Employee relations
The ongoing work between people who still have to work together on Monday.
The problem is rarely the policy
Employee relations is the day-to-day work between an organization and its people: complaints, conflicts, performance concerns, and the record of all of it. Performance management is the system that should be catching those things early.
- Conflicts that end rather than pause
- Concerns raised in month one, not month eleven
- Documentation built as you go, not reconstructed
You are probably looking at this because
Not every organization needs this work, and the ones that do usually recognize themselves in one of these before they can name what is wrong.
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The same conflict keeps coming back
It was addressed, or people say it was. Nothing changed, and now both sides have a version of events and neither is willing to let it go.
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A complaint has come in and nobody has done this before
There is a right way to handle the first week of a complaint, and getting it wrong is hard to undo. Most organizations this size find out mid-complaint that they do not have a process.
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Reviews happen once a year and change nothing
Everyone gets a three. Nobody is surprised by anything. The one person who needed to hear something months ago still has not heard it.
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A manager is documenting after the fact
The performance problem is a year old and the file starts last week. Whatever happens next is now harder than it needed to be.
What our employee relations work covers
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Conflict resolution
We sit with both sides, separate what happened from what it meant, and get to something both people can work under. Not friendship. A working relationship.
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Performance management
A cycle managers will actually run, with expectations written clearly enough that nobody is surprised at review time.
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Coaching managers
Most performance problems are two problems: the employee’s, and the manager’s discomfort in naming it. We work on the second one.
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Documentation support
What to write, when to write it, and what makes a record hold up later. Built as you go rather than reconstructed afterward.
What working on employee relations looks like
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01
You tell us what happened
In your own words, in whatever order it comes out. We do not need it organized first.
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02
We tell you what we would do
Including whether this is a conversation, a documented process, an investigation, or something that should go to employment counsel. We name the last one plainly when it applies.
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03
We do the work with you
Facilitating the conversation, building the review process, coaching the manager through it, or sitting in the room, depending on what it actually needs.
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04
We help you close it properly
Documentation, follow-up expectations, and a check back in a few weeks, because most of these fail in the follow-through rather than in the meeting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Got a question about our employee relations approach? Here’s a list of common questions we get asked.
Can you conduct a workplace investigation?
We help you plan and run a fair internal process, prepare the person conducting it, and review the documentation. Some complaints call for an outside investigator or employment counsel instead, and we will tell you when we think you are in that territory.
Are you attorneys?
No. We are HR practitioners. We work alongside your employment counsel and will tell you plainly when a question belongs with them rather than with us.
Do you work with employees, or only employers?
Usually the employer. We also coach individuals preparing for a difficult conversation of their own, but never on both sides of the same matter.
Our review process exists but nobody uses it. Can that be fixed?
Usually, and usually by making it smaller. Most abandoned review systems failed because they asked managers for an hour of writing per person once a year.
How quickly can you get involved?
If something is happening this week, say so when you write. We will tell you honestly whether we can be useful on that timeline.
What if the problem turns out to be the manager?
That happens often. We will tell you, and then help you decide what to do about it.
Not seeing an answer to your question? Our expanded FAQs page covers how we work more broadly, or start a conversation and we would be happy to answer it directly.
Our other services
Most situations touch more than one of these, and you do not have to work out which before you write.
Whatever it is, it is probably not the first time we have seen it.
Tell us what is going on and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.