Employee Relations’ (ER) is the collective and individual relationship between employers and employees in the workplace.
ER increasing emphasis on the relationship between managers and their team members.
Employee relations’ covers the contractual, practical, as well as the physical and emotional dimensions of the employee-employer relationship.
Employee relations can make or break the workplace climate so it’s important you handle it professionally.
Let’s look at some of the employee relations efforts HR departments make to manage the employee-employer relationship. Here are 6 employee relations best practices.
- Open Communication
Be open, clear, and honest in your communication with your team, don’t oversell the opportunities your company has to offer to candidates or employees because this will lead to disappointment and negative energy.
Share company’s vision and organizational updates with your team, inform them as soon as possible about people leaving, and build a relationship in which no one is afraid to speak up or ask questions. And if for some reason you realize that you won’t be able to fulfill a certain obligation, be honest about it and inform people sooner rather than later.
- Get your team behind the vision
Sharing the vision and making sure everyone in your team knows the organization’s vision is the first step in getting them behind it.
Frequently share and communicate the mission and vision of the company with the team.
Randomly ask people questions like ‘What’s our company mission? Or get a quiz-like method that gets everyone involved.
It makes people feel like they’re part of something bigger and that they do in fact play an active role in achieving this common goal.
- Trust your people
Don’t micro-manage. Once you’ve made sure that people know what they need to do, what’s expected of them, and that you’re there if they need you, let them be. Trust them. However, this level of trusting your people is probably exceptional and won’t work for everyone. Just keep in mind that there is a fine line between offering guidance and feedback.
- Recognition and Appreciation
Showing your employees, you care and giving them recognition is key in building strong employee relations. Encourage team-wide meetings across the organization on a regular basis, during such meetings share appreciation for work well done and to recognize goals reached. Recognize achievements and celebrate across departments.
- Invest in People
Showing people, you care and building strong employee relations also means investing in them. You can invest in your employee through learning and development, a peer mentoring program and employee wellness program etc.
The options here are endless and will depend on the type of organization, industry, and available budget.
- No Favorites
Put simply, if you want your employee relations to be good with everyone then don’t play favorites. Create a work environment that truly enables all employees to participate and thrive and in which everybody knows that they are heard.
Author’s Bio
The writer is the Head of HR at UMB Capital. She is passionate about Human Capital Development. She enjoys providing support for SMEs who cannot afford to set up full-scale HR Departments. She loves everything about People & Culture in the corporate environment.
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