How to improve their workplace relationships

124 views 10:36 am 0 Comments June 28, 2023

You are an employment relations consultant. You work in a small (six person) consulting firm, providing advice mostly to managers, about how to improve their workplace relationships and enhance work productivity and performance. Your firm has just been hired by Eastern Leagues Club to advise the CEO on the club’s worsening staffing problems, and you’ve been assigned to the job.

Eastern Leagues Club is a licensed sporting club that is doing well. Revenue is growing. Membership is growing and a surplus is being generated each year to build reserves and distribute to the associated rugby league club and local community groups. This is a very positive commercial story compared to many other licensed clubs in New South Wales.

Despite these strengths, the CEO has become aware of some worrying trends among the club’s staff. Like most clubs (Buultjens 2001), Easter Leagues Club employs a mix of full-time, part-time and casual employees. The most significant concern relates to data indicating that labour turnover has increased in the past 12 months. Finding good staff has always been a bit of a problem, but 41 employees out of a total 120 – over 30 percent – left in the last year. Apparently, though, there are significant differences between the main departments: turnover is low in administration, modest in the food/kitchen area but high (over 45%) among bar staff.

Furthermore, the number of employees who are union members seems to have grown and both the delegates and union officials have been knocking at the CEO’s door more frequently and more vigorously over recent months.

You know that:

…the hospitality industry has been characterised in terms of high turnover rates, a part-time and casual workforce, an absence of an internal labour market – i.e. low job security, promotional opportunity and career development, plus low wages and low skills levels.

You are also aware that:

…the hospitality industry has created and reinforced a turnover culture. Employees generally enter with the belief that there is limited career development and promotional opportunity…This dramatically increases costs and reduces the quality of service delivered (Iverson and Deery 1997, pp80-1).

The modern award covering clubs might also give you insights in the working conditions and employment relations arrangements at the club. (The Registered and Licensed Clubs Award is available at https: www.fwc.gov.au/documents/documents/modern_awards/award/ma000058/default.htm.)

Further the importance of employee representation in the workplace is of growing importance to the manager who sees this aspect of employee voice providing an important strategic means for HR to contribute to the good corporate citizenship being developed within this organization. In addition, the growing number of new employees from an indigenous background mean there may be a potential for bias or discrimination between employees and between employees and management in some cases.

Some elements of the community have been so disadvantaged in the past that special measures may need to be developed to address any past disadvantage and/or work and life issues in a regional community. The hospitality sector remains one of the most gender diverse sectors in the economy, but despite recent efforts to promote and encourage women’s participation and representation in management there are few women in management roles at Eastern Leagues Club. Women face structural and cultural challenges and the lack of women in leadership positions in the sector compounds the difficulty in recruiting and retaining female leaders. Only 15% of its management team is female. The organization admits that it has never undertaken or considered any gender pay gap analysis.

The CEO would like advice on how to best address these staffing issues.

 

EXAMINATION QUESTIONS

 

SECTION 1: SHORT ANSWER SELECTION QUESTIONS: Please Answer four (4) of the six (6) Questions with at least 300 words for each question and not more than 330 words, and appropriate references (at least 3 for each question), for eight (8) marks per question for a total of 32 marks for this section. A=2 marks; B=3marks and C=3marks.

SECTION 2: COMPULSORY ESSAY QUESTION FOLLOWS THIS SHORT ANSWER SECTION. DON’T FORGOT TO DO THAT ESSAY TOO.

 

QUESTION 1. Indigenous cultures often experience the concepts of time differently. As Eastern Leagues Club attempts to engage more indigenous employees across a range of levels and in a range of roles, how might issues of time, timing and tempo be deliberated? You might like to consider the topic of Murri Time.

A. Explain the importance of time consciousness at Eastern Leagues Club.

B. Distinguish between the different employee coping strategies towards aspects of working time that different employee groups might experience at Eastern Leagues Club

C. Evaluate the current issues in the duration of working time, e.g., long hours, presenteeism.

 

QUESTION 2. Hidden work can have potentially big impacts on individuals from groups who have been or, are currently disadvantaged in the workplace due to increased work and or pressure and who may be different from other groups of workers.

A. Explain Hidden work and identify the types of hidden work that Eastern Leagues Club may need to address?

B. Identify the potential disadvantages for Eastern Leagues Club in not addressing hidden work?

C. Evaluate strategies and processes that Eastern Leagues Club can implement to acknowledge and address hidden work.

 

QUESTION 3. Workplace flexibility and parental leave are major features of Australian workplaces and increasingly other jurisdictions worldwide. In Australia the Fair Work Act 2009 provides employees in the national workplace relations system with a legal right to request flexible working arrangements. Can this concept assist Eastern Leagues Club increase the numbers of women overall and in management?

A. Define and explain workplace flexibility and parental leave, and the legal right to request?

B. Eastern Leagues Club has not had a policy on Work and Family and now your HR Department is currently investigating policy development and implementation. Identify the potential benefits to Eastern Leagues Club on having such a policy?

C. Consider what might be the resistance from current managers for this policy, offering suggestions for overcoming any resistance?

 

QUESTION 4. Managing Diversity is all about managing differences in employees. There are several legislated and non-legislated means for managing difference to ensure equal opportunities and to decrease discrimination. Eastern Leagues Club has not in the past encouraged special measures in addressing equity. How can this value add to the Club’s suite of HR policies.

A. Define Management Diversity and Equal Employment Opportunity and discuss their benefits and limitations for Eastern Leagues Club?

B. Explain the value of the use of ‘special measures’ to address previous unfair disadvantage at Eastern Leagues Club?

C. Critically address how Managing Diversity without the use of special measures can support the organisation’s aim for equity for different employee groups?

 

QUESTION 5. Employees at Eastern Leagues Club may be using a range of survival strategies to overcome the control measures the Club engages to extract effort from their labours.

A. Define and explain alienation and the means of addressing it at Eastern Leagues Club

B. Assess whether survival strategies identified at the Club should be interpreted as forms of consent or resistance.

C. Consider strategies to encourage management and employees to work together on surviving new control measures in the workplace to address work during COVID restrictions.

 

QUESTION 6. Does Eastern Leagues Club need to understand how they force emotions on their staff, use those emotions and not acknowledge them? Perhaps they even use these emotions in a discriminating way where women are expected to display emotions and men are not. Keeping a job may depend on displaying the appropriate emotions but promotion might be based on not displaying any emotion. How do you think emotion work occurs at Eastern Leagues Club and how does it affect people from minority groups such as Indigenous workers or women?

A. Define and examine what is meant by emotional labour at Eastern Leagues Club.

B. Explain how different employee roles may learn and experience emotional labour at Eastern Leagues Club.

C. Identify and evaluate how Eastern Leagues Club managers may be managing this aspect of employee behaviour and how it may be better acknowledged and addressed equitably.

 

SECTION TWO: COMPULSORY ESSAY: Please answer this section with at least 1500 and not more than 1650 words and appropriate references (at least 8-10) for 28 marks addressing all the questions in your essay. A=16marks; B=12marks

 

Building high performance outcomes for Eastern Leagues Club and its employees, its community, as well as shareholders, is an important element within the development of an effective employment relationship. Talks between the board and several unions and some community groups indicates the pluralist perspective of the board and the identified groups, as well as substantial good will of all parties. How would you advise Eastern Leagues Club? The following questions may help you to build your argument for your employment relations approach:

A. Explain your approach for building a High Road Strategy to developing a good jobs strategy that reflects the pluralist values at Eastern Leagues club? Who do you identify as the major groups to participate in the negotiations? How will you involve them?

B. What can HR do to achieve a High Road Strategy to build good employment practices and policies? What are the major issues you identify as a consultant to the HR Director, to be discussed as part of the employment relations negotiations? How might you set up and undertake these negotiations? How will you ensure employee voices are heard? What are the major issues that Eastern Leagues Club may have to address first?

DO NOT SPECIFICALLY ANSWER EACH OF THESE QUESTIONS AS YOU WOULD IF THEY WERE SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS, BUT USE THESE QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU SET UP YOUR ARGUMENT TO ADDRESS THE QUESTION ABOUT HOW YOU WOULD ADVISE EASTERN LEAGUES CLUB TO BUILD HIGH PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES THROUGH AN EFFECTIVE EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP THAT INVOLVES A HIGH ROAD STRATEGY OR A GOOD JOBS STRATEGY.

THE END

 

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