Employment Relationshups

INTRODUCTION TO EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP

An employer is a person or business that employs one or more people for wages or salary. An employee is a person who works for another in return for financial or other compensation. The relationship between the employer and employee includes the connectedness as well as the mutual dealings between them. Referred to as the employment relationship, it is of significant importance in any organisation to continuously seek methods to improve and maintain these relationships.

Relationships should be ethical and based on trust in order for a company to obtain growth and profits. The improvement of the employment relationship is important to both the employer and the employee for the following reasons:

* Employee productivity increases when employees feel they are treated with respect;

* Employees are involved in relationship marketing which encourages them to perform conscientiously which results in rewards of higher wages;

* A good employer-employee relationship provides an intrinsic sense of self-satisfaction.

* Employees perform better when they are reminded, through fair compensation, that their efforts result in something of value.

A psychological contract exists between the employer and the employee; employers should adopt the attitude that their employees are special, should be treated humanely and that compensation should be distributed fairly according to an employees' skills and efforts, whereas employees should consistently work to the best of their ability and avoid any action which may be inappropriate in the working environment.

The employer-employee relationship is continuously changing and managers are altering their style of management to suit the needs of employees. Most organisations realize that their success and profits are largely due to their employees and their involvement and commitment.

The lack of employment security has reduced the level of employee loyalty & therefore more emphasis has to be placed on building positive relationships with people.

Workshops and facilitation services help to improve the employment relationship by addressing workplace issues, building stronger workplace relationships and creating a safe working environment. Training programs can provide help by identifying needs and finding strategies to deal with the issues that create communication challenges or other workplace problems. Programs can also assist in developing the necessary skills to build strong employment relationships and in learning to maintain and improve them.

Building these relationships are stimulating to both the employer and employee and brings great satisfaction to both.

THE CHANGING CONTEXT AND NATURE OF THE EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP

In the past, the policy was applied in master/servant or employer/employee relationships. If the employee or servant committed a civil wrong against a third party, the master or employer could be accountable for the acts of their servant or employee when those acts were committed within the extent of the relationship. The third party could proceed against both the servant/employee and master/employer. The action against the servant/employee would be based upon the direct responsibility of the servant/employee for his behaviour. The action against the master/employer is based upon the assumption of explicit liability, by which one party can be held accountable for the acts of another.

Increased competition and the globalisation of business have resulted in fundamental changes in the formation of organisations. These in turn have twisted the nature of the employment relationship and reduced the degree of internal labour markets. The implications for traditional models of appraisal are thoughtful. Job analysis, the management of careers, homogeneity of the workforce, and the ownership of assessment information are all difficult.

New tools are not enough to address these issues. Rather, the profession of work and organisational psychology needs to change the assumptions and principles of its culture as well as its artefacts. The major block to such change is the selection of those problems, which are defined by the academic establishment, rather than those faced by the client.

The changing context and nature of the employment relationship draws upon new research into the relationship between changing organisational forms and the reshaping of work in order to consider the employment relationship. The development of more complex organisational forms, such as cross organisation networking, partnerships, alliances, use of external agencies for core as well as peripheral activities, multi-employer sites and the blurring of public and private sector split, it has implications for both the legal and the socially constituted nature of the employment relationship.

The idea of a clearly defined employer-employee relationship becomes difficult to sustain under conditions where employees are working in project teams or on-site beside employees from other organisations, where responsibilities for performance and for health and safety are not clearly distinct, or involve more than one organisation.

This unknown of the relationship affects not only legal responsibilities, grievance and disciplinary issues and the extent of clearness and fairness in employment conditions, but also the definition, constitution and implementation of the employment contract defined in psychological and social conditions.

So far, the investigation of both conflicts and complementarities in the workplace has focused primarily on the dynamic interactions between the single employer and that organisation's employees. The development of simultaneously more uneven and more networked organisational forms raises new issues of how to understand potential conflicts and contradictions around the 'employer' measurement to the employment relationship in addition to more widely recognized conflicts located on the employer-employee partnership.

9 Key Challenges facing the Employment Relationship

1. To gain insight into the changing psychological contract at work, the way in which it is formed, the things that lead to a breach or violation of the contract, the consequences, and the extent to which the psychological contract change is a manageable process.

2. To consider what is really meant by flexibility at work. We