Challenges of Employer/Employee Relationships in the contemporary workplace

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Employer Employee Relationship:

Employee relations refers to collective relationships between employer and their workforce. However current trend refers to wider individual and collective workplace relations. On the other hand, the increasing individualization of employment relationships following many factors such as individual workplace rights decline of trade union reach, influence and perhaps increase in contingency workers, flexible nature of work all contribute to a shift in this relationship (CIPD, 2017).

Several factors are influence the relationship dynamics…

Employee engagement is changing to be more individual employee based as there is a shift from collective to individual in the delivery of goals and financial returns increasingly. Therefore, employee engagement has become a vital role of the employment relationships. Despite this change in the UK CIPD surveys suggest that there link in the way collective consultation and workplace conflict is managed and this is related to levels of employee commitment (CIPD. 2017).

Managing relationships at its best is complex, a decision which has not been well thought-out without employee participation or none participation of employees can break the trust and confidence. Example Starbucks’ decisions to prohibit workers wearing rings with stones or engagement rings. While relaxing the policy on tattoos has back fired on its worker morale. Further analysts are of the view it may backlash on business based on the coffee giant’s declaration (SHRM online, 2014).

Psychological Contract:

On the other hand, the psychological contract, the un written contract if the employee’s aspirations and expectations are defaulted due to lack of care by the employer the trust and confidence may be torn leading to attrition or poor performance by the employee.

Interesting in USA a Gallup poll conducted in October 2013 suggest that there are too many Miserable Workers and questioned where is HR going wrong? Further it suggested in the U.S alone more than 173 Mil people grade themselves out of bed each morning with zero enthusiasm (SHRM online, 2014).

Technological Changes and employee relationship

Finally, such processes as technological development also changes the way people work and how they are engaged with their jobs changing the relationships between employer and employee further.

Reference:

CIPD (2017) Employee relations: An introduction: Understand what employee relations means as a concept and what it means to the employers. 27^th April 2017 report of CIPD UK.

SHRM online (2014) Top 10 Employee Relations Articles of 2014. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/top-employee-relations-stories.aspx  October 2017, 4 am 

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