(Solution) CIPD opportunities for and barriers to HR sustaining effective employment relationships during these turbulent times
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Solution
In CIPD HR Professional Map, employee relations is categorised as a specialist knowledge area (CIPD, 2023b). It influences on the relevance of ensuring relationships of the organisation and its people are managed transparently and in line with existing legislations. The nature of turbulence in UK employment relations is supported by CIPD (2023c) report which hypothesised that trade union membership had declined to 6.25 million in 20222 with percentage of UK employees members of trade unions reducing to 22.3% from 23.1% in 2021. Despite of this, Statista (2024) report noted that as of 2023, upto 829,000 working days had been lost owing to labor disputes and strike action in UK. This is with approximately 155,000 employees being in strike every month in average.
In order to evaluate the opportunities for and barriers to HR sustaining effective employment relationships during the turbulent times, the following areas would need to be put into consideration;
Union and non-union settings- Today, in UK, it is projected that approximately half of the employees representatives in UK are trade unions. As evidenced in Dobbins and Dundon (2020) their functions are restrained than most of the union counterparts. Considering the case of union settings, HR sustaining an effective employment relationships, unions would be recognised. This is as workplace union representatives. For non-union organisations, HR would ensure they engage employees representatives as a consultant committee or work council.
Considering barriers, CIPD (2023d) note that with a labour force having 32.5 million employees, 1.4% of overall employment represent the gig economy. This means that for 14.7% of the employees in work, approximately 4.4 million work in gig economy platforms once in England and Wales. Hence, HR sustaining effective employment relations would be a major challenge since unionisation in gig economy has been challenging. This is since the employees have misunderstanding on how people like on flexible gig working with traditional union recruitment tactics struggling when the employees show up for work through an application. Also, another barrier is that union contracts demand employees promotion to be dependent on seniority rather than quality of working.. Hence, the HR sustaining effective employee relations would be characterised by significant challenges in promoting a person informed by productivity/potential. For example, Edwards and Clinton (2023) note that in time of downsizing/restructuring of job opportunities, the union contracts would demand termination of employees in line with their seniority.
Employees involvement- In UK, there has been an increase in what ONS (2024) identify as work stoppages owing to disputes of employers and employees. This is evidenced by increased strikes and lockouts, days lost in public and private sectors and workers engaged. For the opportunities, by improving the scope of employees involvement, it becomes possible to allow the employees to offer their unsolicited opinion on decisions potentially impacting them in their job roles. According to Köseoglu et al. (2020), during disciplinary hearing and grievances handling, the scope of involving employees would be through organisation meetings, committees and elected organisation internal representation. The strength of this is the employees having immense control over their working scope and workplace when engaged in decisions making.
Taking into account of the barriers, Balasubramanian and Sarkar (2020) identify the issue of higher incidence or informality limiting success in unionisation. With majority of the trade unions restricted to represent population in formal labour market, even with initiatives for incorporating and representing informal workers, the challenge would persist. The outcome of this would be negatively affecting the employees wellbeing and stress management. This is in areas of lacking work-life balance, lacking effective trust and empowered and lacking purpose and meaning. Also, Clark et al. (2022) note that resistance from workplace flexibility would similarly hinder a success sustaining of the effective employment relationships in the current business environment.
Developments in the field of employee engagement-
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