Addressing Employee Grievances

Addressing Employee Grievances

Summary of the Situation

I work in a company that operates in the apparel industry. My company produces new and trendy designed clothes. During festive seasons like the Christmas period, there is always an increase in demand for new and trendy designed clothes, especially for the young American population. In handling the pressure from increased demand, the management has formed a habit of increasing the targets which each employee is required to complete within a weak. To meet these targets, the employees in the production units always have to increase the number of hours in which they have to work. Some had to forgo weekend to meet these targets.

At the beginning of this year’s winter break in which there was an increase in demand, the management instigated the usual trend of increasing the targets. However, the employees at the production unit one objected such an increase and worked towards meeting their regular targets. Soon the other two production units also opposed the increased targets, and the human resource manager threatened to outlay everyone who will not work towards meeting the target. The employees pointed out the forty hours a week requirement stipulated in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in their defense. The act demands that all employees are to work for forty hours within a week. Any extra working hours should be paid in terms of overtime payment (Basen & Cole, 2019). In its defense, the management mentioned that the targets set for employees during off off-peak seasons are always quite low, which the organization compensates during the peak seasons.

The Grievance Process Surrounding Personnel Management Issues within The Organization

Every employee within the organization who has an issue that they feel should be addressed is expected to notify the immediate supervisor. The organization has a supervisor in each of the three production units. The three supervisors are to appoint one of them who will be responsible for communicating with the human resource manager. The bureaucracy within the organization only allows employees within the production units to only communicate their grievances to their respective production unit supervisor. The supervisor then communicates the issue to the overall supervisor, who then communicate the matter to the human resource manager. The human resource manager then deliberates the problem with the other management team members to come up with viable solutions. The team deliberates on how other departments within the organizations will be affected by the issue and how these departments can help in containing the problem. The response then follows the reverse channel from the human resource manager until it gets to the employees.

Fail Points within the Grievance Process

Though the organization has a well-laid framework for handling employee grievances, still there are some fail points within the framework. First, the organization excludes the employees themselves in finding viable solutions for the problem at hand. It is essential for the organization to include the employees within the panel that is responsible for charting viable solutions since the employees are the individuals within the organization who interacts with these problems and they know the scope of the problem in terms of nature and extent to which it can affect the overall performance within the organization (Schwartz, Adair, Bae, Rehder, Shanafelt, Profit & Sexton, 2019). For this reason, they are well placed in finding long-lasting solutions to these problems. Secondly, the organization’s bureaucratic framework can be an obstacle in handling the problems that employees may be facing as some of the issues may be generated by the supervisors and for this reason, these supervisors can fail to communicate these grievances to the human resource as required, and on the other hand, employees are not allowed to communicate directly with the management.

Recommendation

• To eliminate such stand-off with employees, the organization should adopt automated time-keeping in which will allow employees to know when they are expected to be at their working stations and when they are expected to leave their working stations (Mitrefinch, 2019). Additionally, automated time-keeping has time card changes, which allows employees to manage their own work time at their individual work stations.
• The management should also adopt Contractual employment during peak seasons to effectively and efficiently manage the pressure posed by increased demand. This will ensure it reduces the pressure it exerts on its employees during such times to meet these demands
• The organization should also ensure accurate and well-updated records of each employee’s profile. Such a record should contain the number of hours an employee has worked within the year and the output of each individual employee. This will help the organization to know if a given employee needs to work extra time to compensate for any target and time deficit they have.
• Human resource manager should also embrace employee work-life management. This will ensure the organization supports individual employees in their output within the organization and also their private and social life. This will also ensure that employees work-life does not affect their private and social life in any way (Schwartz et al. 2019).