Employee Relations & Engagement

Employee Relations involves the body of work concerned with maintaining employer-employee relationships that contribute to satisfactory productivity, motivation, and morale. Essentially, employee relations is concerned with preventing and resolving problems involving individuals which arise out of or affect work situations. In order to facilitate the smooth running of employee relations many staff, especially in the public sector choose to join trade unions or professional associations.

Advice is provided to management on how to correct poor performance, employee misconduct or monitor sickness. In such instances, progressive discipline and regulatory and other requirements must be considered in effecting disciplinary actions and in resolving employee grievances and appeals.

Information is provided to employees to promote a better understanding of management’s goals and policies. Information is also provided to employees to assist them in correcting poor performance, on or off duty misconduct, and/or to address personal issues that affect them in the workplace. Employees are advised about applicable regulations, legislation, and bargaining agreements. Employees are also advised about their grievance and appeal rights and discrimination and whistleblower protections
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At Strategic HR Solutions we get involved where there is high labour turnover, high absenteeism levels and bad timekeeping. This is primarily down to employees being demotivated and unhappy with working conditions, consistent change programmes and redundancy threats.

Discontent, especially in the public sector has heightened as most organisations lack to increase their efficiencies as workforce costs are over 60% of organisational costs, there is no surprise that there are more complaints, friction, apathy and poor working practices.

All of these actions lead to:

• - a reduction in organisational profitability
• - harming employment prospects and stagnating pay
• - festering of discontent at a time when organisational changes become unrelenting
• - they cause problems to patients, clients and the economy as a whole

Our aim at Strategic HR Solutions is to create partnership working for the benefit of all concerned. One area in countering discontent is employee engagement. Employee engagement is a business concept referring to the level of interest that an employee feels about their job.
An engaged employee feels deeply committed to their organisation, bringing a positive attitude and in turn greater productivity to their work. Research shows that engaged employees are better workers, more patient or client focused and more likely to stay.

Employee engagement is directly tied to employee retention and stability and an engaged workforce also helps with employee recruitment. The best performing organisations know that it pays to focus on improving employee engagement.

Strategic HR Solutions get involved usually after a poor NHS staff survey has taken place. Engagement here is measured using three different dimensions physiological engagement, e.g. are you thinking of leaning the organisation, advocacy e.g. would you recommend the organisation to others as a place to work and involvement, e.g. to the extent the organisation keeps an employee up to date and is therefore able to make suggestions to improve the work of the team.

Strategic HR solutions will engage with your staff in focus groups and other forma to review the underlying difficulties of poor staff surveys through staff groupings teams, ethnicity or by bandings. If we can tease out what the symptoms are then we would faster engagement through good staff management:

• - having well-structured appraisals with clear objectives able to improve how the employee does their job.
• - having a well structured team where teams have clear shared objectives work interdependently and meet regularly.
• - supportive line management
• - good job design with meaningful and clear tasks
• - having good employee health and well being due to high levels of work pressure and stress that leads to disaffection and disengagement
• - positive work environment in which staff feel valued and supported.