Sharp Business Development

“Be nice to people on the way up because you’ll meet the same people on the way down”, Wilson Mizner.

Until late 1970s employee relations used to be considered as a professional stream running within the boundaries of organizational policies and rules. The emphasis used to be on the interactions of both employees and employers persuading them to act how they are expected to be. Managers were just as instruments who were executing the orders with limited decision-making freedom.

The earlier phases of employee relations, known as “Authoritarian Management”, minimize the importance of people but given more substance to the orders of boss. This doesn’t prove that authoritarian management used to be always cruel or rude. Authoritarian managers were surely autocrats but they positioned themselves between two ends of the scale with Exploitative Autocrats on one end and Benevolent Autocrats on the other. Authoritarian Management was intensified by the emergence of Scientific Management. Scientific Management offered many modern aids to management as well as improvements to employee performance. With the positive contributions, Scientific Management also put men under pressure.

Scientific management was followed by many others including Human relations approach, behavioral school, and so on. As the phases advanced employee relations has reached a state of understanding employees and accommodating them to the organizational worthiness. Today employees are not only informed about their rights and privileges but also they took part in deciding them.

Rather than seeing employee relations as a management function, today it is seen as a skill-set or a philosophy. The depth of employee relations is moving from the concept of collective institution to personalized attention. It understands the fact that every individual has their individual behavior, core values, beliefs, and influential factors. It does not mean that employee relations may forget the group behavior, values, beliefs and influential factors of people. Today behavioral science has grown to a much higher level to keep space for individual and group factors of every human resource.

The primary motive of the employee relations used to be responding to the employment conflicts. This should be considered as a reactive approach with emphasis on conflict resolution, framing of policies & procedures, and disciplinary control. Today, employee relations attained an image of proactive approach. Proactive approach of employee relations does not negate the features of reactive approach but adds conflict prevention and resolution.

Proactive approach strains itself to learn individuals and groups in the context of environmental effects to frame personnel policies and procedures. It offers employees a freedom of say and includes them to be the part of policy framing team. The sense team-spirit and involvement, improves morale, loyalty, and performance to develop a positive organizational culture.