration

  • Voluntary arbitration
  • Compulsory arbitration
• Voluntary arbitration


  Both the conflicting parties appoint a neutral third party as arbitrator, the arbitrator acts only when the dispute is referred to him/her, judgments given by it are not binding on the disputants
• Compulsory arbitration


  The government can force the disputing parties to go for compulsory arbitration, the judgment given by the arbitrator is binding on the parties of dispute
• Adjudication machinery in India

  • Labour Court
  • Industrial Tribunal
  • National Tribunal
• Labour Court


  Constituted by the appropriate government, deals with matters specified in the second schedule of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947
• Industrial Tribunal


  Constituted by the appropriate government, has a wider jurisdiction than the Labour Court, deals with matters such as wages, hours of work, leave, bonus, retrenchment, etc.
• National Tribunal


  Appointed by the Central Government for the adjudication of industrial disputes of national importance, no labour court or industrial tribunal shall have any jurisdiction to adjudicate upon such matter