In any organization or business, people are the driving force and the skills they possess makes all the difference. Even in the digital age, where the structure of commerce has transformed from brick and mortar stores to online workplace, employees are instrumental in driving the business goals.
We can say that employees are internal customers and the most important organization assets. And, to safeguard an employee interests there are a myriad of Federal and State laws and regulations covering a wide range of practices. There are anti-discrimination laws, compensation laws, health and safety laws and labor relation laws which an employee can exercise in case of a grievance. But the question is, are you doing enough for your internal customers?
Are you doing it right?
Every organization has a department or cell for handling employee grievances and the details of the same may be recorded manually or logged in the system. Employee grievances need to be addressed at the time of their origin, so that they do not take a catastrophic turn. If the grievances are not paid heed at the right time, it may affect the organization in numerous ways like-
- Brand image : In the age of digital media, where everyone has a platform to present their views through plethora of channels like social media and job portals, company's brand image would be tarnished by a single negative remark by anyone of your employee
- Workplace environment : A dissatisfied employee will not contribute whole heartedly, as a result work may suffer. Also they would share their experience with other colleagues, resulting in their lack of trust in the organization. In 2014, more than 31,000 Americans were intentionally injured by their colleagues which resulted in 188,280 missed work days and estimated $25 million in lost wages. And, that's a lot.
- Financial impact : Well, if a grievance is not handled in accordance with the regulatory norms and defined SLAs, it can cost your company dearly. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (US), a US postal service employee suffered humiliation and was ridiculed for helping a co-worker to stand-up for her rights. After the investigation and trial court found that the employee was entitled to $229,228 in damages.
The numbers are alarming but grievances are common to workplaces and their source of origination may vary - work environment, wages, bonus, policy or regulation etc. Grievance management is managing and handling problems with an aim of solving them. Every organization has a set procedure of grievance management which may be routed through a manager or a grievance cell. But, the key factor here is, are those grievances addressed rightly? Do you know your employees well?
A case for grievance management
As per the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), there has been an increase in the number of registered cases of discrimination at workplace from 88778 in Fiscal year 2014 to 89385 in Fiscal year 2015. The reasons attributed to discrimination are race, sex, disability, age, national origin, region, color and unequal pay. Handling an employee grievance effectively, gets all the more critical with various regulatory bodies into play and SLAs to adhere to. It's time to brace yourself to handle such increasing number of cases.
In this age of digital transformation, we have altered the way of doing business by digitizing our processes. But can we have a standard workflow for handling employee grievance? Each employee grievance which you receive varies from other and requires a novel approach to deal with it. For instance, a sexual harassment grievance cannot be resolved in a similar way to a wage discrimination grievance. Each grievance needs to be treated as a different 'case' and needs a distinct workflow to handle it.
Case Management system provides your current systems with agility and flexibility that empowers you to design workflows - the way you want. With Case Management systems based on BPM and ECM framework, it makes your processes flexible, provides contextual information and insights to achieve an optimal outcome acceptable by all. It lets you create a unified case file of each case by capturing data from disparate sources, which is then made available for all caseworkers to work on. It also ensures that caseworkers gain 360 degree visibility of case by generating real-time reports and by offering extensive tracking capabilities.
So, now handle grievances efficiently and identify the root cause by gaining access to all the indispensable information pertaining to each case - regulations involved, background information of the employee, previous cases registered for the same grievance or the frequency of such cases.
Consider the scenario, where decision based on above information is not acceptable by the employee and he wants to make an appeal ? Is the process going to end in a deadlock? Well, Case Management systems are build to handle such exceptions. It provides agility to your core systems to handle such ad-hoc situations.
The way forward
With every organization bearing a moral and legal obligation, to safe-guard their employees and providing them with a better workplace, handling employee grievances efficiently and timely becomes imperative. To prevent such cases, enterprises need to enforce the code of ethics thorough-out the workplace, conduct trainings for employees/ HR departments, have forums where employees can share their experiences and have set procedures and policies to handle grievances.
In case of a grievance, a proactive approach is preferable. It is important that grievant should have confidence in their organization, that he is being heard before he resorts to other means like unions or courts. Once a grievance is received, an acknowledgement should be sent to the grievant and their case created which later on goes to assessment and investigation stages.
Once the case reaches investigation stage, while investigating you might progress on case but with some information change, you might want to retreat, rethink and then progress. In such instances, leveraging solutions like Case Management allows you to - digitize processes, handle such ad-hoc exceptions and offer right balance between human intervention and automation in your decision making. It enables you to transform your resources into responsive 'knowledge workers' by providing contextual information and authority. So, you can empower your systems, processes and people to have a holistic view of each case, empathize with your employees and minimize exposure to settlements and litigations.
Sources:
- http://www.lifecarealliance.org/component/k2/item/209-your-most-important-corporate-asset.html
- https://www1.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/2-4-15.cfm
- https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=NEWS_RELEASES&p_id=27471
- 2016 Workplace trends-Sodexo
