HR Case Management Software: A Tool for Grievance and Conflict Resolution

"A good manager doesn’t try to eliminate conflict," says Robert Townsend, author of the bestseller Up the Organization, and co-author of Reinventing Leadership. "He tries to keep it from wasting the energies of his people."

As an HR professional in an enterprise organization, you have a choice in how your team — and, as a result, your entire organization — handles all of the conflicts that arise from employee complaints, grievances, and concerns.

Some will be big blow-ups, the kind that enmesh managers and leadership. These are the types of conflicts that drive home the importance of practicing risk reduction. Other grievances will be smaller — the kind settled easily and quietly, often having stemmed from a simple misunderstanding or lack of clear information.

Either way, as an HR leader, you can try to avoid conflict, but you can’t escape it. What you can do is exactly what Townsend suggests: Keep it from wasting the time, energy, and resources of everyone in your organization. How can you do that? Through organization, collaboration, and efficiency. Those are the keys to successfully and efficiently processing employee complaints, grievances, and concerns.

Those key processes are obtainable through an automated HR case management system. With a Web-based HR case management solution, like LBi HR HelpDesk, case data is easily available to the appropriate people. Every case’s workflow, related documents, notes, and history of transactions are readily accessible and visible for review.

After an employee submits a case, you can be sure it’s automatically routed to the right HR team member or appropriate manager, depending on the type of report, the employee’s location, or other criteria you specify in the system. You can then customize the workflow to precisely align with the steps that need to be taken throughout any case — from its first report to its final disposition.

Often, the key to resolving conflict is collaboration. An automated HR help desk lets you share all applicable documents related to a case with the appropriate people. It also creates a fail-safe audit trail of all activity related to the case, in case look-back is needed.

A good HR case management system also enhances efficiency — another key to easier conflict resolution. LBi HR HelpDesk, for example, offers an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Anyone can easily make reports and can track their progress.

Finally, no one will feel comfortable engaging in a resolution process if they think their privacy or personal information will be compromised. If they don’t feel the system is secure, no amount of case-management organization or easy accessibility will help resolve the case. You should consider a case management system that at least has configurable security access, integration with Single Sign-on (SSO), multiple priority levels, and case-visibility settings.

In the end, employee concerns and grievances are resolved as easily, quickly, and clearly as possible — because, like it or not, they can’t be avoided.

Image source: Insperity

Strategic HR: Using Case Management to Build an Enterprise-wide Knowledge Base

Science fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote, "Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future."

A similar argument can be made for almost any enterprise organization, and particularly for their HR departments.
 

Without a library of your organization's employee-relevant documents, forms, policies, benefits information, and similar items, you run the risk of seeing the same HR problems repeated over and over, and you have no clear path for preventing similar problems in the future.

A highly featured, automated HR case management solution can help you build a living library — a searchable, constantly growing, and evolving document repository that will expand your organization's knowledge base. HR departments can use the repository to store and update standard forms and company documents that employees, HR staff members, and customer service representatives can access and download.

A related feature is a system of reports that gives you updated insight into how employees and HR are using any of the myriad items in the knowledge base.

Let's assume that after you announce a new policy for paid time off, you see a spike in the number of requests from one region compared with the others. It might prompt you to be sure that everyone is getting the same communication about the new policy, or find out if managers have communicated it differently from region to region.

A knowledge base is even more beneficial if it includes searchable answers and solutions to concerns and questions that have previously been addressed within the system. This ensures that employees and HR staff are all working from the same book, all the time. When you extend the knowledge base to include employee self-service and access from an employee portal, the workforce gets the information they need by accessing their own personalized, searchable information. The results: fewer calls to HR and a more certain future of accurate employee actions and employee engagement.

With an enterprise-wide knowledge base, you can achieve:

• Faster resolution of HR cases — from the smallest to the biggest
• Greater alignment with policies and procedures company-wide
• The ability to update documents on the fly

To see the value of having a knowledge base integrated into your HR case management solution, ask yourself this question: What was one major HR case in your experience that could have been mitigated by providing that front-line employee or manager easy, direct access to current, accurate, and relevant information?

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Why Are Employees Leaving? HR Case Management Can Provide Answers

Authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman wrote in their 1999 bestseller, First, Break All the Rules: What The World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, that people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers. If anything, that statement rings more true today than ever before.  And it’s even more sobering when you consider the most recent findings from Modern Survey, the employee engagement measurement company.

Modern Survey’s Spring 2013 National Engagement Study found that:

1. Disengagement among U.S. workers is at its highest level since the company began conducting its twice-yearly study six years ago.
2. Just over 1 in 3 employees feel that direct managers and supervisors are “most responsible” for engaging employees.
3. Nearly 1 in 4 managers are, meanwhile, unfamiliar with the concept of employee engagement.

So, when someone leaves your organization, odds are good that the relationship between that person and his or her manager had at least something to do with it. How would HR know what those reasons were? More importantly, how would they know in time to change the course of events? How might the problems that one employee is having with a manager be affecting other employees?

Throwing a wider net, what else is going on among your employees that’s not readily visible on the surface but that could nonetheless be causing employee disengagement and, ultimately, be contributing to their decisions to leave? To begin to answer that question, think of all of the personal and professional issues in any employee’s life that might cause them to reach out to HR.

In an enterprise organization, HR is going to be contacted about employee concerns ranging from complaints about their managers to questions about paid time off. Or employees may need help resolving difficulties over, say, getting medical claims reimbursed or their sales bonuses accurately paid.

We're not saying any one of those concerns in and of itself would lead to employee disengagement or cause someone to quit. But what if you could see where the common denominators lie? What if you could compare the issues affecting disengaged and terminating employees with those of their colleagues, other business units, or the entire company?

A fully featured, automated HR case management solution with robust and accessible analytics, like LBi HR HelpDesk, gives you the power to look back among HR cases of disaffected and exiting employees to get accurate and timely insight into their concerns and to see how those metrics compare with similar reports for other groups. You can track the same metrics against performance and productivity to determine how trends among exiting employees are affecting the bottom line.

From there, HR can be a more strategic business partner and proactively suggest changes in policies or processes.  With a system like LBi HR HelpDesk, you have the tools to help managers positively affect employee engagement and to generate greater engagement among more front-line workers.

To learn more about how an automated HR help desk can help HR transform data into better workplace performance and up its strategic game, download our white paper "Stay Competitive: Use Your HR Help Desk to Drive and Measure Employee Engagement."

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