As a leader, your high standards of performance, attention to detail, and above all-how hard you work set the stage for how your players perform. A lot of leaders want to tell people what to do, but they don’t provide the example. “Do as I say, not as I do,” doesn’t cut it when leading people to a destination of success.

Having friendly and supportive co-workers leads to increased job satisfaction. The behavior of one’s boss is a major determinant of satisfaction. Studies find that employee satisfaction in increased when the immediate supervisor is understanding and friendly, offers praise for good performance, listens to employee’s opinions, and shows a personal interest in them.

The activities of an organization can only be achieved through the combined efforts of its members. The relationship between the organization and its members is governed by what motivates them to work and the satisfaction they derive from it. The manager needs to understand how to elicit the co-operation of staff and direct their performance to achieving the goals and objectives of the organization. He must know how best to motivate staff so that they work willingly and effectively.

Lack of respect and credibility is one of the critical leadership issues of our country today. With the rapid changes continuing in organizations today, the typical employees sees little pain occurring at the top. Usually we’re so busy with our tasks we forget that, above all else, what our people want most of all from us is us–our values, our attitudes, our perceptions etc. In the long run, it’s not our skills or our know-how or our experience that makes the biggest impact-we are the main message!

By understanding how measures are related to one another, you increase their power to help you understand and diagnose performance, and thus how you can report those measures together to make performance understanding and diagnosis easier.

RELATIONSHIP TYPE 1: Cause-Effect

As the most commonly talked about relationship between measures or KPIs, the cause-effect relationship isn’t too hard to understand. It simply means that when one measure improves or deteriorates in performance, it causes another measure to improve or deteriorate in performance as a consequence.

For example, reducing rework can cause costs to reduce; improving recruitment of talent can cause workforce capability to improve; if employee engagement slides then it can cause customer satisfaction to slide too.

RELATIONSHIP TYPE 2: Companion

Measures have a companion relationship when they each tell a part of a complete story of performance. If you relied on just one of the measures, you wouldn’t have a full enough picture to take the best action.

For example, number of new prosects and prospect conversion rate are companions to track a marketing process; customer lifetime value and number of active customers are companions to understand drivers of profit.

RELATIONSHIP TYPE 3: Conflict

Because you can’t have your cake and eat it too, you often can’t maximise the performance of any one measure. Other measures of performance can pay the price, and that’s where you get conflict relationships between measures.

For example, improving workplace safety can conflict with on-time delivery to customers; reducing call handling time (in a call centre) can conflict with first call resolution; improving product quality can conflict with cost reduction.

TAKING ACTION:
Look at one of your organisation’s performance reports, and the suite of measures or KPIs it includes. How are these measures related to one another? Does this appreciation of the relationships suggest any opportunities to improve the way your report the measures, so they are more useful?

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.