Employee Relations – Importance and Benefits

Organization success depends critically on the important stakeholders of the organization, the most important amongst them being the employees. Maintaining a healthy employee relations is a key for the organizational success. Employee relations have a number of direct and indirect benefits associated with them. Employee relations directly result in developing a conducive work environment which also improves the productivity and the efficiency of the organization. Maintaining healthy employee relations effectively lead to an efficient, productive and motivated employees who help in increasing the revenue generation and sales.

When an employee enters an organization, he or she has a number of aspirations associated with the organization. When the employee is committed to the specific jobs, the organization gets benefited in return. Hence organizations should also commit their resources to build a strong and healthy employee relations which fulfills the aspiration level of the employees and they feel satisfied with their work and the brand they are working with. Such satisfaction, helps the employees in growing strong bonds with the organization as a result of which employee attrition rate reduces considerably.

Employee should feel empowered, should be accountable for their jobs, and should have a complete knowledge about how their individual task is helping the organization to attain their goals. However, in spite of maintaining and engaging in strong employee relations practices, often due to incidents in organizations the employee relations get affected. Examples of suc incidents are as follows;

Instances of employee indiscipline regarding the organizations rules and procedures, the employee relations get hampered, and the organization takes resorts to punish such behavior, so that others do not get encourages and start following the same. Also, often it happens that a problem breaks out between two employees, may be colleagues or may be superior- subordinate, and both ask for justice from the organization, and often due to circumstances it appears to employees that organizations’ management was biased and has taken a side. In such instances too the employee relations get hampered. This instance is of employee grievance.

Also, often employees fail to meet their own personalized expectations and goals, due to tremendous work pressure, peer pressure, career goals etc. This gives rise to the phenomenon of employee stress which significantly hamper a conducive environment of employee relations. Hence the above mentioned employee indiscipline, employee grievance and lastly employee stress are instances which threat the employee relations of any organization.

Fair and just treatment by management, job rotations and flexi timings, enhanced communication, industry best reward and recognition, positive feedback and criticism to the employees, good leadership etc are practices which the management can adopt in order to practice an effective employee relations. Holding informal gatherings in offices, arranging for office dinners, short trips with families, outdoor training sessions etc are tactics through which the bonding between the employees themselves and with the organization increases, and the satisfied employee performs in a much more effective and efficient fashion in their respective jobs.