As a business owner, maintaining good employee relations is essential to your company’s longevity and success. It lowers the turnover rate, improves employee morale, and increases productivity. However, employee relations issues will happen no matter what. How you handle the situation will determine how it will affect your company.
Most Common Employee Relations Issues
Learning what causes problems in employee relations will help you identify them before they escalate. Then, you can determine the appropriate solutions. Consider working with an employment mediator to make sure the solutions you come up with are fair and benefit both parties.
Timekeeping and Attendance Issues
Manual attendance tracking systems—such as time cards, timesheets, and perforation clocks—present a problem in the modern workplace. Even before companies moved to remote work, these systems raised concerns about inconsistency, from human errors to intentional errors. An example of the latter is when a lax employee asks another employee to punch in for them, committing time theft.
A good way to resolve this issue would be to use self-service software or a digital attendance tracking system. It allows employees to keep better track of their time and attendance. It also provides your HR team with a comprehensive database of the company’s timekeeping records, reducing the time they spend checking up on disputes.
Hour and Wage Issues
Your HR team faces questions during payday. Some employees complain about the number of hours they were paid for, while others insist that they worked overtime even when it wasn’t required. All of these take time out of your HR team’s day as they go through records to double-check details. At worst, mistakes in wages put you at risk of federal violations, resulting in legal problems for your company.
A digital attendance tracking system gives employees access to their records, allowing them to bring up inconsistencies before payday. This will give the HR team enough time to correct the mistake. Consider sending out a memo a week before payday to remind employees to file any attendance or timekeeping updates (e.g. sick days, unexpected leaves, overtime) to include them in their paychecks.
Conflict Management
No matter how close-knit your company is, arguments will arise. These can occur between two or multiple employees or between an employee and the company. Failing to handle this situation at the onset might result in a major conflict that will affect your operations and morale. In some cases, disputes can lead to legal battles that may have long-term consequences for your company, such as a ruined reputation.
Communication plays a key role in conflict management in the workplace. Most of these disputes escalate because there is no strategy on how to deal with them, specifically when and how parties should talk to each other. Work with your HR and legal teams to come up with a strategy on how to handle these types of situations, including where to have the conversation and who should get involved.
Failing to recognize red flags will cause minor disputes to snowball into larger problems for your company. Invest time in creating appropriate solutions to get a better handle on these situations when they do happen.
