Employee Grievance Management

 

Employee Grievance Management

Grievance management strategies are used to manage dissatisfied employees in an organization. Dissatisfaction would lead to employer conflicts, job burnouts and finally employee turnover. Identifying the issues at early stage and coming up with better solutions can minimize and manage employee turnovers. Grievance is complaint of one or more employees with respect to the organization. They may relate to employee wages, condition of work, leave, transfer, overtime, promotion, job assignment and termination of service. (Ghosh et al., 2014)

Many organizations have Employee Grievance handling manager or an Employee Ombudsman to handle employee grievances. The duty of such appointed authority or HR Manager in the organization is critical in handling employee grievances. HR managers should look into such grievances without prejudging anything in an objective and unemotional manner. Similar to small leak could sink a big ship, a minor employee grievance raised could lead up to major organizational problem if the concern is not addressed at the very beginning. (Holley, 2015) Not all the employee grievances could be solved by the HR Manager as some grievances could not be valid & justifiable from the employee perspective. However, as a HR Manager all employee grievances should be discussed & justified to the employees with possible resolutions. All grievances are not oral or written. There could be grievances that are unvoiced & unraised but could be reflected through the behavior of the staff members. Grievances associated with the co-workers such as lack of corporation or dissatisfaction with the fellow worker could be reached to the management in very informal manner which needs to be understood by the HR Manager or the immediate supervisor. (Fonseca & Brauer, 2014)

According to Walker & Hamilton, (2011) whether the grievance is presented formally or informally, all grievances are could adversely influence the productivity of the employees in the organization. Considering the impact of the employee grievances to the productivity of the organization HR Managers should focus on following key areas in handling employee grievances.

·        Ensure fairness

·        Representation to build employee confidence

·        Procedural steps for resolution

·        Prompt action

Grievance which reflects dissatisfaction among employees which adversely affects the productivity of the organization. In other hand, delaying the action to deal with grievance, the organization could lead to lose the productive efforts of the discontented employee. Therefore, the timely handling of employee grievances is a critical function in HRM.

 

 References

Fonseca, A. and Brauer, M. (2014) “The roles of fairness procedures, normative influences and cultural variables in workplace deviant behavior,” Psyc Extra Dataset [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/e578192014-451.

 

Ghosh, P. et al. (2014) “Measuring workers’ satisfaction with grievance-handling procedure: Study of a power distribution major in India,” Asian Journal of Management Cases, 11(2), pp. 139–157. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0972820114538347.

 

Holley, W.H. (2015) “Grievance procedure,” Wiley Encyclopedia of Management, pp. 1–2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118785317.weom050083.

 

Walker, B. and Hamilton, R.T. (2011) “Employee-employer grievances: A Review,” International Journal of Management Reviews, 13(1), pp. 40–58. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2370.2010.00283.x.