Research Briefs – February 2019

In This Issue…

1. Building Trust and Increasing Employee Engagement in the Workplace
2. Performance Management – Many Possibilities…and Implications
3. Flashback Feature:
   The Grievance Procedure: The Heart of the Collective Agreement

Building Trust and Increasing Employee Engagement in the Workplace
How HR Business Partners and Managers Can Work Together for Success
Sandi Cardillo, Queen’s IRC Facilitator, 2018

Ben was concerned. Emma, a manager new to his group, had just received her employee engagement scores. They were not good. Emma had been a rock star in her previous individual contributor role. She was seen as talent for the future in the organization. As her HR Business Partner, Ben had watched her struggle as a first-time manager. Now, it appeared that her employee team was willing to put those struggles on paper in the form of not so good engagement scores. This had always been a good team. But their responses were a strong signal to Ben that something was not right.

“Emma, let’s talk about what these employee engagement scores might mean,” Ben said.

“I know, Ben,” she replied. “I am trying so hard to get this managing thing right. I am not happy with the responses and how the group sees me right now. This is such a good team. The one that really bothers me is the feedback from the ‘do you trust your manager?’ question. I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty trust worthy person, so this one really bothers me. I can’t seem to find a way to earn my team’s confidence and trust.”

“Emma,” he replied, “I’ve been doing a lot of studying on how managers build trust on their teams since we started this whole employee engagement initiative. We are trying to understand how what we do in HR helps build trust in the organization. Would you consider studying with me? I really want to help you. We can learn together”. “Ben, that would be great,” Emma replied. “Let’s do it!”

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Performance Management – Many Possibilities…and Implications
Ian Cullwick, Queen's IRC Facilitator, 2017

Performance Management (PM) has become a core organizational strategy and management priority for many organizations. From Boards of Directors to front-line managers, PM can effectively be used to drive accountability, quality, productivity, competence, and rewards and recognition. Going beyond simply a tool to drive “appraisals” and incentive rewards, PM can be complex and not without risk but it can also drive a sophisticated quality and performance-based culture.

Performance management has also become both a strategic imperative and a challenge for many organizations in this data analytics day and age. As a core enabler of performance optimization and accountability, many executive and HR leaders view PM as a core management practice and a key ingredient to becoming a higher performance organization. As a result of various regulatory, methodological and technological developments over the past five years, however, PM has become a misunderstood topic that is confusing for many organizations, especially for those that do not recognize the interdependencies that cut across other management and human resources practices at the enterprise-wide, team and individual levels of performance.

Best practice performance management is clearly not a “one size fits all” endeavor. Rather, it needs to fundamentally reflect the unique contextual needs of one’s strategic direction, business model, workforce profile and leadership preferences. Best practice PM also needs to be thoughtfully configured, and in many cases, phased in and allowed to mature, otherwise, the policies and programs that it supports will collapse and be rendered ineffective – a management risk that could be quite damaging, ultimately constraining front-line performance and of key importance, customer satisfaction.

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Flashback Feature:
The Grievance Procedure: The Heart of the Collective Agreement
Sean C. Doyle, 1999

The grievance procedure is more than just a means of managing conflict; an understanding and effective use of the procedure may, according to some experts, improve the labour-management relationship. It is often lauded as one of the most significant innovations in industrial relations, serving several roles and functions and having benefits that outweigh its weaknesses.

The grievance procedure has four primary roles: a compliance role; a judicial and adjudicative role; an administrative role; and a ‘fractional bargaining’ role.

It also assumes many secondary roles including: a mechanism for the extension of the relationship between the parties; a union tactic to pressure management for strategic purposes; a diagnostic device to uncover underlying problems in the workplace; a mechanism for individual employees or union officials to challenge management over a range of working conditions; a forum for the communication of information.

In addition to these practical roles, there are some broad, more theoretical functions served by the procedure: a constitutional or recognition function; a legislative or rule-making function; an executive or administrative function; a due process or judicial function; a power distribution function; a communications function; and a ‘voice’ function.

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