Importance Of Employee Relations In HRM Decision Making At Wesfarmers.

Your CEO has asked you to write an in-house newsletter, analysing internal and external factors that affect Human Resource Management decision-making, including employment legislation.

Analyse the importance of employee relations in organisation of your choice with respect to influencing HRM decision-making

Analyse the followings: Employee relations, maintaining good employee relations, Strategies for building, and improving employee relations and engagement

Identify the key elements of employment legislation and the impact it has upon HRM decision-making

Internal and External Factors Affecting HRM Decision-Making at Wesfarmers

Human resource management is the management of human resources which is aimed at maximizing the employee performance in an organization.  Wesfarmers is an Australian based company whose human resource management has contributed to its success in the industry. Currently, Wesfarmers is listed as one of the largest company in Australia. Human resource management dramatically benefits Wesfarmers (Hendry, 2012, p. 33). The company employs one of the best HR policies that motivate its employees. The human resource management not only helps individual employees but also to the whole organization.

The internal factors that affect HRM decision making at the company include; changes in technology, employees skills and competence, Wesfarmers HR culture, the company’s structure, and the nature of management policies applied by the management in the HR department.

The external factors that impact decision making for Wesfarmers HR department include changes in economic conditions, technological changes, increased competition from Woolworths and other firms, socio-cultural factors, and legal factors as legislated by the government.

Employees relations at Wesfarmers helps in establishing excellent employees relations hence preventing conflicts from arising. Also, strong employee relations enables managers value employees ideas, views, and opinions regarding different operations of the company, and this helps in proper decision making in areas of marketing, finance, operations, and sales. Valuing employee ideas motivates the personnel to perform optimally and improve the productivity of Wesfarmers since their morale is high. When conflicts arise between employees, the management has established proper conflict resolution mechanisms that help resolve issues in harmony. Further, Wesfarmers has the best employees’ motivation and reward mechanisms such as bonuses, birthday gifts, promotions, salary increment, and overtime payment for both permanent and casual workers.

The importance of human resource management at Wesfarmers is that it creates trust which binds the workers together. The trust allows every individual in the organization to be open and accept every person’s weakness and also acknowledge the strength’s with no prejudice. HRM is also important at Wesfarmers as it reduces fights in an organization as each person is in good relation with another (Griffin and Moorhead, 2011, p. 88). HRM reduces complains and ensures that more work is done. It also creates a happy and healthy environment for the employees which motivate them to do their best and hence yields profits to the organization. Employees who trust each other are motivated to improve their productivity, and this benefits the company too regarding profit making initiatives.

Wesfarmers establishes and maintains good employee relationships in the working place as it’s the best key to success. The organization creates a very clear and concise focus on its mission statement which it distributes to each. This statement must summarize well the purpose of the business. Also, the company should encourage the team work by use of informal and the formal team building activities (Carver and Scheier, 2012, p. 90). The organization should reward the individuals who have great work in an organization. The organization should ensure each group communicates its expectations hence high goals are set.

In human resource management, there are some strategies which the company may use to improve the employee relations in the company. These include the involvement of the team members as according to responsibilities to interests. Also, the organization should encourage each to share the work assigned to them with each other to improve other people’s level of understanding (Werner and DeSimone, 2011, p. 20). Also, there should be modes of communication which are written and hence they must be promoted in between the employees for high transparency.  Also, the meeting in the morning may improve the relations between the employees. The company should organize parties to the employees such as birthday, Christmas, happy New Year among many others to improve the relations between the employees.

Importance of Employees Relations at Wesfarmers

The ways to improve the employee’s relations in human resource management include the improvement in communication. This is enhancement by having regular meetings to communicate the important matters to the employees instead of memo or the email use. Also, the organization should think of career improvement to the employees (Miller and Lee, 2001, p. 170). This is by improving staff skills by managers working closely with the workers hence answering any question that arises. The organization should also share their vision with the staff to make them feel better about the company and also it makes the work rewarding and interesting.  Also should challenge the employees in one way or the other. This can be enhanced by the use of incentive plans such as the profit sharing to entice the employees to improve their productivity.

Equality Act 2010 legislation emphasis age discrimination, race relations and also the disability discrimination. This enhanced the Wesfarmers to practice the Equality Act 2010. This Act helps in protection of the workers against the direct or indirect discrimination of workers. This helps in changing the definition of reassignment of gender by taking away the requirement for medical supervision. The Act is also clearer in protection of those breastfeeding mothers.

This working time directive Act talks about the working time regulations. The Wesfarmers provides an average of 100 hours in a week of every worker. Even though the workers may consider working for longer hours by opting out they are paid for annual leave of 5.6 weeks in one year.

The Employment ACT 2008 emphasizes on the following: the power to investigate any criminal offence in the company, voluntary workers where there are some expenses incurred so as to make every worker to perform his or her work accordingly and as it is required by the owner. Also the Employment Act talks about all the offences that may occur like the mode of the penalties and penalties. Wesfarmers does according to this Employment Act so as to ensure that there is smooth running of its HR activities.

The Wesfarmers practiced Equal pay as it is described in the Equal Act 1970. This means that every individual when the work done is the same, the work done is rated in equivalent or the work done is of equal value the pay should be the same whether is women or the men who have done it (Guest, 2011, p. 10).  

There are some legal issues in the field of human resource. They include equality where the employees in an organization should be treated equally. The employees should be paid for the work done and without discriminating any individual in the work place. Every individual should also be shared equally (Beardwell and Thompson, 2014, p. 8). The other legal issue is data protection. The information regarding the company or the organization should be taken care of so that the time the data is needed is accessed easily. The employer should enhance health and safety to the employees to strengthen high productivity in the company.   

Conclusion

Human resource management is the most critical department for every organization. Employees form the most important asset of a firm. Decision making in the human resource management of a company is affected both internally and externally. The internal factors that influence HRM decision making include technology, company culture, organizational structure, and internal work ethics/ policies. Externally, HRM decision making is affected by competitor forces, market culture, technology, social-cultural, and economic factors. Curbing these factors requires an organization to establish legislative policies that govern both its internal and external HRM operations. Further, enhancing health and safety for employees, the proper running of employment contracts, HR data protection, and elimination of employee discrimination contributes to HRM decision making a success.

References

Beardwell, J., & Thompson, A. 2014. Human resource management: a contemporary approach. Pearson Education.

Carver, C.S., and Scheier, M.F., 2012. Attention and self-regulation: A control-theory approach to human behavior. Springer Science & Business Media.

Grade, G.B., Strategic Management, 2017: Wesfarmers. Retrieved from: https://myassignmenthelp.com/free-samples/strategic-management-wesfarmers

Griffin, R.W. and Moorhead, G., 2011. Organizational Behavior. Cengage Learning.

Guest, D.E., 2011. Human resource management and performance: still searching for some answers. Human resource management journal, 21(1), pp.3-13.

Hendry, C., 2012. Human resource management. Routledge.

Miller, D. and Lee, J., 2001. The people make the process: commitment to employees, decision making, and performance. Journal of management, 27(2), pp.163-189.

Werner, J.M., and DeSimone, R.L., 2011. Human resource development. Cengage Learning.