EMPLOYEEE RELATIONS
Employee relations refers to an organisation’s efforts to create and maintain a positive relationship with its employees. By maintaining positive, constructive employee relations, organisations hope to keep employees loyal and more engaged in their work. It is a set of organisational functions and practices that deals with issues related to people as staffing, compensation and benefits, performance management, organisation development, health and safety, communication, and administration.
Typically, an organisation’s human resources department manages employee relations efforts; however, some organisations may have a dedicated employee relations manager role. Basically, in Rice mill industry human resource department exercise their expertise to provide guidelines to the line managers how to improve performance and behaviour of the employees.
Definition
The approaches and methods adopted by employers to deal with employees either collectively through their trade unions or individually.
-Armstrong
In general (the employee relations agenda) is no longer about trade unions. There is more emphasis on direct communication. Managing organisational change and involving and motivating staff issues about work life balance and the war for talent reflect a changing workforce with changing expectations.
-CIPD (2005)
Employee Relations is to manage relationship between employer and employees with ultimate objectivity of achieving optimum level of productivity in terms of goods and services, employee motivation taking preventive measures to resolve problems that affect adversely the working environment
-Michael (2005)
Unitarism & Pluralism
Unitarism consist of management and staff members sharing a common goal, through their loyalty towards the organisation (Fox, 1966). Companies who use this approach depends their workplace on strong sense of cooperation between the employer and employee, which allows workers to focus on the primary aim.
Pluralism approach suggests that there is more than one source of power in the relationship between workers and business leaders. Unions are often a central component to the pluralistic approach that seeks a balance of power between leadership and employees.
The Employee Relations unit (mostly HRM) provides employees and supervisors with the resolutions of work-related issues. They also provide consultation and advice to managers, supervisors and employees regarding Human Resources issues, including performance management, corrective actions, interpretation of policies and procedures and collective bargaining agreements, training of staff policy and procedures.
Employee Relation Functions
• Performance Management
• Conflict Management
• Corrective Actions
• Counseling
• Skelly Review Process
• Investigations
• FMLA
• Layoff
• Leave Management
• Service Audits & Service Awards
• Unsatisfactory EPAR’s
• P&P/Contract Interpretation
• Training
In rice mill industry most works are done by labors. So, followings are the labor relation functions
- Grievance and Complaint Administration
- Conflict Management
- Arbitrations, Unfair labor Practice (ULP) Hearings; Misc. Agency Complaints
- P&P/Contract Interpretation
- Settlement Agreements
- Union Relations: Notices; Labor Management Meetings; Information Requests (IR); Collective Bargaining; Organizing & Demonstrations
- Training
Duties of Employee Relation Officers
Employee relation focuses on creating and delivering people practices which develop and maintain positive working relationships between an organisation and people working closely with unions and employee representatives the company need to ensure that people practices are fair and transparent.
Since different working environment create different challenges and the changing circumstances of work we need to understand,
- The impact these changes can make
- Forces bring about the change
- Hoe to work with employee bodies ensuring police are aligned to the employer brand
- Employment law and how it is created
- Maintain up to date legislation
Activities have to involve in rice mill industry as employee relation officers
- Creating people policies
- Dealing with complex cases
- Supporting the organisation through restructures
- Ensuring engagement is maintained and managers act in a way that they involve their staff
- Managing the relationship between the organisation and unions or employee bodies
- Dealing with disputes appropriately
- Ensuring managers are upskilled to deal with people in fair and effective manner
- Overseeing all people practices to ensure they are legally compliant
Design of Work in Rice Mill Industry
Job design
Job design is a research and analysis of a job in consultation with peers, Manager and management to compile the entire job data and outline the duties, responsibilities, Academic and professional qualification skills and expertise required to perform a particular job. The study and research conducted determine that job design plays an important role to understand the complexity of the job and its implication on individual employee.
Steps of Job design
Benefits of Job design
Job Categories in Rice Mill Industry
Since rice mill industry in Sri Lanka is still in backwards and only a few of them are doing modern rice mills using high technology and most of rice mills are using traditional technologies there are no big staffs in most of rice mill. Mentioned below are the job categories in small and medium rice mills.
Factory Manager
Production Manager
Production Supervisor
Machine Operator
Machine Helper
General Helpers
Cleaning Staff
2. Quality Staff
Quality Manager
Quality Executive
Quality Supervisor
3. Stores Staff
Stores Manager
Stores executive
Stores Supervisor
Helpers
Drivers
4. Accounts Staff
Chiff Accountant
Accountant
Accounts Executives
Account assistant
5. Sales Staff
Sales Manager
Area Sales Managers
Sales Supervisor
Sales representative
References:
U.S. Department of Labor,( 2021) Food and Tobacco Processing Workers,
Duties of Food and Tobacco Processing Workers [online].
This is a very good article.
ReplyDeleteAs a banker I really interested in this ,bcz its a different area for me to know.
Thank you Chathurika. Lot of people don't have a clear idea about rice mill industry and process though rice is our main food that's why I wanted to bring attention on it.
ReplyDelete