The Importance of Employee Relationship Management – for Owners and Managers

Employee relationship management is a key tool smart companies use to manage all interactions with employees, ultimately to achieve the goals of the organization. The value of an owner or manager understanding their role and playing it out to its maximum potential is the most effective method nurturing employee relationships and dealing with inevitable problems when they arise. Let’s look at some ways you can build better employee relationships.

Employee relationship management catch all phrase that might mean different things to different people.  For most small businesses, relationship management is focused primarily on attracting and retaining employees. Turnover is usually the most effective method measure of success, but there is so many more benefits to building solid relationships with your employees.

Infinium HR or other outsourced HR professionals can play an important role in this process, and many times we’re onsite with our clients and their employees to resolve issues. Although this can be effective, it is far more effective when owners and managers are trained to focus on relationships before problems arise and truly build relationships with their employees.

What’s your Goal?

What’s your goal as a business owner or manager? Better customer service? Growth? Employee retention? How will you measure the success or failure of a good employee relationship building effort? Spending a moment to understand where your business is going and how much your employees have an impact on the success of that goal is critical.

Determining Employee Needs

What do your employees need most? How will you determine their needs and what will motivate them most effectively? Employees lives don’t start and end with their job, they have lives outside of work! Yes, that might be news to some. Remember, needs vary greatly depending on employee differences such as age, gender, so it’s a good idea to determine directly from employees what’s important to them.

Balancing Work and Life

It’s a bit of a buzz phrase, but it has meaning and impact in the real world we’re in today. Effective employee relationship management requires consideration of the complete employee, not just the one that shows up in your workplace several times a week. This means taking steps to ensure that the employee’s work-life needs are taken into consideration. This can occur through creative workforce management and might involve flexible work hours, remote working opportunities and a results-oriented approach to production.

What Steps can you Take?

Here are some concrete steps you can take to improve your employee relationships:

• Holding more informal “reviews” or one-to-one, and even group “chats” with your employees

• Share your vision with the employees and make sure they understand how they fit into the organization and how meeting those goals will benefit them.

• Train your managers in better people skills so they can commit to communicating regularly and honestly with employees about the issues that impact their work.

• If possible, consider a more flexible work schedule. Allow your teams to work out coverage and production expectations.

• Hold luncheons once a month, ask for feedback on daily challenges, concerns, positive reports and the like. Don’t be afraid to hear the truth!

In general, the more open you can be, the more likely you will be to establish strong relationships that lead to increased loyalty and productivity among employees and decreased turnover and dissatisfaction.

A secondary result of great relationships with your employees is the improved ability to deal with problems when they inevitably occur.

If you need help with ideas, training, or coaching you or your managers ion better employee relationship building, contact the people management experts at Infinium HR.