RELATIONSHIP MATTERS FOR INCREASED PRODUCTION & PRODUCTIVITY
When employers start a business (or open a branch of an existing business), they require employees to produce, administer, organize, publicize, sell, transport, maintain, repair, etc. They advertise job openings, conduct interviews, and hire individuals based on qualifications, requirements and wages. They usually provide training to newly-hired employees and make them aware of the company's policies, rules and goals. They assign tasks according to the job positions and employee profiles, and may offer vacations, health insurance coverage, workers’ compensation, and other benefits. But one day, sooner or later, the employer may serve an employee the dreaded pink slip, and terminate his/her employment without any valid reason or cause. The employee becomes an ex-employee and, usually but not always, is eligible for unemployment insurance. And his/her employment process begins again.
From the beginning of the employment to the end, the employee may have been treated unlawfully, discriminated against, harassed, denied his/her due wages or benefits, made to work in unsafe conditions, or wrongfully terminated.
Years ago, the relationship between employer and employee was governed by the assumption that employers were like kings and were free to offer any terms of employment and treat their employees in any way they dictated, and the employees were free to either accept or reject those terms (i.e., take it or leave it). There were few laws and protections available to employees that would safeguard their interests at times of manipulation, shabby treatment, defamation, discrepancies, retaliation, unfair practices, etc. Employees did not have a platform to voice theirprotests.
Initially, it was the unions that protested employers' unfair practices and demanded that employees be provided rights. In the 1930s, the federal government enacted the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which called for fair wages and safe workplaces. The NLRA set off a deluge of new laws governing the workplace.
With the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, the federal government, followed by many state governments, began to enact laws prohibiting discrimination against women and minority group members and barring discrimination against older employees. In 1970 the federal government enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), setting minimum workplace safety standards. By 1990 Congress had enacted laws prohibiting discrimination against disabled workers, and requiring employers to reasonably accommodate such workers if the accommodation did not cause undue hardship on the employer.
Today, employees and job applicants are protected by various federal and state laws. Many state courts have recognized additional employee rights that have not been set out in written statutes, but instead are part of common law, based solely upon earlier court rulings. Employers no longer have the right to treat their employees any way they desire. Employees have the right to protest, make claims, file litigation, and seek damages, if they believethey have been mistreated at any stage of the employment relationship.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2011
MISTAKES ORGANIZATIONS MAKE
IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYER-EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIP
Twenty Dumb Things Organizations Do to Mess Up Their Relationship With People
Use These Employee Relations Tips to Avoid the 20 Mistakes Organizations Make
By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com Guide April 13, 2011
Even the best organizations periodically make mistakes in dealing with people. They mess up their opportunity to create effective, successful, positive employee relations.
They treat people like children and then ask why people fail so frequently to live up to their expectations. Managers apply different rules to different employees and wonder why workplace negativity is so high. People work hard and infrequently receive positive feedback.
At the same time, many organizations invest untold energy in actions that ensure employees are unhappy. They ensure ineffective employee relations results. For example, one of the most important current trends in organizations is increasing employee involvement and input. Organizations must find ways to utilize all of the strengths of the people they employ. Or, people will leave to find work in an organization that does.
According to former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, the number of people in the labor force ages 25 to 34 is projected to decline by 2.7 million in the next seven years. To meet this challenge, work places need to recruit new populations and non-traditional employees. And, workplaces urgently need to retain valued employees.
The book, High Five, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles talks about building powerfully effective teams. The book emphasizes that "the essence of a team," according to Dr. Blanchard, is "the genuine understanding that none of us is as smart as all of us."
Teams allow people to achieve things far beyond each member's individual ability. But teamwork also requires powerful motivation for people to put the good of the group ahead of their own self interest. Fortunately, the millennial generation grew up working in a team work environment. Valuing and appreciating teams, your youngest workers will lead the way.
Pull these workplace trends together and it is no wonder that the Dilbert cartoon is perennially popular. Consider that Scott Adams, the strip's creator, will never run out of material because, despite what organizations want or say they want for effective employee relations - they often fail to:
• retain valued employees,
• develop empowered people working together to serve the best interests of the organization, and
• create an environment in which every employee contributes all of their talents and skills to the success of organizational goals.
The next time you are confronted with any of the following proposed actions, ask yourself this question. Is the action likely to create the result, for powerfully motivating employee relations, that you want to create?
Twenty Dumb Mistakes Employers Make
Here are the twenty dumb mistakes organizations make to mess up their relationships with the people they employ.
• Add another level of hierarchy because people aren't doing what you want them to do. (More watchers get results!)
• Appraise the performance of individuals and provide bonuses for the performance of individuals and complain that you cannot get your staff working as a team.
• Add inspectors and multiple audits because you don’t trust people’s work to meet standards.
• Fail to create standards and give people clear expectations so they know what they are supposed to do, and wonder why they fail.
• Create hierarchical, permission steps and other roadblocks that teach people quickly that their ideas are subject to veto and wonder why no one has any suggestions for improvement. (Make people beg for money!)
• Ask people for their opinions, ideas, and continuous improvement suggestions, and fail to implement their suggestions or empower them to do so. Better? Don’t even provide feedback about whether the idea was considered or why it was rejected.
• Make a decision and then ask people for their input as if their feedback mattered.
• Find a few people breaking rules and company policies and chide everybody at company meetings rather than dealing directly with the rule breakers. Better? Make everyone wonder "who" the bad guy is. Best? Make up another policy to punish every employee.
• Make up new rules for everyone to follow as a means to address the failings of a few.
• Provide recognition in expected patterns so that what started as a great idea quickly becomes entitlement. (For example, buy Friday lunch when production goals are met. Wait until people start asking you for the money if they cannot attend the lunch. And, find employees meeting only the production goal that will merit the prize - and not one bit more. )
• Treat people as if they are untrustworthy - watch them, track them, admonish them for every slight failing - because a few people are untrustworthy.
• Fail to address behavior and actions of people that are inconsistent with stated and published organizational expectations and policies. (Better yet, let non-conformance go on until you are out of patience; then ambush the next offender, no matter how significant, with a disciplinary action.)
• When managers complain that they cannot get to all of their reviews because they have too many reporting staff members, and performance development planning takes too much time, eliminate PDPs. Better? Require supervisors to do them less frequently than quarterly. Or, hire more supervisors to do reviews. (Fail to recognize that an hour per quarter per person invested in employee development is the manager's most important job.)
• Create policies for every contingency, thus allowing very little management latitude in addressing individual employee needs.
• Conversely, have so few policies, that employees feel as if they reside in a free-for-all environment of favoritism and unfair treatment.
• Make every task a priority. People will soon believe there are no priorities. More importantly, they will never feel as if they have accomplished a complete task or goal.
• Schedule daily emergencies that prove to be false. This will ensure employees don't know what to do, or are, minimally, jaded about responding when you have a true customer emergency.
• Ask employees to change the way they are doing something without providing a picture of what you are attempting to accomplish with the change. Label them "resisters" and send them to change management training when they don't immediately hop on the train.
• Expect that people learn by doing everything perfectly the first time rather than recognizing that learning occurs most frequently in failure.
• Letting a person fail when you had information, that he did not, which he might have used to make a different decision.
You can avoid these employee relations nightmares. These ingredients add up to a recipe for disaster if you want to be the employer of choice in the next decade. Effective employee relations will always result in a win - for both the employees and for you
Twenty Dumb Things Organizations Do to Mess Up Their Relationship With People
Use These Employee Relations Tips to Avoid the 20 Mistakes Organizations Make
By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com Guide April 13, 2011
Even the best organizations periodically make mistakes in dealing with people. They mess up their opportunity to create effective, successful, positive employee relations.
They treat people like children and then ask why people fail so frequently to live up to their expectations. Managers apply different rules to different employees and wonder why workplace negativity is so high. People work hard and infrequently receive positive feedback.
At the same time, many organizations invest untold energy in actions that ensure employees are unhappy. They ensure ineffective employee relations results. For example, one of the most important current trends in organizations is increasing employee involvement and input. Organizations must find ways to utilize all of the strengths of the people they employ. Or, people will leave to find work in an organization that does.
According to former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, the number of people in the labor force ages 25 to 34 is projected to decline by 2.7 million in the next seven years. To meet this challenge, work places need to recruit new populations and non-traditional employees. And, workplaces urgently need to retain valued employees.
The book, High Five, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles talks about building powerfully effective teams. The book emphasizes that "the essence of a team," according to Dr. Blanchard, is "the genuine understanding that none of us is as smart as all of us."
Teams allow people to achieve things far beyond each member's individual ability. But teamwork also requires powerful motivation for people to put the good of the group ahead of their own self interest. Fortunately, the millennial generation grew up working in a team work environment. Valuing and appreciating teams, your youngest workers will lead the way.
Pull these workplace trends together and it is no wonder that the Dilbert cartoon is perennially popular. Consider that Scott Adams, the strip's creator, will never run out of material because, despite what organizations want or say they want for effective employee relations - they often fail to:
• retain valued employees,
• develop empowered people working together to serve the best interests of the organization, and
• create an environment in which every employee contributes all of their talents and skills to the success of organizational goals.
The next time you are confronted with any of the following proposed actions, ask yourself this question. Is the action likely to create the result, for powerfully motivating employee relations, that you want to create?
Twenty Dumb Mistakes Employers Make
Here are the twenty dumb mistakes organizations make to mess up their relationships with the people they employ.
• Add another level of hierarchy because people aren't doing what you want them to do. (More watchers get results!)
• Appraise the performance of individuals and provide bonuses for the performance of individuals and complain that you cannot get your staff working as a team.
• Add inspectors and multiple audits because you don’t trust people’s work to meet standards.
• Fail to create standards and give people clear expectations so they know what they are supposed to do, and wonder why they fail.
• Create hierarchical, permission steps and other roadblocks that teach people quickly that their ideas are subject to veto and wonder why no one has any suggestions for improvement. (Make people beg for money!)
• Ask people for their opinions, ideas, and continuous improvement suggestions, and fail to implement their suggestions or empower them to do so. Better? Don’t even provide feedback about whether the idea was considered or why it was rejected.
• Make a decision and then ask people for their input as if their feedback mattered.
• Find a few people breaking rules and company policies and chide everybody at company meetings rather than dealing directly with the rule breakers. Better? Make everyone wonder "who" the bad guy is. Best? Make up another policy to punish every employee.
• Make up new rules for everyone to follow as a means to address the failings of a few.
• Provide recognition in expected patterns so that what started as a great idea quickly becomes entitlement. (For example, buy Friday lunch when production goals are met. Wait until people start asking you for the money if they cannot attend the lunch. And, find employees meeting only the production goal that will merit the prize - and not one bit more. )
• Treat people as if they are untrustworthy - watch them, track them, admonish them for every slight failing - because a few people are untrustworthy.
• Fail to address behavior and actions of people that are inconsistent with stated and published organizational expectations and policies. (Better yet, let non-conformance go on until you are out of patience; then ambush the next offender, no matter how significant, with a disciplinary action.)
• When managers complain that they cannot get to all of their reviews because they have too many reporting staff members, and performance development planning takes too much time, eliminate PDPs. Better? Require supervisors to do them less frequently than quarterly. Or, hire more supervisors to do reviews. (Fail to recognize that an hour per quarter per person invested in employee development is the manager's most important job.)
• Create policies for every contingency, thus allowing very little management latitude in addressing individual employee needs.
• Conversely, have so few policies, that employees feel as if they reside in a free-for-all environment of favoritism and unfair treatment.
• Make every task a priority. People will soon believe there are no priorities. More importantly, they will never feel as if they have accomplished a complete task or goal.
• Schedule daily emergencies that prove to be false. This will ensure employees don't know what to do, or are, minimally, jaded about responding when you have a true customer emergency.
• Ask employees to change the way they are doing something without providing a picture of what you are attempting to accomplish with the change. Label them "resisters" and send them to change management training when they don't immediately hop on the train.
• Expect that people learn by doing everything perfectly the first time rather than recognizing that learning occurs most frequently in failure.
• Letting a person fail when you had information, that he did not, which he might have used to make a different decision.
You can avoid these employee relations nightmares. These ingredients add up to a recipe for disaster if you want to be the employer of choice in the next decade. Effective employee relations will always result in a win - for both the employees and for you
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