As they say, "To win the marketplace, you must first win the workplace."
Healthy relationships between employees and their leaders and peers are one of the most significant succeeding factors for any business. It is especially true for such workforce management agencies, which often suffer from high turnover rates. They face this as one of the most alarming staffing challenges.
75% of such US staffing agencies think it is crucial to intentionally manage employee relations from the hiring stage onward. This helps create a great work environment and overcome the biggest staffing challenges. They believe in leveraging various human experience platforms and acting sensibly. It helps build trust and respect as the core values at the organizational level.
With this, team members feel supported, content, and energetic to do their best work. And this is what gives rise to incredible employee relations (E.R.). In this blog, we will discuss the concept of boosting employee relations from the hiring stage. But before we dive in, let's explore a few basics.
What are Employee Relations?
Employee Relation is nothing but the efforts of an organization to create and maintain a good relationship with employees. The best E.R. strategies include:
- Maintaining positive and constructive relations with the workforce
- Helping organizations encourage employees to stay loyal to their work.
What does an Ideal Employee Relations Team Do?
Employee Relations jobs are very crucial for the overall betterment of any company. The roles and responsibilities include bridging the gap between employees and managers which further solves the biggest staffing challenges. Not only that, but an ER consultant also focuses on the implementation of various company policies and different employee-centric aspects. They are functional benefits, correct work-life balance, feasible working hours, and so on.
What's more, a couple of the core responsibilities of H.R. employee relations include 1. Preventing differences of mindset between employees and management. 2. Walking through the organizational policies to candidates and ensuring they understand them precisely. Moreover, a strong Employee Relations Specialist job description also includes creating a feeling of psychological safety for employees. And at Rekrooting, our respective department for that does all of these together to ensure our consultants are always up for success!
How Can We Ensure Building Extraordinary Employee Relations While Hiring?
According to the latest employee relations metrics and employee relations investigations, the experts in the workforce management industry vouch for some practical tips to develop outstanding employee relations at the hiring stage while fighting back the biggest staffing challenges. We have discussed some of such proven practices that can help develop a happy workforce.
Read on
1. Explain the Inner Structure of the Organization
It is one of the most crucial employee relations manager jobs to incorporate the organizational values-driven ideologies into the hiring process. This helps to improve the hiring process and hire only those candidates who seem to be able to best emulate the company's culture instead of those with just impressive resumes!
Moreover, it should be a significant part of employee relations training to help the E.R. professionals better understand the internal organizational structure, map it well with the company principles, and make sure the candidates are aware of it from the hiring stage. It will help people to stay consistently empowered and they will do their best to align with the company’s expectations.
If the E.R. team works proactively like this, it is assured to improve employees' morale and performance, which, in turn, boosts customer satisfaction with the brand.
2. Empower Employees to Communicate Better with Managers
The Employee Relations department should ensure no communication gap between the team and the company's management. For example, 55% of the staffing agencies in the U.S. believe that because of the lack of flawless communication between candidates and their managers, they face payroll issues as there is mostly a gap when it comes to the timely approval of candidates' timesheets.
This kind of challenge can be solved if the employee relations professionals educate employees on how to establish streamlined communication with their managers at the workplace. It will help them get their hours approved effortlessly, eventually leading to smooth functioning.
3. Conduct Frequent Virtual Meetups with Employees
Because of the evolving hybrid and remote work environment, the Employee Relations department might not always get a chance to meet with the employees and discuss their workplace wellbeing physically. Hence, experts believe that employee relations professionals should make a concerted effort to meet virtually with the employees more frequently from the hiring stage.
This will help the employees feel welcomed and ingrained in the company culture. The Employee Relations department should organize more video calls with the employees to discuss if they are facing any challenges at work, arrange virtual happy hours, have virtual coffee meetups, and so on. This will help people with similar interests connect better; above all, employees get a personalized touch and thus feel motivated to work better.
With this strategy, we at Rekrooting have increased our headcount tremendously over the past years with negligible attrition rates!
4. Inform Your E.R. Principles to Candidates
We believe this tip can be transformative for you if you belong to the workforce management industry like us.
At Rekrooting, we have practically experienced this. Also, the experts in the industry believe that sharing the hiring agency's employee relations approach with the candidates at the onset helps maintain an excellent level of transparency.
This is very important for establishing an impeccable working mindset for the employees, as 75% of today's modern professionals consider a hiring agency's clarity at the E.R. level as one of the foremost driving factors in a job.
Suppose employees feel from the initial stage that they will experience an understanding and great behavioural pattern regarding workplace satisfaction in the future. In that case, it can help them feel stimulated to work better.
Also, if you explain your company's culture precisely to the candidates from the hiring and onboarding stage, they will feel more connected and engaged. In turn, they will not back out and it will solve one of the biggest staffing challenges. Demonstrating company values verbally has always proven appealing for the Employee Relations department to tie up better with candidates rather than printing them in a handbook.
5. Run Surveys Among New Hires
How about creating a comprehensive onboarding process? We do that and are super happy with the tremendous results!
We, at Rekrooting, ensure that our formal onboarding process doesn't only introduce a new hire to only the employee benefits but all other aspects of our agency. We keep conducting surveys to determine all types of questions that candidates may have when starting a new job and always try to target all those while hiring. This helps us to ensure the employees feel content from the very start.
You should keep surveying from time to time as industry experts say that people's needs and expectations constantly evolve while taking up a new job; it's not something constant.
The Bottom Line
In a nutshell, employee relations can make or break any workplace environment – and your organization's overall performance in the long run. With the above best practices, we shared in this blog, you can help build the strongest E.R. in your organization.
So, what are you waiting for? Start giving a new dimension to the nurturing of your people!
P.S.: We at Rekrooting have ultimately brought down our candidates' turnover rate to 0% by following these incredible E.R. strategies.
