Challenge
The management of labour & employee relations has had its challenges across this client organisation. Many locations mean many managers conducting many procedures with their many staff members on a regular basis. A centralised labour & employee relations department although providing some input when requested, found it difficult to ensure managers maintain: – consistency of actions taken, fair decision making, adequate documentation and correct process actions initiated, all often leading to wasted time and a high risk of outcomes being overturned.
Logistically managing these procedures via email correspondence has been very difficult. Even though labour & employee relations practitioners have assisted to some degree, there is still no adequate audit trail and information is being stored locally in silos making retrieval almost impossible.
The Client has attempted to put in place various methods to ensure procedural and substantive compliance, but processes are for the most part manual and disjointed. There is no effective way for decisions to be checked or approved and no way of enforcing the applicable procedures are followed given the circumstance.
Reporting is also a major challenge. Firstly, information must be retrieved from many different sources and locations, and secondly the information must be manually sorted, collated and verified for completeness. This means reporting is a major task and the output cannot be easily verified. Reporting insights into trends and exceptions as and when required is generally not possible.
Like other disciplines within the business the company requires a single labour & employee relations platform for effective management and control.
Solution
The combination of digitization and process workflow, case management, knowledge base, decision support, compliance management, content management and analytical technologies enabled the platform to streamline the Client’s labour & employee relations processes, whilst centralising all the data and making it accessible. It alleviated all the logistical and control issues.
The system incorporated the group’s international, regional and divisional structures, its multiple codes of conduct and policies and differing documentation requirements.
The system settings were configured to follow the diverse business and process rules, thereby involving the relevant users, delivering the relevant contextual policy content and employee information when required and prompting the users to follow the correct procedures and processes.
The cases are routed through a pre-defined step by step process, ensuring all relevant tasks are performed on-time.
The platform stores the client’s case data including all the relevant documentation, forms and evidence in an electronic accessible case file. Each case is uniquely referenced and classified in applicable statuses depending on its process stage. The, client has an electronic labour & employee relations file for each employee.
The platform now allows for consolidated real time reporting. The robust reporting and BI tools provide executives and managers insight into real time statistics, trends, activity including exceptions and variances and so much more.
Result
The improvements were almost immediately realized across the entire organisation. Process quality, fairness and consistency was immediately reinforced by the system functionality. Managers are now prompted to follow compliant processes, deviations are controlled via approval processes. Managers have direct insight into their policies and their employee’s history, not only empowering them but also educating them as well.
The labour & employee relations practitioners are made aware of cases timeously and the information delivered is precise and accurate, evidence is available and correct policy and procedure have been followed. All exceptions are fully documented and communicated.
The system has alleviated all logistical issues, no matter who is involved, what the cases is about or where parties are located, the processes are unaffected, and quality and fairness and consistency is always maintained. Previous problems that were encountered such as duplication of effort and misplacing of evidence are a thing of the past.
Reporting is available at the click of a button. There is no longer a need to sort, collate or prepare reports. These are generated by a simple click providing invaluable data on demand to those who require it.
The client has a comprehensive enterprise wide framework in place to manage all their labour & employee relations activities. Processes have been streamlined and there is a full database of all labour relations activities with audit trails providing extensive employee profile information by any category.
“erNavigator has assisted in reducing our risk of non-compliance by providing us with access to a controlled, efficient and measurable labour & employee relations environment.”
