3 Tactics to Up Your Employee Relations Game

Whether a company has one employee or 10,000 employees in multiple offices (including home offices) around the world, employee relations need to be a priority. Maintaining good employee relations serves multiple business purposes, and failing to maintain good employee relations can lead to unnecessary costs, stifle innovation and enhance the company’s risk exposure.

So, what can—and should your company be doing to foster a devoted and high-performing workforce? Here are three tactics to up your employee relations game:

1. Make Sure You Really Understand Why Employee Relations Matter

While lots of companies pay lip service to employee relations, many lack a clear understanding of why they are doing so. When you understand why employee relations matter, not only will you have a better appreciation for the importance of building strong relationships with your company’s employees, but you will also have a better understanding of how to build these relationships effectively.

Why do employee relations matter? Some of the key benefits (among many others) of building a committed and content workforce include:

• Reducing your company’s recruitment costs
• Building strong teams of employees who work well together
• Improving performance, efficiency and innovation
• Reducing the risk of employment-related claims and litigation
• Enhancing your company’s reputation among prospective employees, customers and clients

All of these are critically important, and they are all directly impacted by your company’s employee relations. As an HR professional, keeping these benefits in mind (and being able to demonstrate these benefits to your company’s leadership) can help you focus your resources in the right areas (and obtain the additional resources you need) so that you can maximize employee satisfaction, engagement and retention.

2. Ask Your Employees What They Want

Too often, we see company leaders and human resources (HR) professionals implement policies and programs that they think will work, only to see them fail spectacularly. In many cases, they do so because they see what is working for other companies, and they assume that these efforts will work at their companies as well.

But, this isn’t necessarily the case.

There are several ways to figure out what will work at your company—one of which is simply to ask your company’s employees what they want. For example, while the trends show that about half of all employees care more about flexibility than salary, this may or may not be true within your company’s workforce. Since there are right and wrong ways to conduct pulse surveys and other means of gathering data from employees, it is important to work with an experienced HR consulting company during this process.

3. Measure Your Success

When implementing policies focused on improving employee relations, it is important to do so in a way that allows you to measure your success. An experienced HR consulting company can assist with this as well. If you don’t have a way to measure your success, you won’t know what is working (and what isn’t), and you won’t be able to make informed decisions about your next steps.

Up Your Company’s Employee Relations Game with The AR Group

At The AR Group, we help companies build strong, diverse and high-performing workforces. If you would like to know more about our HR consulting services, please call 720-452-3300 or contact us online to arrange a confidential consultation.