Being discreet with employee complaints (part one)
Businesses that will lead their peers in the industry and post enviable returns on investments will not necessarily be the ones that have succeeded in bringing on board all the so-called highflyers and the miracle-working individuals but those that set up a friendly, firm and trustworthy procedure for airing out the tensions that brew from time to time from within and outside.
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Which goes to the point that corporations that neglect the appropriate resourcing of their HR offices and the development of the staff who are in charge of employee welfare may start right but will soon be left behind in the corporate race to lead the market.
In this quest to find answers to one of every corporation’s headache, a well-resourced, professionally smart and ethically correct human resource office is key. Even though the most professional and efficient human resource director cannot evolve into a labour lawyer by merely being an experienced HR practitioner, the latter is often the one that takes the heat off the shoulders of the corporate lawyer.
Resources
In an era of expanded human rights and elaborate workplace ethics, HR’s roles in being the shock absorbers in matters which when neglected, may degenerate and possibly create bad image for the corporation have become pertinent.
A countless number of model cases exist in a number of standard textbooks which exemplify the fact that the HR, when well-equipped and adequately resourced, will assist the business in identifying fires and quenching them even before they become infernos that engulf the entire corporations.
But when all has been said and done, in spite of the resources committed to the human resources department, unless and until the leader of this department lives by a certain set of principles, one of which has been discussed in the rest of this article and the others delayed until next week, only limited progress will be made in this regard.
The HRpractitioner must demonstrate maturity in dealing with complaints that come to her desk. Maturity here is employed to imply understanding of the context of the complaint and the perspective of the employee complainant.
Even though the HRpractitioner may have her own value systems and may, operating in normal circumstances outside of the rules running corporations, think of an aggrieved employee’s complaint as trivial and inconsequential, she has to be able to go past her own biases in order to appreciate the worries of the employee.
People managing skills
In an era as technologically advanced as ours and confronted with a world in which people know and appreciate the extended limits of their freedoms and liberty, if a young lady employee approaches the HR to lodge a complaint, no matter how much at war the HR practitioner may be with the complainant, she has to quickly set in motion an acceptable mechanism for addressing the grievance.
When a female employee reports of a certain behaviour from her male supervisor which she believes crosses the line, it is possible for a biased, inexperienced HR practitioner to trivialise this matter and shelve it among the many issues that will get her attention only when she has cleared all issues in her tray.
It is sometimes typical in a lot of the small, up-and-coming businesses that are in the process of formalising their status to hear comments by the resident HR practitioner or the CEO about the dress code of the victim and how these have precipitated the action of the perpetrator.
A conservative, staunch Christian HR practitioner with the notoriety of starting work with a demon-casting little prayer and devotion and whose views about the contemporary young women and their so-called newfound freedom is almost cynical may be twice as likely to disregard the genuine complaints of this young woman. In extreme situations, this awkward HRpractitioner may try to justify the actions of the supervisor by blaming the indulgencies of the victim, as if such actions by the victim justify the unacceptable behavior.