Dessler 14.Ppt - Edited

14
Building Positive
Employee
4-1414 Relations
Copyright © 2017 Pearson

14-1
Education, Ltd.
Learning Objectives
14-1. Define employee relations.
14-2. Discuss at least four methods for managing employee
relations.
14-3. Explain what is meant by ethical behavior.
14-4. 4-1414
Explain what is meant by air disciplinary practices
14-5. Answer the question, “How do companies become “Best
Companies to Work for?

14-2
Education, Ltd.
What is Employee Relations?
• Employee Relations – is the activity that involves establishing and
maintaining the positive employee-employer relationships that contribute to
satisfactory productivity, motivation, morale, and discipline, and to
maintaining a positive, productive, and cohesive work environment.
• Employers can do many things to build positive employee relations.

Some examples include providing good training, fair appraisals, and
4-1414
competitive pay and benefits (all of which we discussed in previous
chapters). However, most employers also institute special “employee
relations programs” to maintain positive employee relations. These include
employee fair treatment programs, improving employee relations through
improved communications, developing employee recognition/relations
programs, and having fair and predictable disciplinary procedures.

14-3
Education, Ltd.
Employee Relations Programs For Building and
Maintaining Positive Employee Relations
Ensuring Fair Treatment – Anyone who has suffered unfair treatment at

work knows it is demoralizing. Unfair treatment reduces morale, poisons
trust, and negatively impacts employee relations and performance.
Employees of abusive supervisors are more likely to quit, and to report
lower job and life satisfaction and higher stress. The effects on employees
4-1414
of such abusiveness are particularly pronounced where the abusive
supervisors seem to have support from higher-ups.
At work, fair treatment reflects concrete actions such as “employees are
treated with respect,” and “employees are treated fairly.”

14-6
Education, Ltd.
Fair Treatment
Reasons for fair treatment.

1. Unfairness can backfire on the company. For example, victims of
unfairness exhibit more workplace deviance, such as theft and sabotage.
Victims of unfairness also suffer a range of ill effects including poor health,
strain, and psychological conditions.
2. 2. Unfairness leads to increased tensions between the employee and his
or her family or partner.
3. Abusive supervisors undermine their subordinates’ effectiveness and may
prompt them to act destructively.
4. In terms of employee relations, employees’ perceptions of fairness relate
positively to enhanced employee commitment; enhanced satisfaction with
the company, job, and leader; and enhanced organizational citizenship
behaviors.
5. The employer and the manager are responsible for ensuring that the
employee is treated fairly and with respect (and that its employees treat
each other respectfully).
5
Education, Ltd.
Research Insight – A study illustrates the effects of
unfairness. College instructors first completed surveys
concerning the extent to which they saw their colleges as
treating them with procedural and distributive justice.
1. Procedural justice refers to justice in the allocation of
rewards or discipline, in terms of the procedures being
evenhanded and fair;
4-1414
2. distributive justice refers to a system for distributing
rewards and discipline in which the actual results or
outcomes are evenhanded and fair.) Procedural justice items
included, for example, “In general, the department/college’s
procedures allow for requests for clarification or for
additional information about a decision.” Distributive justice
items included, “I am fairly rewarded considering the
responsibilities I have.”

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
Improving Performance:
The Strategic Context
A New HR Strategy
at the Foxconn Plant in Shenzhen, China
The phrase social responsibility tends to trigger images of
charitable contributions and helping the homeless, but it actually
refers to much more. For example, it refers to the honesty of the
company’s ads; to the quality of the parts it builds into its
4-1414
products; and to the honesty, ethics, fairness, and “rightness” of
its dealings with customers, suppliers, and, of course, employees.
The basic question is always whether the company is serving all its
constituencies (or “stakeholders”) fairly and honestly. Corporate
social responsibility thus refers to the extent to which companies
should and do channel resources toward improving one or more
segments of society other than the firm’s owners or stockholders.

14-7
Education, Ltd.
• A worker uprising at Apple’s Foxconn iPhone assembly plant in
Shenzhen, China, shows that workers around the globe want their
employers to treat them in a fair and socially responsible manner.
Producing quality products as efficiently as possible was long the
strategy at this plant. However, after the uprising over pay and work
rules at the Foxconn plant, Apple asked the plant’s owner to have
the Fair Labor Association (FLA) survey the plant’s workers. The FLA
found “tons of issues.” For example, employees faced “overly strict”
product-quality demands without adequate training: “Every job is
tagged to time, there are targets on how many things must be
completed within an hour,” said Xie Xiaogang, 22, who worked at
4-1414
Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant. “In this environment, many people
cannot take it.” Heavy overtime work requirements and having to
work through a holiday week were other examples. To foster the
improved behaviors that the plant’s performance required, Hon Hai,
the Foxconn plant’s owner, tweaked its efficiency-first strategy and
changed its plant human resource strategy and practices, for
instance, by raising salaries and cutting mandatory overtime. Those
changes were among 284 made at Foxconn after the audits
uncovered violations of Chinese regulations. The changes show that
fair treatment is a global obligation.
8
Education, Ltd.
Bullying and Victimization
The U.S. government (www.stopbullying.gov) says most would

agree that bullying involves three things:
● Imbalance of power. People who bully use their power to
control or harm, and the people being bullied may have a hard time
defending themselves.
● Intent to cause harm. Actions done by accident are not bullying;
the person bullying has a goal 4-1414
to cause harm.
● Repetition. Incidents of bullying happen to the same person
over and over by the same person or group, and that bullying can
take many forms, such as:
1. • Verbal: name-calling, teasing
2. • Social: spreading rumors, leaving people out on purpose,
breaking up friendships
3. • Physical: hitting, punching, shoving
4. • Cyberbullying: using the Internet, mobile phones, or other
digital technologies to harm others

14-9
Education, Ltd.
Improving Employee Relations Through
Communication Programs
• Different Types
• Organizational Climate Surveys
Many employers use communications programs to
bolster their employee relations efforts, on the
reasonable assumption that employees feel better about
4-1414
their employers when they’re “kept in the loop.”
This employer uses an open-door policy to encourage

communication between employees and managers, an
employee handbook covering basic employment
information, and “the opportunity to keep abreast of
University events and other information of interest
through the website, e-mail, and hard copy
memoranda.
14-10
Education, Ltd.
Develop Employee Recognition / Relations
Programs
Opportunities for two-way communications like these improve employee

relations, but there are other employee relations programs. Most notable
here are the employee recognition and award programs.
Instituting recognition and service award programs requires planning.

For example, instituting a service award program requires reviewing the
tenure of existing employees and 4-1414
establishing meaningful award periods (1
year, 5 years, etc.). It also requires establishing a budget, selecting awards,
having a procedure for monitoring what awards to actually award, having a
process for giving awards (such as special dinners or staff meetings), and
periodically assessing program success. Similarly, instituting a recognition
program requires developing criteria for recognition (such as customer
service, cost savings, etc.), creating forms and procedures for submitting and
reviewing nominations, selecting meaningful recognition awards, and
establishing a process for actually awarding the recognition awards.

14-11
Education, Ltd.
Use Employee Involvement Programs
Focus Groups
Employee relations also tend to improve when employees

become involved with the company in positive ways, and so
employee involvement is another useful employee relations
strategy.
4-1414involvement in various
Employers encourage employee
ways. Some organize focus groups. A focus group is a
small sample of employees who are presented with a
specific question or issue and who interactively express
their opinions and attitudes on that issue with the group’s
assigned facilitator.

14-12
Education, Ltd.
Trends Shaping HR: Digital and Social Media
Employee Involvement
Many employers use social media, such as the

pinboard-style photo-sharing Web site Pinterest, to
encourage involvement. One survey found that just
4-1414
over half of employers use social media tools to
communicate with employees and to help develop a
sense of community. For example, Red Door
Interactive used a Pinterest-based project it called
“San Diego Office Inspiration.” This encouraged
employees to contribute interior design and decor
ideas for its new offices.

14-13
Education, Ltd.
Using Employee Involvement Teams
• Suggestion Teams
• Problem-Solving Teams
• Quality Circle
• Self-Managing / Self-Directed Work Team
• Suggestion Systems
Employers also use special teams to gain employees’ involvement.

Suggestion teams are temporary teams whose members work on
4-1414
specific analytical assignments, such as how to cut costs or raise
productivity.
Some employers formalize this process by appointing semi-permanent

problem-solving teams. These identify and research work processes
and develop solutions to work-related problems.

14-14
Education, Ltd.
A quality circle is a type of formal problem-solving team,
usually composed of 6 to 12 specially trained employees who
meet weekly to solve problems affecting their work area. The
team gets training in problem-analysis techniques (including
basic statistics). Then it applies these techniques to solve
problems in its work area.
In many facilities, specially 4-1414
trained teams of self-managing
employees do their jobs with little or no oversight from
supervisory personnel. A self-managing/self-directed work
team is a small (usually 8 to 10 members) group of carefully
selected, trained, and empowered employees who basically
run themselves with little or no outside supervision, usually
for the purpose of accomplishing a specific task or mission.

15
Education, Ltd.
Using Suggestion Systems – Most employers understand that
employee suggestions can produce significant savings (and,
through involvement and rewards, improved employee
relations). For example, one study several years ago of 47
companies concluded that the firms had saved more than $624
million in one year from their suggestion programs; more than
250,000 suggestions were submitted, of which employers
adopted over 93,000 ideas. 4-1414
Furthermore, employees like these
programs. In one survey, 54% of the 497 employees surveyed
said they made more than 20 suggestions per year, while
another 24% said they made between 10 and 20 suggestions per
year.
The accompanying HR as a Profit Center feature on the next
slide provides an example.

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
IMPROVING PERFORMANCE: HR As a Profit Center
The Cost-Effective Suggestion System
A Lockheed Martin unit in Oswego, New York, developed

its “Cost-Effectiveness Plus” suggestion program to
encourage and recognize employees for streamlining
processes. With the Cost-Effectiveness Plus program,
employees electronically submit
4-1414their ideas. These are
then evaluated and approved by the local manager and
the program’s coordinator (and by higher management
when necessary). This program reportedly saves this
facility about $77,000 per implemented idea, or more
than $100 million each year.

14-17
Education, Ltd.
Today’s suggestion systems are more sophisticated than the
“suggestion boxes” of years ago. The main improvements are in
how the manager formalizes and communicates the suggestion
process. The head of one company that designs and installs
suggestion systems for employers lists the essential elements of
an effective employee suggestion system as follows:
✓ Senior staff support
✓ A simple, easy process for4-1414
submitting suggestions
✓ A strong process for evaluating and implementing suggestions
✓ An effective program for publicizing and communicating the
program
✓ A program focus on key organizational goals

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
The Ethical Organization
4-1414

14-16
Education, Ltd.
Ethics and Employee Rights
Societies don’t rely on employers’ ethics or sense of fairness

or morality to ensure that they do what’s right. Societies also
institute various laws and procedures for enforcing these
laws.
Protecting employee rights4-1414

is thus part and parcel of all the
employment laws we discuss in this book. Although ethics,
fairness, and morality help govern how employers treat their
employees, the enforceable rights embedded in
employment law also govern what employers and
employees can do.

14-17
Education, Ltd.
What Shapes Ethical Behavior at
Work?
• Three factors combine to determine the ethical

choices we make
1. The person (bad apples)
2. Situations (bad cases)
4-1414
3. Company Environment (bad barrels)
o Pressures
o Organizational culture

14-18
Education, Ltd.
Why do people do bad things? It’s complicated. However, one
review of over 30 years of ethics research concluded that three
factors combine to determine the ethical choices we make.
The authors titled their paper “Bad Apples, Bad Cases, and Bad
Barrels.” This title highlighted their conclusion that when
“Bad apples” (people who are inclined to make unethical choices),
4-1414
must deal with
“Bad cases” (ethical situations that are ripe for unethical choices),
while working in
“Bad barrels” (company environments that foster or condone
unethical choices), … then people tend to act unethically.

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
Here’s a closer look at what they found:
1. The Person (What Makes Bad Apples?) First, because people bring to
their jobs their own ideas of what is morally right and wrong, each
person must shoulder much of the credit (or blame) for his or her ethical
choices.
2. Which Ethical Situations Make for Ethically Dangerous Situations (Bad
Cases)? But, it’s not just the person but the situation that’s important.
Basically, how much harm can befall victims of the choice, or the number
of people potentially affected. People seemed more likely to “do the
wrong thing” in “less serious” situations, in other words, the problem is
that one thing leads to another;4-1414
people start by doing small bad things
and then “graduate” to larger ones.
3. What Are the “Bad Barrels”?—The Outside Factors That Mold Ethical
Choices? Finally, the study found that some companies produce more
poisonous social environments (outside factors or “barrels”) than do
others; these bad environments in turn foster unethical choices. Those
that encouraged employees to consider the well-being of everyone had
more ethical choices. Most importantly, companies whose managers put
in place “a strong ethical culture that clearly communicates the range of
acceptable and unacceptable behavior” suffered fewer unethical
decisions.
14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
How Managers Can Create More Ethical
Environments
Reduce Job-Related Pressures – If people did unethical things at work

solely for personal gain or because they were “bad people,” it perhaps
would be understandable (though inexcusable). The scary thing is that it’s
often not personal interests but the pressures of the job.
One study illustrates this. It asked employees to list their reasons for
4-1414
taking unethical actions at work. For most of these employees,
1. “meeting schedule pressures,”
2. “meeting overly aggressive financial or business objectives,” and
3. “helping the company survive” were the three top causes.
4. “Advancing my own career or financial interests” ranked about last. In
any case, reducing such “outside” pressures helps head off ethical
lapses.

14-19
Education, Ltd.
How Human Resource Managers Can
Create More Ethical Environments
• Institute Ethical Polices and Codes

• Enforce The Rules
4-1414
• Encourage Whistleblowers
• Foster The Right Culture

14-20
Education, Ltd.
There are also steps the HR group can take.
Institute Ethics Policies And Codes – Employers use ethics
policies and codes to signal that their companies are serious
about ethics.
Enforce The Rules – Codifying such rules without enforcing them
is futile. To paraphrase one study, managers’ statements can
reduce unethical behavior on the part of employees, but knowing
that behavior is actually being monitored and enforced has the
biggest impact. 4-1414
Encourage Whistleblowers – Some companies encourage
employees to use hotlines and other means to “blow the whistle”
on the company when they discover fraud. In complying with the
Dodd-Frank Act, the SEC established a whistleblower reward for
people who report unethical corporate behavior to it. It is also
tracking possible incidents of retaliation against whistleblowers.

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
Foster The Right Culture – Organizational culture is the “characteristic
values, traditions, and behaviors a company’s employees share.
Managers therefore have to think through how to send the right signals
to their employees—in other words, create the right culture. Doing so
includes:
● Clarifying expectations. First, make clear what values you want
subordinates to follow. For example, the IBM ethics statement shows
the company takes ethics seriously.
● Using signs and symbols. Symbolism—what the manager actually
does—ultimately does the most4-1414 to create and sustain the company’s
culture. As we said earlier, managers need to “walk the talk.” They can’t
say “don’t falsify the financials” and then do so themselves.
● Providing physical support. The physical signs of the employer’s
values—its incentive plan, appraisal system, and disciplinary
procedures, for instance—send strong signals regarding what
employees should and should not do. For example, do the promotions
employees get reward ethical behavior or penalize it?

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
IMPROVING PERFORMANCE: HR Tools For Line
Managers and Small Businesses
Small Business Ethics
When people think of unethical corporate behavior, big

companies come to mind, because they’re usually in the
headlines. Yet studies show that small and midsize enterprises are
prone to the same unethical corporate
4-1414 behavior as big firms. For
example, one study of 20 small to midsize firms found that
bribery, corrupt dealings, payoffs to local gangsters, and a general
tone of dishonesty were all “business as usual” at many of these
firms. Some were clever about their corrupt dealings. When
doing business abroad, one U.S. business tried to keep its hands
clean by forming a “strategic alliance” with a local firm. The latter
then did the dirty work, for example, handling the local bribes,
while the U.S. firm’s managers looked the other way.

14-28
Education, Ltd.
How Human Resource Managers Can Create
More Ethical Environments
• Hire Right
• Use Ethics Training
4-1414
• Use Rewards and Discipline
• Institute Employee Privacy Policies

14-22
Education, Ltd.
1. Hire Right – As one writer says, “The simplest way to tune up
an organization, ethically speaking, is to hire more ethical
people.” Start by using recruitment materials that emphasize
your firm’s commitment to honest dealings and ethics. Then
use screening tools like honesty tests, background checks, and
interview questions (such as “Have you ever observed
someone stretching the rules at work? What did you do about
it?”) to screen out problematical people.
4-1414
2. Use Ethics Training – Ethics training usually involves showing
employees how to recognize ethical dilemmas, how to apply codes
of conduct to resolve problems, and how to use personnel activities
like disciplinary practices in ethical ways. The training should
emphasize the moral underpinnings of the ethical choice and the
company’s deep commitment to integrity and ethics. Include
participation by top managers in the program to emphasize that
commitment.

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
3. Use Rewards And Discipline – Employees expect you to
punish unethical conduct and to reward ethical conduct.
The employer should discipline executives, not just
underlings, who misbehave.
4. Institute Employee Privacy Policies – Most employees

probably view invasions of their privacy by their employers
as unethical. At work, employee privacy violations include
4-1414
intrusion (such as locker room and e-mail surveillance),
publication of private matters, disclosure of medical records,
and appropriation of an employee’s name or likeness for
commercial purposes. In practice, background checks,
monitoring off-duty conduct and lifestyle, drug testing,
workplace searches, and workplace monitoring trigger most
privacy violations.

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
Know Your Employment Law
Electronic Monitoring
What can the employer do to balance privacy concerns with its need to protect
itself ? There are two main restrictions on workplace monitoring: the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and common-law protections against
invasion of privacy (protections that have evolved from court decisions, for
instance, decisions against defaming employees by publicizing highly personal
matters about them without their permission). The ECPA is a federal law
intended to help restrict interception and monitoring of oral and wire
4-1414
communications. It contains two exceptions. The “business purpose exception”
permits employers to monitor communications if they can show a legitimate
business reason for doing so. The second, “consent exception,” lets employers
monitor communications if they have their employees’ consent to do so.
Electronic eavesdropping is thus legal—up to a point. For example, federal law
and most state laws allow employers to monitor employees’ phone calls in the
ordinary course of business. However, they must stop listening when it becomes
clear the conversation is personal. You can also intercept e-mail to protect the
property rights of the e-mail provider. However, court cases suggest employers
may have fewer rights to monitor e-mail than previously assumed.
14-32
Education, Ltd.
Electronic Monitoring
To be safe, employers issue e-mail and online service usage policies,

which warn employees that those systems should be used for
business only. Employers also have employees sign e-mail and
telephone monitoring acknowledgment statements like that in Figure
14-3. Many employees probably assume that their communications
using the corporate e-mail system are open to review, but that e-
mails they send via the employer’s system but using personal e-mail
accounts such as Gmail aren’t. However, that’s not necessarily true.
An attorney should review the company’s e-mail policy, but, at a
minimum, make it clear that employees should have no expectation
of privacy in their e-mail and Internet usage. Also emphasize that all
messages sent and received on the employer’s e-mail system are
company property and not confidential. Videotaped workplace
monitoring requires more caution. Continuous video surveillance of
employees in an office setting may not be a problem. But a Boston
employer had to pay over $200,000 to five workers it secretly
videotaped in an employee locker room, after they sued.
33
Education, Ltd.
Monitoring Acknowledgment
4-1414

14-34
Education, Ltd.
Trends Shaping HR: Digital and Social Media
Monitoring
Monitoring reflects in part a proliferation of online and smart devices and
social media tools. For example, a New Jersey court found one employer
liable when one of its employees used his company computer at work to
distribute child pornography.
Security is another problem: One “4-gigabyte MP3 player, such as the first
generation of iPod Mini … can take home a lot of corporate data,” said one
4-1414
employer (a process some graphically describe as “podslurping”). And,
increasingly, disgruntled employees are using their companies’ cloud
services to hack into and undermine their employers’ computer systems.
Monitoring today therefore goes far beyond listening in on phone lines.
New York’s Bronx Lebanon Hospital uses biometric scanners to ensure that
employees who clock in really are who they say they are. Iris scanning
tends to be the most accurate authorization device. Some organizations like
the Federal Aviation Administration use it to control employees’ access to
their network information systems. UPS uses GPS to monitor their drivers’
whereabouts—and therefore productivity.
14-35
Education, Ltd.
One restaurant in Dallas digitally monitors most everything waiters do, for
instance, tracking every ticket, dish, and drink that they process. This not only
makes it easier to track employee theft, but also helps identify exceptionally
conscientious waiters. To keep productivity up, the British grocery chain Tesco
has some distribution center employees wear “Motorola arm-mounted
terminals” (armbands) that keep track of how quickly employees are unloading
and scanning goods.
Such monitoring, as we said, raises privacy issues. The dilemma is that it can also
boost profits. For example, employers routinely use software to monitor (usually
4-1414
secretly) what their employees are doing online. When one employer noticed
high employee overtime claims, they installed new software, and discovered
many employees spent hours each day shopping online instead of working.
Physicians often say that “every medicine contains a little poison,” since
anything,
even aspirin, becomes dangerous if misused. For employers, the dilemma is to
obtain the profit advantages of monitoring, while minimizing the ethical and
privacy issues that it raises.

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
Managing Employee Discipline
The purpose of discipline is to encourage employees to behave
sensibly at work (where sensible means adhering to rules and
regulations). Discipline is necessary when an employee violates a
rule. Proper disciplinary procedures are important for several
reasons. For one thing, positive employee relations requires trust,
and few personnel actions will undermine trust as will arbitrary
discipline. Legal concerns are another reason. One study surveyed
4-1414
45 published arbitration awards in which tardiness had triggered
discipline and/or discharge. When arbitrators overturned
employers’ decisions, it was usually because of inadequate
disciplinary procedures—for example, the employer had failed to
clarify what “tardy” meant. Unfair disciplinary procedures can
backfire in other ways. For example, unfair discipline can trigger
retaliatory employee misbehavior. And, of course, it is hard to be
seen as ethical when disciplinary actions are unfair.

14-27
Education, Ltd.
The Three Pillars of Fair Discipline
1. Rules & Regulations

2. Progressive Penalties
4-1414
3. Appeal Process

14-28
Education, Ltd.
Disciplining employees is often unavoidable, but any such discipline should be
rooted in the need to be fair. The manager builds a fair discipline process on
three pillars: rules and regulations, a system of progressive penalties, and an
appeals process.
1. Rules And Regulations – An acceptable disciplinary process begins
with a set of clear disciplinary rules and regulations. The rules
should cover problems such as theft, destruction of company
property, drinking on the job, and insubordination.
2. Penalties – A system of progressive penalties is the second pillar of
effective discipline. The severity of the penalty usually depends on
4-1414
the offense and the number of times it has occurred.
3. Appeals Process – Third, an appeals process should be part of the
disciplinary process. The aim here is to ensure that supervisors
mete out discipline fairly. An appeals process is essential but is no
panacea. The employer can sometimes mitigate the effects of unfair
discipline by catching it during an appeal. However, some
supervisory behavior may be impossible to overcome. For example,
behaviors that attack the employee’s personal and/or social identity
are difficult to remedy.
14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
Diversity Counts
Comparing Males and Females in a Discipline Situation
the “Evil Woman Thesis” argues that when a woman doesn’t act the way other
men and women expect she should act, they tend to treat her more harshly
than they might if a man acted unexpectedly. The research seems to support
this.
In one study, 360 graduate and undergraduate business school students
reviewed a labor arbitration case. The case involved two employees, male and
female, with similar work records and tenure with employers. Both were
discharged for violation of company rules related to alcohol and drugs.
4-1414
The case portrays one worker’s behavior as a more serious breach of company
rules: The more guilty worker (a male in half the study and a female in the other
half) had brought the intoxicant to work. The students had to express their
agreement with two alternative approaches (tough or not-so-tough) to settling
the dispute that arose after the discharge.
The researchers found bias against the female “employee” by both the male
and female students. Both the male and female students recommended harsher
treatment for the “guilty” female than they did for the “guilty” man.
Researchers conclude, “women, as decision makers, appear to be as willing as
men to impose harsher discipline on ©
Copyright women than upon men.”
2017 Pearson
Education, Ltd. 14-40
How to Discipline an Employee
1. Make sure the evidence supports the charge of employee
wrongdoing.
2. Make sure to protect the employees’ due process rights.
3. Adequately warn the employee of the disciplinary
consequences of his or her alleged misconduct.
4. Have the employee sign form.
5. The rule that allegedly was violated should be “reasonably
4-1414
related” to the efficient and safe operation of the particular
work environment.
6. Objectively investigate the matter before administering
discipline.
7. “The Investigation should produce substantial evidence of

misconduct.
8. Apply applicable rules, orders, or penalties without
discrimination.

14-30
Education, Ltd.
How to Discipline an Employee continued
9. Maintain the employee’s right to counsel. For example, all
union employees generally have the right to bring a
representative to an interview that they reasonably believe
might lead to disciplinary action.
10. Don’t rob your subordinate of his or her dignity, for instance
by disciplining the person in public.
11. Listen to what the person has to say.
12. Remember that the burden of proof is on you. In U.S.
4-1414 innocent until proven guilty.
society, a person is considered
13.Get the facts. Don’t base your decision on hearsay evidence
or on your general impression.
14.Don’t act while angry.
15.Adhere to your company’s disciplinary appeals process.

14-33
Education, Ltd.
How to Discipline an Employee continued
4-1414

14-31
Education, Ltd.
Discipline Without Punishment
• Issue an oral reminder.
• Issue a formal written reminder and place in the
personnel file.
• Give “decision-making leave”.
• Dismissal if behavior repeats.
4-1414

14-36
Education, Ltd.
Traditional discipline processes have two main drawbacks:
1. First, no one likes being punished.
2. Second, punishment tends to gain short-term compliance,
but not long-term cooperation.
Discipline without punishment (or alternative or non punitive

discipline) aims to avoid these drawbacks by reducing the
punitive nature of the discipline. Steps include the following:
4-1414

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
1. Issue an oral reminder for a first infraction.
2. Should another incident arise within 6 weeks, issue a formal written

reminder, and place a copy in the employee’s personnel file. Also, hold a
second private discussion with the employee.
3. Give a paid, one-day “decision-making leave.” If another incident

occurs in the next 6 weeks or so, tell the employee to take a 1-day leave
with pay, and to consider whether he or she wants to abide by the
4-1414
company’s rules. When the employee returns to work, he or she meets
with you and gives you a decision.
4. If no further incidents occur in the next year or so, purge the 1-day
paid suspension from the person’s file. If the behavior is repeated, the
next step is dismissal.
The process would not apply to exceptional circumstances. Criminal
behavior or in-plant fighting might be grounds for immediate dismissal,
for instance.

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
Employee Engagement Guide For Managers
How Companies Become “Best Companies to Work For”
We began this chapter by noting that some companies are better to work for than
others, and we therefore focused on programs managers use to cultivate the
positive employee relations that contribute to being a best place to work. This final
section zeroes in on three companies that are known in part for actually being best
places to work.
4-1414
The “Best Companies to Work For” – Each year, several organizations publish “Best
Companies to Work For” lists, the most notable of which is probably “Fortune
Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For®.” Based on an extensive multinational
survey of employees by the Great Place to Work® Institute
(www.greatplacetowork.com), the survey seeks to identify the best companies to
work for based on how the employees working in them actually feel about working
there.

14-38
Education, Ltd.
Employee Engagement Guide For Managers
The Great Place to Work Institute defines a great workplace

“as one where employees trust the people they work for,
have pride in the work they do, and enjoy the people they
work with.” They say that the companies on their great
companies list “have the highest levels of trust, strongest
evidence of employee engagement and demonstrate the
best applied management practices and programs” as
defined by the institute’s proprietary models.
We’ll look at three recent “Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best

Companies to Work For”—SAS, Google, and FedEx.

48
Education, Ltd.
SAS: Great Benefits, Trust, and Work-Life
Balance
SAS, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, is a leader in providing business analytics software and
services to companies that include 90 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune global 500 list.
Founded in the 1970s, the company is privately owned and has long been known for the quality of
its benefits and for the support it provides for its employees’ work-life balance. It has annual
revenues of over $2.3 billion, and a worldwide workforce of over 13,000 people, about half of
whom work at the company’s North Carolina campus.
4-1414
They have reportedly never laid off an employee. SAS goes to great lengths to foster its employees’
trust in other ways, for instance by giving them abundant freedom in the hours they work. They
also have the Great Place to Work Institute independently survey SAS workers on important
characteristics of trust including open communication, respect, career paths, and being treated as
a human being.
What does all this do for SAS? As one long-term employee put it, “I just can’t imagine leaving SAS,
and I felt that way for a very long time … if somebody offered to double my salary, I wouldn’t even
think about it.” Employee turnover, about 20% in software companies, is about 3% at SAS, which
highlights another important facet of the SAS benefits programs. One person who has studied SAS,
estimates that the lower turnover alone saves SAS $60 million to $80 million a year. As another
example, letting employees visit on-campus health professionals (as SAS does) can cut hours out of
the average employee’s time away from work for doctors’ visits. And, of course, the effect on
engagement, morale, and productivity may be©
Copyright priceless.
2017 Pearson
14-39
Education, Ltd.
Google: Happiness and People
Analytics
When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began building Google,
they wanted to make it a great place to work, and in doing so, they turned
to SAS. They met with SAS executives and sent a team there to better
understand what made SAS consistently a “Best Company to Work For.”
It’s therefore not surprising that Google
4-1414is one of the few employers whose
employee benefits equal or exceed those at SAS. In addition to things like
health-care benefits and flexible work hours (and the possibility of making
millions on stock options), its benefits include on-site dry cleaners, bowling
alleys, cafés, transportation to and from campus, and nap pods. As Google
puts it, “It’s all about removing barriers so Googlers can focus on the
things they love, both inside and outside of work. We’re constantly
searching for unique ways to improve the health and happiness of our
Googlers.”

14-40
Education, Ltd.
FedEx: Guaranteed Fair Treatment
FedEx has been one of the “Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work
For” for 12 of the past 15 years. Several things—excellent benefits,
competitive salaries, and (as we discussed in Chapter 5) a focus on promoting
from within (as embodied by its Job Change Applicant Tracking System
[JCATS]) help to explain this; however, it may be FedEx’s emphasis on building
trust through communications that most sets it apart.
Survey Feedback Action (SFA) – The FedEx survey feedback action (SFA)
program is one example. SFA includes4-1414
an anonymous survey that allows
employees to express feelings about the company and their managers, and to
some extent about service, pay, and benefits. Each manager then has an
opportunity to use the results to help design a blueprint for improving
workgroup engagement and commitment.
SFA has three phases. First, the survey itself is a standard, anonymous
questionnaire given each year to every employee. The questions are designed
to gather information about what helps and hinders employees in their work
environment. Sample items include: “I can tell my manager what I think” and
“My manager tells me what was expected.” A workgroup’s survey results are
compiled and sent anonymously to the manager.
14-41
Education, Ltd.
The second phase is a feedback session between the manager and
his or her workgroup. The goal here is to identify specific concerns or
problems, examine causes for these problems, and devise action
plans to correct the problems.
The feedback meeting should lead to a third, “action plan” phase.

This produces a list of actions that the manager will take to address
employees concerns and boost results. It includes: What is the
4-1414
concern? What’s your analysis? What’s the cause? And What should
be done?
The FedEx Guaranteed Fair Treatment Process – FedEx’s Guaranteed

Fair Treatment Process (GFTP) is a sort of turbocharged grievance
process. It goes beyond most grievance procedures in several ways,
perhaps most notably in that an appeal can go all the way to FedEx’s
top executives.

14-<#>
Education, Ltd.
A Best Company Human Resources Philosophy
There are several things that any manager intent on building positive
employee relations can learn from studying any of these Best Companies To
Work For….
The human resource philosophy on which they built their human resource
management practices. In Chapter 1, we said that people’s actions are
always based in part on the basic assumptions they make, and that this is
especially true in regard to human resource management. The basic
4-1414 they be trusted? Do they dislike
assumptions you make about people—Can
work? Why do they act as they do? How should they be treated?—together
comprise your philosophy of human resource management. And every
personnel decision you make—the people you hire, the training you
provide, your leadership style, and the like—reflects (for better or worse)
this basic philosophy.
One of the things molding your own philosophy is that of your
organization’s top management. While it may or may not be stated, it is
usually communicated by their actions and permeates every level and
department.
14-42
Education, Ltd.
Chapter 14 Review
14-1. Define employee relations.
14-2. Discuss at least four methods for managing
employee relations.
14-3. Explain what is meant by ethical behavior.
14-4. Explain what is meant by fair disciplinary
practices. 4-1414
14-5. Answer the question, “How do companies
become “Best Companies to Work for?”

14-54
Education, Ltd.

Dessler 14.Ppt - Edited

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Dessler 14.Ppt - Edited

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Dessler 14.Ppt - Edited

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

14

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

• Employers can do many things to build positive employee relations.

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Ensuring Fair Treatment – Anyone who has suffered unfair treatment at

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Reasons for fair treatment.

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

The U.S. government (www.stopbullying.gov) says most would

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

This employer uses an open-door policy to encourage

Opportunities for two-way communications like these improve employee

Instituting recognition and service award programs requires planning.

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Employee relations also tend to improve when employees

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Many employers use social media, such as the

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Employers also use special teams to gain employees’ involvement.

Some employers formalize this process by appointing semi-permanent

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

The Cost-Effective Suggestion System

A Lockheed Martin unit in Oswego, New York, developed

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Societies don’t rely on employers’ ethics or sense of fairness

Protecting employee rights4-1414

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

• Three factors combine to determine the ethical

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Reduce Job-Related Pressures – If people did unethical things at work

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

• Institute Ethical Polices and Codes

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

When people think of unethical corporate behavior, big

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

4. Institute Employee Privacy Policies – Most employees

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

To be safe, employers issue e-mail and online service usage policies,

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

1. Rules & Regulations

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

7. “The Investigation should produce substantial evidence of

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson

Copyright © 2017 Pearson