Employee Relations
Dr Request Machimbira
Employee relations is, without doubt, the software of institutional productivity.
We invest heavily in hardware. We buy state-of-the-art machinery, enterprise resource planning systems, gleaming buildings and branded vehicles.
Yet all of that hardware is rendered inert without the software that makes it run. That software is employee relations. It is the invisible code that determines whether people will give us their hands only, or their hands, their heads, and their hearts.
It, therefore, remains a mystery, if not negligence of epic proportions, that industrial relations rarely occupies even a page in a sixty-page strategic plan of an organisation.
We will devote 10 pages to marketing, 12 to finance and a full annexure to risk, but not a paragraph to the very climate that determines whether the strategy will be executed at all.
That is courage laced with recklessness. A strategy that does not plan for its people climate is a budget waiting for a labour dispute to dismantle it.
Over the years, I have observed two distinct approaches to industrial relations. They are less about systems and more about the character of managers.
I have decided to term them the thermometer and the thermostat approaches.
The thermometer reads temperature and does nothing else except read it. There are managers who resemble the thermometer. They are excellent at observing. They will see an anxious employee at clock-in and do nothing.
They will see a desperate or even troubled employee in the corridor and still do nothing. They will see a pattern, suspicious Monday and Friday leave days, a sudden spike in short sick notes, lunch breaks stretching by 10 minutes, a low murmur in the canteen and they will still do nothing. They file the temperature.
Such management is apathy management. It is management by indifference. Their pride is their compensation package, the glamour of their office and the boardroom coffee, until one day it rains.
And in industrial relations, it always rains eventually. The single unpaid overtime query that was ignored becomes a collective grievance. The denied leave that was never explained becomes evidence of unfair labour practice.
The sexual harassment joke that was laughed off becomes a constructive dismissal. The thermometer manager is always shocked when the strike notice arrives.
He had been reading the temperature for months, but he never thought it was his job to regulate it.
On the other hand, a thermostat reads temperature but not only that, it regulates it. There are managers like that. They act on what they see. They understand that in industrial relations, nothing is neutral.
An employee’s excitement, mood swing, sudden silence, or overt fear is not just an emotion; it is data. It is a message that must be decoded and regulated.
The thermostat manager does not wait for a formal grievance to act; he acts on the precursor.
The thermostat does not allow the industrial relations climate to exceed boiling point. He controls the climate.
What control means is not necessarily descending on staff with a heavy hand, issuing warnings and suspensions. That is not regulation; that is escalation. True control is ensuring that a single grievance on unpaid overtime, denied leave, miscalculated NSSA, bullying, or sexual harassment does not escalate or degenerate into fully-fledged conflict.
Rather, it is plugged at the source.
The difference is profound. The thermometer asks, “Who is at fault?” The thermostat asks, “What is this telling us about our system?”
Being a thermostat-type manager, therefore, demands a fundamental mindset shift: treating every industrial relations incident as a form of intelligence. A research problem and research questions must arise out of every industrial relations incident.
Do we have a compensation philosophy? Is it competitive? How is our organisational performance recognition regime structured?
Is our leave policy humane and consistently applied? Do our supervisors know how to manage without harassing? Are our job evaluations still defensible?
When a young graduate resigns after six months citing a toxic supervisor, he is not just resigning; he is telling you that your leadership pipeline is leaking talent and your culture is unaffordable. Becoming a thermostat-type organisation demands normalising industrial relations incident tracking.
This is where most organisations fail. We track sales leads religiously. We track debtors religiously. We do not track IR incidents.
Every incident must be logged, categorised and analysed as a source of intelligence. Maintain an industrial relations incident register, not a disciplinary register, but an intelligence register.
Date, location, nature of incident, employees affected, underlying system failure suspected, time to resolve and future preventive action taken.
This register becomes more valuable than any engagement survey because it is real-time, not retrospective.
Consequently, your next human resources report to the CEO and the board HR committee must include a dedicated section on industrial relations incidences and intelligence with trends, heat maps and remedial actions.
If you cannot see it, you will not fix it. Tracking helps you to see. Reporting it to the board helps the board to govern it.
Boards must start asking, “What was our industrial relations climate this quarter? What were the three recurring grievances? What systemic risk do they point to?”
You can be a thermometer organisation. You will have beautiful offices, accurate readings of a deteriorating climate, and a perfectly documented path to a strike, a lawsuit or mass disengagement.
You will be able to tell the arbitrator exactly when the temperature started rising, but you will have no defence for why you did nothing. Or you can be a thermostat organisation. You will read, regulate and plug the leaks while they are still drops.
The software of productivity is not maintained by reading. It is maintained by regulation. In this season every manager must decide: Am I a thermometer or am I a thermostat?
Dr Request Machimbira is the executive director of Proficiency Consulting Group and the International Wellness Institute. For feedback, email request @proficiencyinternational.com or phone +263772693404.
