Question

This discussion has 3 parts:

1. In your experience, how do human resources managers cope with demands, constraints, and choices confronting them with reference to employee rights and policies and procedures?
2. What are the benefits or consequences that you have witnessed when it comes to employee rights?
3. What steps do you believe human resources managers use to solve problems and make decisions? If you have experienced this first hand, please feel free to share your experience.

For assistance with your assignment, please use your text, Web resources, and all course materials.

Discussion Board Reminders:

Answer 1

HR policies and procedures encompassing the employee rights are a very important aspect of the workplace. It is like the Holy Grail for the HR personnel and guideline for management and employees to be followed for all concerns.

Employee rights are legal protections mandated by the government which an employer must follow to ensure safety and equal treatment to all employees of the organization. The policies and procedures are formalized by the human resource department by incorporating the employee rights to ensure that management is following the laws of fair employee treatment, training and disciplining and there is clear information about behavioral requirements and restrictions so that employees can do their job well.

HR managers need to ensure that every time a particular employee or organizational concern is raised the policy handbook should be able to cater to it. The policies & procedures ensure that there is no subjectivity or personal bias when resolving conflicts or concerns. This helps the HR personnel to strike a right balance between the employee needs and the organizational requirement. For example maternity leave is an employee right which can put forth some constraints for the deliverables of the organization. However, there is no choice available with the organization whether to grant it or not. The role of the HR manager is to ensure that there are standard operating procedures set in place for taking maternity leave so that neither the employee nor the organization suffers when this right of employee in executed.

Medical insurance for employees and their family members is a standard employee right across all organizations. A major consequence of this employee right is the year on year increasing admin cost for the company due to increase in insurance premium every year as the age of the members in the policy increases, family size increases and new employees are recruited which further get added to the group policy. Here again the role of the HR manager comes in to ensure that a right balance is struck providing the employee right and also stabilizing the cost of insurance. This can be done by deploying various health oriented programs for employees and their family members, partnering with clinics for proactive health checks to reduce the use of insurance for chronic illness and keeping the employees’ health conscious.

Whenever an employee concern or organizational concern is raised the first step deployed by the HR manager is to hear the parties involved in the concern or conflict, find out the problem, refer to the policies and procedures to look out for the solution, propose solutions based on mutual benefit and interest of the parties involved and design the plan of execution. For e.g. An employee had forwarded his resignation to his line manager with a one month notice period as per his employment contract. The line manager did not reply to his email for almost 2 weeks. Later the employee forwarded the same to the HR department as he had not heard from his manager. Due to non-communication for 2 weeks there was delay in formal responsibility handover process. However, the employee did not extend his notice period and left the organization to join another company without a formal exit procedure and without handing over important and confidential data of company. This led to non-disbursal of employee end of service benefits or gratuity benefits. The decision of non-payment of gratuity was taken by the HR manager based on the fact that despite repetitive telephonic and email requests the ex-employee did not handover important data and procedures to existing colleague, a period of three months was given to the employee to follow proper exit procedure and finally the department head was notified of the irresponsible behavior. Then management and HR department took the decision of not paying the end of service benefit in consultation with the labor department by declaring the ex-employee terminated. The line-manager of the ex-employee was also issued a warning for not following the guidelines of responding to subordinate resignation and HR manager passed a new standard operating procedure with stringent guidelines to ensure that in future such fallouts do not happen.