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The definition of employee relations refers to an organization's efforts to build and sustain a positive relationship with its employees. By maintaining positive and constructive relationships with employees, organizations hope to keep them faithful and more involved in their work. Typical responsibilities of an employee relations officer include acting as a liaison or intermediary between employees and managers, and either creating or advising on the creation of policies around employee issues like fair compensation, useful benefits, proper work-life balance, reasonable working hours, and others. When it comes to employee relations, an HR department has two primary functions. First, HR assists in the prevention and resolution of issues or conflicts between employees and management. Second, they contribute to the creation and implementation of equitable and coherent policies for all employees.

In other words, Employee Relations is the definition of the relationship between employers and employees. ER focuses both on individual and collective relationships in the workplace with an increasing emphasis on the relationship between managers and their team members.

The term employee relations is also used to highlight the efforts that a company, or HR, is making to manage this relationship. These efforts are usually formalized in an employee relations policy or program.

Such as other companies, employee relations are equally as important as recruitment and onboarding. For without employee relations, the company will not strive. Employee relations and engagement are the like the glue that holds the organization altogether.

Within the company, there is one person assigned to for employee relations and one for employee engagement. They work hand in hand in solving problems within employees and provide sensible solutions to reoccurring problems. They also promote wellness and camaraderie amongst other stuff by proposing community involvement projects and whatnot.

Employee relations is an umbrella within the human resources department in which their main role is to promote and apply disciplinary actions.

What do they do specifically?

The company has a license of the ticketing tool named Freshdesk where its main component are tickets, tickets in which every department of the company has lodged in order for them to ask for help or solutions to the problems within their department or within the company.

Freshdesk is a ticketing tool used to lodge problems and find sensible solutions either from other employees or ready-made articles for their perusal. The Freshdesk license can only be granted to the people involved in the Human Resources department. The company uses Freshdesk for easier solving of problems faced within the company and the answering of queries from people to people.

The employee relations officer in-charge is the one responsible for answering all the queries in Freshdesk.

What he/she does, since they have a deadline or a timeframe on when to answer questions or tickets or they are given 2 hours before the ticket is considered due, he/she reads the tickets thoroughly and then if it is out of her job range, he/she forwards the ticket to the HR person who has the right answers to the ticket query.

There is no exact quota for the tickets to be answered in Freshdesk, only the response time and due tickets, how many tickets are lodged daily, closed tickets, pending tickets, and the employee relations officer in-charge must respond as soon as they receive the ticket and find the solutions to said tickets.

The HR department, not only the employee relations officer, checks Freshdesk everyday even after work hours.

They have daily tasks to cater to in Strategy X which is to accommodate new tickets lodged within the day, as well as overdue and pending tickets on Freshdesk. Their main goal is really to just respond to tickets being lodged in Freshdesk as a compliance to their job responsibilities and roles as an employee relations HR in-charge.

Aside from the daily tasks they have to tend to, they also have weekly tasks like tracking the first response time and the ticket resolution time on Mondays.

The HR department conducts departmental meetings every day, first thing in the morning to check up on what’s going on and what there needs to be done.

Since the employee relations part of human resources focuses on discipline and disciplinary actions, the process is as follows:

• To start disciplinary procedures, the HR department receives reports from team leaders/department heads in Freshdesk or if they cannot lodge a ticket, the department heads or team leaders provide insight to the HR department and from there the HR starts the disciplinary action procedure. This is only applicable to problems which cannot be solved directly by ready-made articles or sensible solutions in Freshdesk.
• If the tickets are lodged through Freshdesk, TLs or department heads are asked to fill out incident report form ready-made by the HR department in MS Forms.
• If they cannot access the incident report form, the employee relations officer will be the one to encode details with the guarantee that Freshdesk ticket is filled out completely, without missing any information about the whole incident.
• The employee relations HR person checks the responses made by the department heads and team leaders and then issues a notice to explain or an NTE to the employee in question, while thinking and deciding on possible actions to take, referring to the code of conduct made by the company in relation to rules and regulations. For the NTE, the employee relations officer in-charge refers to which category of offense it lands on for the possible decisions to be made.
• The employee in question is given a grace period for 5 days to prove and explain his/her side of the story as to why the incident happened. If they cannot provide an explanation, be it verbal or written, within 5 days, HR will issue an NDD or notice of disciplinary decision for the employee being sanctioned. The notice of disciplinary decision is used as basis to what consequence the employee in question should receive.
• Lighter cases are different from heavier cases for heavier cases require administrative hearing. Lighter cases meaning it does not require intense disciplinary action, just verbal or written warnings. While heavier cases, as what was previously being mentioned, involves administrative hearings for the incident that has taken place. Usually these kinds of incidents are mostly continuous disobedience to the code of conduct or the repetition of offenses and not taken in consideration the warnings they have been given.
• The employee being questioned must provide explanation letter about his/her actions and the employee relations HR in-charge must coordinate with the department heads for the decision of the status of the employee in question in the company.
• This is however a case to case basis. The decision will be based on the code of conduct and the extremity of the offense. Some cases are not that high of intensity since the offense can be warded off with warnings. However, other cases require hearings and more extreme repercussions.
• The decision is up to the department heads for the issuance of disciplinary action which is to be acknowledged by the employee.
• Administrative hearings happen when the cases are subject for dismissal or the likes. Dismissal happens when the offense cannot be solved with warnings and if the offense has grounds for dismissal.
• Employees however have the right to have any legal representative present during the administrative hearing. The people present in the administrative hearing are the HR, the employee being questioned and his/her legal representative, immediate superior, witness.
• The CEO is in charge of the releasing of final decision. The CEO coordinates with the HR department and the immediate head of the employee in question for the ultimate decision.

Another thing the employee relations officer does is to review policies if they are updated in relation to the code of conduct and the times today and if there is a need to revise or change policies altogether, they are the ones to do it as well.

Refer to the list of policies through this link: https://hoithr.freshdesk.com/a/solutions/articles/63000264654