Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Motivation to Harness Positive Employee Relations

Motivation in general has been the most elusive concept in human relations and relevant transactional matters. It is as crucial to employee relations in organizations as it is for the relationships maintained outside organizations but its importance is most of the times overridden in the wake of conflicting opinions of stakeholders. Employee Relations is an aspect of business that plays a crucial role in the success of overall enterprise in both the short and the long runs.

The topic in itself is protean as the domain engulfs various pressing issues that gnaw at the very stakeholders who happen to be at the helm of affairs. The issues which both motivation and employee relations deal with can be enumerated as rewards and recognition, performance management, succession planning and the likes. With respect to motivation at work, it is all about activating and directing human behaviour towards achievement of goals which ultimately are relevant to both employees’ personal and organizational goals. 

Organizations initiate, develop and maintain certain processes legitimized by upper echelons in order to vitalize and make employee achieve organization’s larger goals in the long run. Motivation is more than energizing employees to achieve the tasks at hand and it is sufficed by the statement: “Motivation is concerned with how behaviour gets started, is energized, is sustained, is directed, is stopped and what kind of subjective reaction is present in the organization while all this is going on.”

Here is the subjective side of motivation to delve deeper into with employee relations in perspective. Motivation in organizations can easily be considered tantamount to a scientific discipline unearthing and establishing ways in which employees can be motivated or repelled from organizations’ desired roles and behaviors. It is a popular view that modern corporate mechanism treats competitiveness as fodder to gorge upon and is also fed with concerns of external competition. Such rigor in corporate modus operandi asks for ultimate satisfaction of talent at work. Retaining employees who matter the most is one of the foremost aspect that higher management of organizations are worried about in present years. Human Resource Management has reared its head as the most reliable business support function as the discipline is a popular management paradigm in contemporary managerial scenario. 

Satisfied and motivated workforce definitely affords organizations with a hard-to-imitate competitive advantage. Human Resource Management is therefore considered part and parcel of modern strategic management. HRM predicates its operations on two basic tenets. There’s a hard version which posits that resources such as workforce should be controlled tightly enough so that their economic outcomes could be manipulated as well for the larger good of organizations. On the other hand the soft version states that there’s human side to winning commitments from employees as they need to be nurtured so as to contribute to the fullest to organizational goals. The dichotomy of focus of HRM approach is ascribed to the McGregor’s theory X and Y which is considered another milestone in the work accomplished with respect to work motivation. 

Employee relations have also been an integral part of what Human Resource Management does along with the crucial indulgence of upper echelons of organizations. There has been somewhat confusion among usage of the relevant terms such as labor relations, industrial relations, employment relationship and employee relations but there are minor differences among all. Industrial relations have got employment relationships under its aegis but that industrial relations have intrinsically assumed the role of employment relationships in present scenario. The focus of this research is solely on employee relations and this discipline is considered in the realm of non-industrial employment relationships. 

In a conventional stream, the subject of industrial or employee relations revolves around mere trade unionism, collective bargaining, national labour policy and labour law which are considered a part of the whole not otherwise. Employee relations strategy, pertain to the liaison between employer and employee with respect to multiple issues that emerge in day to day proceedings. The issues have potential to affect employee performance along with rendering him or her delinquent in the duties assigned. Addressing the grievances and relevant procedures are crucial to employee relations strategies in present corporate era.

There’s need for employee relations in formal organizational structure because relationship between employers and employees can be ameliorated by having support of overall strategic mission and vision. Employee relations are always dictated by views differentiated from the perspectives of employers and employees. It is of viewpoint of employers the employee relations go awry when employees exhibit non-compliance and be based performance with absenteeism as well as high turnover rate. From employees’ angle, employee relations take a wrong turn in the wake of serious issues such as discriminations, disagreements, hygiene and safety problems, conflicts on policies and terms, pay deductions and dismissal etc.

Keywords: Motivation, Employee Relation, Employee Motivation

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