Employee relations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Employee relations - Essay Example It also includes the ongoing evaluation of performance of employees, managing it, ensuring that ‘laws and regulations’ are followed and also to solve the employees disputes (Society for Human Resource Management, 2011). Good employee relations denote peaceful, pleasant, abundant relation between labour and management. Sound relation regulates the production by minimising conflicts. It improves the worker’s strength by resolving their problems through negotiation and consultation. It improves the status of employees, evades any kind of disputes and thus, preserves ‘industrial democracy’. Employee relation is the virtual balance of negotiating influence between the employees and management. In every organisation, an efficient ER executive provides instruction about how a company can manage with the grievances, penalising process and legislative recognition process of the Employment Relations Act (1999). For managing the employee relation the managers mu st act in a reasonable and logical manner towards the employees and labour unions. It is vital for personnel authorities to ascertain standards of activities which are rational (Gennard & Judge, 2005). In this context, the study will evaluate the employee relations related challenges as faced by Royal Mail. Analysis of Organisation Royal Mail is a public limited company controlled by the government of the UK. Their annual turnover is more than ?8 billion and it has almost 200,000 employees. In the UK, Royal Mail operates under its well-known brands: Royal Mail; Post office and Parcel force Worldwide. Royal Mail has gone through a restructuring process to reduce costs, improve effectiveness to compete with other rivalries in the postal sector. It ensures delivery of sustained high quality services effectively (CSR Case Study Series, 2005). Basic Organisational Structure Royal Mail Group serves mails and parcels throughout the UK. It has almost 168,000 employees in the UK. It has 11,9 05 Post Offices and manages almost 400 million parcels per year. The network of Royal Mail includes almost 11,500 branches throughout the UK. Royal Mail Group has five non–Executive Directors and three Executive Directors who take all the managerial decisions for Royal Mail. The CMU (Communication Workers Union) is the labour union of Royal Mail which stands for non–managerial employees. The company follows the bureaucratic organisational structure. The flow of communication goes through different layers of management which causes slow decision making. With respect to employee relation, organisation can adopt unitary or pluralistic approach (Royal Mail Holdings plc, 2010). Industrial Relation Theory There are three theories of industrial employees’ relations namely unitary, pluralist and radical. Unitary: In unitary system, the organisation is a harmonious system. There is no trade union. Mangers and workers both share similar interest, purpose and objective. Pl uralistic: In pluralism, there are two parties in the organisation namely trade unions and the management. Any conflict is dealt with collective bargaining, mutual agreement or negotiation between trade union and management. Marxist