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Employee Relations in 21st Century

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INTRODUCTION
Employee Relations can be explained asset of activities concerned with maintaining employer-employee relationships that contribute to satisfactory productivity, motivation, and morale. Essentially, Employee Relations is concerned with preventing and resolving problems involving individuals which arise due to work related or non work related issues. As we look back towards the history it is obvious that various sorts of industrial related conflicts take place within or outside the work places due to various reasons. The conflicts between the management and the ordinary employees can be identified as one common situation which takes place regularly.

In the globalized world today with the …show more content…

Personnel management has evolved to human resource management to human capital management as organisations attempt to outperform competitors in a global economy. Successful organisations therefore seek to develop constructive relationships with employees that translate into strategies that draw on the full potential of their people through performance improvement and organisational change. Economic pressures dictate that the rate of change will be more frequent as technology improves and the demand for customised services shifts. Employee relations therefore need to focus on knowledge management and people at an individual level as a competitive advantage. (Bryson, 2001)
This contrasts with the pluralistic approach, recommended by the Donovan Report in 1968, that assumes that conflicts between management and staff are inescapable and that structured mechanisms must be designed to resolve differences in an orderly way. Pluralism emphasised collective bargaining by adversarial unions in the workplace where stability is sought through compromise. However, the human resource management efforts during the 1980’s and 1990’s to improve team working methods together with changes in union demographics from blue collar to largely white collar and public sector membership led to a more unitarist approach. (Guest and Hoque,

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