HR Business Partner/Employee Relations

Employees and Leaders need to be able to trust their HR partner.  To do this, HR must

• Learn the business. You can’t be effective if you don’t know what the business does or is trying to accomplish. 
• Learn what supervisors and manager need.
• Be honest, even when the employee or manager doesn’t want to hear it.
• Take all complaints seriously.
• Investigate fairly and completely.

Labor Relations

A contentious workplace is a distracted workplace.  It is not productive and not safe.  Employees and leaders spend far too much time focusing on gripes and grievances.  Allowing it to continue is an excellent going-out-of-business strategy! 

I specialize in taking a dysfunctional union-management relationship and turning it into something productive.  But it starts with an acceptance that the issue is not “I win, you lose” or “I lose, you win”.  Too often this is the mindset of leaders, front line supervisors and union stewards.  When you change this mindset, and act and speak differently, relationships will improve.  

In several situations I was brought in after a union vote.  The union campaign created a conflict-oriented environment that was toxic.  Changing this dynamic wasn’t easy.  I worked with leaders to show that they had to change their approach to issues if they wanted the dynamic to improve and accomplish change without constant grievances and arbitrations.  Once they did that, they actually started having much less conflict when taking action (disciplining employees, work process changes, rule changes, etc) and could focus more time on the business.  

    ARBITRATIONS

Inevitably, some issues end up in arbitration.  In some cases, you can get creative and come up with workable settlements with the union.  When that doesn’t work, it’s important to spend quality time preparing for arbitration.   You will only get one chance to put an issue before an arbitrator. No matter how straightforward the issue may look, things can go sideways quickly if you are not fully prepared.    

I worked at several plants that had way too much arbitration activity when I arrived.  This unfortunate fact gave me a great deal of solid experience in preparing arbitration cases.  I learned the hard way that the arbitrator will generally rule in favor of the employee/union  unless the company presents a case with overwhelming evidence to support their action,   So I know what arbitrators expect:  I know what they want to see (evidence) and what they want to hear (from witnesses). 

    NEGOTIATIONS

I generally take a “2^nd chair” role during contract bargaining.  I am an active participant in all phases of the process. 

Lean/6 sigma/Continuous Improvement/Change Management

There are many different “flavors” of improvement philosophy.  Some target just the plant floor, while others attempt to engage everyone and every department.  Along with this, you have the overarching issue of managing the changes, and peoples reaction to these changes (which can be surprising).  

In my experience, there are a many ways to fail at this, and only a few ways to succeed.  Some important questions to ask are:

• Is there a targeted strategy or just a vague hope of success? What are the expectations? 
• How high does the commitment go? Has someone at the home office decided to make CI this year’s project?  
• Employees and unions can be concerned that “improvement” is a code word for “headcount reductions”. How are you going to address this?
• What is the implementation strategy?
• Will you do formal training of everyone or do just-in-time training as needed?

Union Avoidance

Many companies do an hour or two of training on Union Avoidance and consider themselves protected.  Training simply lays out broad pieces of information.  If you truly want to prevent a union campaign from starting, then you need to consider two issues – the quality of your front line leadership and the adherence to the company’s own policies and procedures. 

Front line leadership questions:

• Are they treating employees with dignity and respect?
• Are they giving preferential treatment to certain employees?
• When a complaint is made about a supervisor, is it actually being investigated?

Company policies and procedures:

• Are you following the company policies you created?
• Do different people get different answers to questions?
• How often do you make exceptions to a policy?
• Are supervisors allowed to make exceptions to policies and how often does that happen (do you know?)

These questions need to be answered with brutal honesty.  Sometimes that is tough to do.  An outsider might be better able to evaluate your workplace.