Perhaps more than any other HR activity, health and safety offer HR manager an opportunity to be more proactive than reactive. Read: The Concept of Occupational Safety and Health There are a number of strategies that can be used by organizations to ensure a healthy and safe workplace and ensure compliance with legal requirements. Some are: Design Safe and healthy systems of work Exhibit Strong management commitment Inspect Workplace for health and safety problems Establish Procedures and controls for dealing with health and safety issues Develop Training programs Set up Health and safety committees Monitor Safety policies Draw up Action plan and checklist 1. Design safer systems of work: The most direct approach to ensuring a safe and healthy workplace is to design systems of work that are safe and without risk to health. This can often only be done satisfactorily at the design, planning or purchasing stage. It may Continue reading
Human Resource Concepts
Effective Ways of Handling Employee Grievances
The word employee grievance is often used in a generic form to indicate various forms and stages of an employee’s dissatisfaction while at work. While the dissatisfaction could be defined as anything that disturbs an employee, a complaint is spoken or written dissatisfaction brought to the attention of the manager or to the HR department/team member. Often employees view the HR team as the custodian of employee content/discontent and take up their grievances with the HR team. Grievance could also be voiced by a group of employees; it need not necessarily be a single employee with a complaint. What might happen if an organization does not provide some method by which a employee can voice his complaints and obtain a explanation? The employee will be unhappy, his productivity is impacted, he openly begins to share his discontent with not just his colleagues but also outsider’s, friends, relatives, maybe even customers Continue reading
Organizational Change
The concept of organizational change is in regard to organization-wide change, as opposed to smaller changes such as hiring a new person, modifying a program, buying a new computer for the department etc. Examples of organization-wide change are a change in mission statement, restructuring operations (e.g., restructuring to self-managed teams, layoffs, etc.), new technologies, mergers, major collaborations, “rightsizing”, new programs such as Total Quality Management, Business Process Re-engineering, etc. Some experts refer to such change as “organizational transformation”. Organizational change means that there is a fundamental and radical reorientation in the way the organization operates. What are the forces, which necessitate change? Change should not be done for the sake of change — it is a strategy to accomplish the overall goal. Usually organizational change is provoked by some major outside driving force, e.g., substantial cuts in funding, address major new markets/clients, need for dramatic increases in productivity/services, etc. It Continue reading
Industrial Disputes – Meaning, Prevention and Settlement
Industrial disputes are organised protests against existing terms of employment or conditions of work. According to the Industrial Dispute Act, 1947, an Industrial dispute means “Any dispute or difference between employer and employer or between employer and workmen or between workmen and workmen, which is connected with the employment or non-employment or terms of employment or with the conditions of labor of any person” In practice, Industrial dispute mainly refers to the strife between employers and their employees. An Industrial dispute is not a personal dispute of any one person. It generally affects a large number of workers’ community having common interests. Prevention of Industrial Disputes: The consequences of an Industrial dispute will be harmful to the owners of industries, workers, economy and the nation as a whole, which results in loss of productivity, profits, market share and even closure of the plant. Hence, Industrial disputes need to be averted Continue reading
Establishing a Grievance Procedure in Workplace
Every employee has certain expectations which he thinks must be fulfilled by the organization he is working for. When the organization fails to do this, he develops a feeling of discontent or dissatisfaction. When an employee feels that something is unfair in the organization, he is said to have a grievance. In the Industrial Relations language, Grievance is defined as anything which irritates or tends to make work conditions unsatisfactory and thereby harbors a discontent or dissatisfaction arising anything connected with the company that an employee thinks, believes or even feels, unfair, unjust. In this sense many of the controversial issues in Industrial Organizations may be said to arise as a result of incept or ill-advised handling or neglect of grievances which individually may appear trivial but collectively may become explosive. The following principles should be observed while laying down a grievance procedure in organizations: A grievance should be dealt Continue reading
Manpower Planning Process – Problems, Barriers and Solutions
The centrality of manpower in production process of corporate entities has long been acknowledged by organization managers and administrators. It is an on-going process (integrated approach), not a once and for all phenomenon. Its process involves interrelated activities and the plan must continue to be modified to meet prevailing circumstances. As a plan, it is embedded with implementation programmes designed to ensure availability of adequate qualified persons. Such implementation programmes include recruitment and selection (employment) of required skilled personnel to perform jobs that will allow the enterprise meet both the corporate and individual goals. The plan implementation programme also entails training and development of personnel and performance appraisal as well as other related personnel administration functions. The term ‘Manpower Planning’ at organizational or corporate level is also known as micro-human resources planning and it has much to do with personnel management or personnel administration. The terms “manpower, ‘human resource”, and Continue reading