Fundamentals of Human Resource Management, 5/e

Employee Relations

Learning Objective 1

1. Define employee relations.

It’s obvious to anyone who has worked for even a few days that some companies are better to work for than are others. Some companies we’ve touched on in this book—Wegmans, SAS, and Google, for instance—show up repeatedly on “Best Companies to Work For” lists, while others seem to always have labor problems and negative press. This commonsense observation reflects the fact that some companies do have better employee relations than do others.

Employee relations is the management activity that involves establishing and maintaining the positive employee–employer relationships that contribute to satisfactory productivity, motivation, morale, and discipline, and to maintaining ...