Reference no: EM132220783
1. What is employee relations? What’s the overlap and what’s the differences with labor relations?
2. What is labor relations?
3. How does effective employee relations help both supervisors and employees?
4. What are some of the essential functions of an Employee Relations Manager?
5. How can a student best get prepared to be an effective Employee Relations Manager?
6. What would be some major functions of an Employee Relations Manager for US Pipe and Foundry? Consider that they have approximately 715 employees, two facilities, three unions, six collective bargaining agreements. Explain what it means to have three unions and six collective bargaining agreements. [note: The information about this position is found in the Employee Relations document I placed on BBLearn.]
7. Compare and contrast being an employee relations manager at US Pipe and Foundry versus the same title/position at Ultimate Software. How would you likely be spending a lot of your work time at each? What is similar and what is different? [note: Again, refer to the information in the document on employee relations.]
8. Justice is a strong motive. Explain this statement and the significance of it for someone trying to be an effective Employee Relations Manager.
9. Recognition of rights and responsibilities, negotiation of the labor agreement, and administration of the negotiated labor agreement are the three big phases of the labor relations process. What is meant by each of these?
10. What is meant by each of the three phases in the labor relations process? In other words, briefly characterize each phase.
11. What are the three big phases in the labor relations process?
12. What’s the role of the main participant groups in the labor relations process (identify the participants and their major roles).
13. Work rules are said to be an important focal point of labor relations. Describe some major constraints and influences that contribute to what will end up being the “work rules.”
14. Why do people join unions?
15. Why do managers resist unions? What are several of the union suppression tactics and union substitution tactics that have been used by managers?
16. What can management do to reduce the likelihood of their employees choosing to be unionized?
17. Characterize the current state of unions in the US. Which industries are relatively more unionized?
18. What is the AFL-CIO? Why would a union want to be part of the AFL-CIO?
19. What are 3 or 4 of the various large private sector unions in the US and how do they differ?
20. Where and with which unions are employees in the public sector unionized?
21. What makes a “best place to work”?
22. What contributes to making an employment place one of the “best places to work”? Why would we, as managers, want to develop and maintain our organization as a best place to work?
23. Employee performance is important to effective organizations. We learned in class that there are three big components contributing to employee performance. Describe them and their relationship to each other and to employee performance.
24. Why might an employee relations manager want to be familiar with several of the theories of human motivation?
25. Explain how a manager could use Expectancy Theory of motivation to make changes that help improve the performance of a group of employees who have been experiencing relatively low performance levels.
26. What is workplace culture and why is it important for an Employee Relations Manager?
27. Briefly describe several different approaches for dealing with conflict.
28. U.S. union membership, as a percentage of the workforce, stands at approximately 10.7%. In the previous decades the percentages were closer to 20. What are the big influences since the beginning of the 1960s that might be contributing to the density levels of around 10.7% rather than around 20%?
29. What do labor unions do? What do labor unions do for their unionized employees?
30. Sexual harassment is a serious issue in the workplace. What can you do, as an Employee Relations Manager, to decrease the chances of anyone in your workplace being sexually harassed?
31. What are the major administrative agencies for labor relations?
32. In June of 2018, the US Supreme Court decided the Janus case about labor relations. What is the Janus case and what are the relevant implications?
33. To improve communications, how can you better respect your conversation partner and how can you work on keeping quiet most of the time?
34. In our classroom lecture on listening better, we learned the value of understanding that all communications include some element of personal sharing regarding what is important, how we think, what we value, etc. How can knowing some of the important history of labor unions and labor union beliefs help us to be more effective as an Employee Relations Manager?
35. How can better listening make us a better decision makers (improve our judgment)?
36. If we prefer to engage and communicate in a style characterized as “low context”, what should we be considering and doing if we have the goal of effectively communicating and our conversation partner is someone who prefers to engage and communicate in a style characterized as “high context”?
37. How do the reasons a country has laws overlap with what it takes to be an effective Employee Relations Manager?
38. We get our legal framework of laws from several sources. Compare the major sources of our laws.
39. What is the Idaho Commission on Human Rights and how might a manager in a company in Idaho come to interact with members of this commission?
40. What is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)? What are the functions of the EEOC?
41. As an Employee Relations Manager, you will work to improve your company’s compliance with laws relating to equal employment opportunities and related laws of non-discrimination. This will include trying to eliminate discrimination that is based on anything that is a “protected class.” What are the major protected classes in employee relations matters?
42. What are some company strategies sometimes used for union suppression?
43. What are some company strategies sometimes used for union avoidance?
44. What are some company strategies sometimes used for union substitution?
45. How are national unions generally governed?
46. What have you learned in class (or heard in class) that is most surprising (positive, neutral, or negative) to you and why?