What are the Trends in Employee Management Relations?

One of our key goals over the past year has been to share with our subscriber’s information to assist you in making quality business decisions by providing current information on what is happening in the work environment.  Sharing how progressive companies deal with their challenges will hopefully offer you solutions for the future.

The Human Resource profession is now driven by metrics.  Using metrics provides the professional with an excellent barometer of how satisfied and engaged employees are in the success of the business.   When metrics are utilized and historical HR patterns are revealed executive management can better respond to the challenges that front-line managers are experiencing on the job.  Executive management can then hopefully create an environment where managers develop into leaders and act as change agents for our organizations.  A key goal for Human Resources is to ensure that managers are meeting the needs of their subordinates and leading their departments.  Managers need to be coaches, conduct quality performance reviews that challenge, ensure that a creative and innovative work environment is maintained, hold people accountable and communicate the goals of the organization by sharing the strategy for the future.  These are just a few of the duties and responsibilities of a high-performing manager.  However, how do we measure their successes and challenges?  One of the tools used to evaluate manager performance and effectiveness on the job is the employee survey. 

Based upon our survey data areas of employee satisfaction with management are varied; however, several common positive themes surfaced when examining the data.  In general, employees are satisfied with their jobs.  They understand and appreciate that management is operating the business efficiently, the respondents are treated with respect and their manager is generally a good coach.  The respondents also believe that the work environment is safe.  With respect to the statements focusing on employee management relations, the respondents gave this area a satisfaction rating of 3.89 (out of a 5 point scale) and this indicates moderate levels of satisfaction.  The great majority of employees believe that their manager will listen to their point of view and assist them in growing professionally.   In addition, the survey results indicate that management treats and respects all individuals. The statement, "My manager treats people the same regardless of race, gender, age, ethnicity or other differences" was given a question satisfaction rating of 4.21 or high levels of satisfaction.  The data suggests that diversity is encouraged and has become a part of the corporate culture.  Areas of improvement include eliminating favoritism, management listening more and increasing communication and sharing more information about the challenges and successes of the organization.  The respondents would also like to learn more about the business strategy and how management plans to expand the business.

In our next post we will discuss areas of employee satisfaction with respect to improving employee communication.