Choose a specific nonunion business situation such as a hotel, automobile assemb

Question

Choose a specific nonunion business situation such as a hotel, automobile assembly line, retail food manufacturing marketing group, or insurance company sales force and determine what type of employee voice mechanism should be implemented. Why?

Outline the structure of the employee voice mechanism voluntary or mandatory individual or group decision make authority or just talk and so on and a strategy for making it successful.

Now consider the same business situation in the presence of a union how the voice mechanism you developed improve with a union? How might the voice mechanism be less effective with a union? Do your answers to these two questions reflect perspective of the company or the employees?

Explanation / Answer

From the Perspective of Human Resource Strategy, employee voice can be explained as involving employees in organizational decision-making. Employee voice is an important component of many contemporary human (Budd, pg.40). Employee voice strategy is commonly adopted by management in nonunion organizations. As the name suggests, non-unionized employees are those who are not members of a union and therefore do not have union representation at the workplace. Thus, the specific nonunion business situation to be considered in the case study is related to hotel businesses or organizations Hotel Companies usually operate as a nonunion, making it quite difficult for hotel employees to be represented at their workplace. There are, however, the recent development of workers voice channel Found in the Contemporary large hotels in the context of declining union organization and power (Haynes,2005).

This employee voice mechanism used in hotel management is the nonunion employee representationcalled the direct formal employee voice mechanism. Direct employee voice here refers to the general communication between the employers and employee in respect of decision affecting the hotel on a daily basis. It has also been explained as the degree to which employees or group of employees directly influence key local establishment level decisions that affect their day to day work (Haynes, 2005). This kind of communication is normally implemented through scheduled meetings, email exchanges, and sectional problem-solving groups.

For example, in Five Star hotels, a new participative structure was introduced to improve nonunion employee voice in the area of communication and moral (Butler,2005). During such meetings, questions are invited from the Floor and sometimes discussion ensues between management and employees pertaining to their concerns or grievances in the running of the company.With this employee voice mechanism, again, employees may have access electronic suggestion box where they can write their concerns, while each department is given the opportunity to have a departmental meeting monthly, as practiced by the Luxury Hotel Sector in Australia.

The success story here is that informal employee voice enables hotel employees to form a non-fearing and cordial relationship with the management of the hotel, and as a result, they are able to enjoy participation in the decision that affects them and impacts the hotel as well. By this mechanism, “employee satisfaction survey” is conducted periodically to ascertain management performance (Hayne,2005). From the above, there is clear evidence that direct informal employee voice mechanism is quite effective in hotel management and employee involvement in decision making are taken seriously by management across all hotel industries. However, the employee voice mechanism that could be adopted by HRM in a nonunion situation such as a hotel is the collective bargaining strategy which is used by union employees to discuss their expectations of wages, working hours and employment through the representatives (Dundon, Wilkinson et al, 2015).

This is because in some situations nonunion may not mean complete absence of trade union. That is to say that management of a hotel may choose to hear the voice of a section of the workforce but would avoid union recognition of other workers (Dundon, Wilkinson et al, 2005).Thus, non-unionism may be explained to include the situation where management may decide not to deal with trade unions that represent the collective interest of employee even though these unions exist.

There is, therefore, the need for a union in the hotel industry, especially, again, for the fact that a union can mediate between employees and management, and the can gather individual concerns or grievances into a single submission. Also, unions play a vital role in securing legislated labor protection, unionized workers may be entitled to social insurance such as unemployment insurance and workers compensation (Butler,2005).

From the above, employee perspective is quite reflective when examining nonunion employee voice situation of a hotel. This is due to the fact that the current lead in this case study is for employees voice to be heard in order to enhance their involvement in all decision-making steps at their workplaces.

I believe that strong employee voice at their workplaces is a fundamental human right because the purpose for employment relationship is equity and voice, so like every human being employees need to be treated with dignity, fairness, and equity. Voice here is the ability of employees to have a meaningful say in a decision or for an employee to have a direct or indirect participation in decisions that are taken at his or her workplace. Unilateral decision-making treats workers as means only, which demean human dignity and violate their rights to voice out their opinions. It is through these employee voice mechanisms that employees may achieve fair outcome pertaining to wages, safety, health insurance, leaves and retirement benefits.

Thus for unionizedor nonunionized business to achieve success, efficiency, equity and voice must be balanced at all workplaces (Budd,2013).

Finally, a fundamental human right was seen in the story of Daniel when he is captured with other servants to serve the King. In Daniel 1:12, Daniel was given the opportunity to make a choice by choosing vegetables and water over meat and wine. The strategy observes here, is the collective employee voice, which gave Daniel the opportunity to meaningfully voice out his desire as to what food he and his friends needed to build their bodies. At the end of the day, God gave Daniel and the three other more knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom.

References

Budd, J.W. (2013). Labor Relations: Striking a Balance. Fourth Edition. ISBN: 978-0-07-802943-1

Haynes, P. (2005). Filling the Vacuum? Non-Union Employee Voice in Auckland Hotel Industry. Liberty University Library

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