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Employee Relations

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Employee Relations

Kogan Page,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

This review of the basics of employee relations will help HR managers become “more strategic and less reactive.”

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Editorial Rating

6

Recommendation

Elizabeth Aylott covers the basics of human resources and employee relations in this useful, well-informed manual. She proves hard-nosed, management-oriented and targeted on the bottom line. Aylott’s technical, dry treatise – with its abstruse HR definitions and academic disagreements on theory and practice – may be too insider-focused, though practitioners in multinational companies will gratefully turn to it as a reference work. Given her orientation to the UK, some details of legalities may be more pertinent to HR professionals there than elsewhere. getAbstract recommends her guidance and expertise to HR practitioners and students in related fields who face sweeping changes in today’s workplace. She sets out with a goal these readers will share: helping HR departments and managers become “more strategic and less reactive.”

Summary

“Employment Relationship”

Human resources (HR) professionals practice employee relations. Their foremost concern is the relationship between the workforce and the employer. The area of employee relations concerns the conflicts that can develop between employees and their firms, and between individual workers and groups of employees.

The umbrella of “employee involvement and participation” (EIP) covers how and what a company communicates to its employees, their involvement with their firm and how they participate. The practice of employee relations further examines and defines how employees and their organizations interact, within four different spheres:

  1. “The economic perspective” – The employment relationship represents a “transaction” between employer and employees. Workers offer a specific product – their labor – at a certain price – their wages. In the modern free market, people with the most in-demand skills garner the highest wages, while those with common or no skills earn low wages.
  2. “The legal perspective” – The International Labor Organization defines employment as “a legal notion widely used in countries...

About the Author

Elizabeth Aylott teaches in the business school at London’s BPP University, where she lectures on human resources and resolving employment disputes.

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