An Evaluation of Human Relations on Worker Productivity

Introduction

According to Kurki (2020), human relations are the interaction between people in an organization, including cooperative efforts, conflicts, and relationships. Human relations include how employees interact with one another, the interaction between employees and management, and the relationship between the human resources in an organization and stakeholders such as suppliers and clients. Evaluating the link between human relations and worker productivity is important because human relations are the backbone of an organization’s success. Therefore, it is important to understand how human relations can be designed to improve productivity. Organizations need to establish a stable organizational culture to prevent human relations issues hence the need to understand the concept of human relations and its significance in an organization. The modern work environment also requires ensuring that employees avoid lawsuits and other actions that employee unions may take to protect employees’ interests. Unionization has also increased the need for organizations to focus on creating a conducive work environment to improve the quality of human relations and prevent conflict. The quality of human relations and human knowledge advancement, particularly in organizations that need collaboration and cooperation, is likely to become more dynamic. Therefore, it is important to study human relations to determine the mental and social issues that should be considered to improve the work environment and increase job satisfaction.

Interpreting the Human Relations Concept

The human relations concept is a vital social approach to establishing interpersonal relations between subordinates and superiors. The main human relations concepts are the concept linked to the nature of man and the concept linked to the nature of organizations. The concept linked to the nature of man includes human dignity, motivation, a whole person, and individual differences. Human beings require motivation to achieve the desired outcomes. Therefore, an organization must invest in employee motivation programs to create good human relations and increase employee commitment and productivity. Individual differences emerge from different backgrounds and viewpoints. Organizations must ensure that diversity and inclusion are upheld to improve the quality of human relations. It is also important to consider individual differences in allocating tasks and designing motivation programs. Due to personality differences, what works for one employee may not work for another. Human dignity emerges from the need to treat every employee respectfully and appreciate their contribution to the organization. It plays a significant role in defining the quality of human relations by preventing conflicts caused by issues such as undermining, discrimination, and harassment. Further, viewing employees as a whole includes considering all aspects of a person, such as personal life, personality, knowledge, skills, and competencies. Organizations need to understand employees’ traits and how they impact their behavior to create an environment that promotes the development of good human relations.

The link between human relations and the nature of the organization is evident in mutual interests and viewing organizations as a social system. Organizations are established and maintained based on mutual interests among stakeholders. For instance, employees’ interest is to improve the organization’s performance and ensure that the organization generates revenue so that they get paid on time and promoted to higher ranks based on their performance. Mutual interests also emerge in the development of the work environment. Organizations create a conducive work environment because they want the employees to perform well, leading to improved organizational performance. Therefore, mutual interests create a foundation for human relations by defining how the leaders interact with employees in an organization and how employees interact with the leaders and customers. Viewing the organization as a social system includes acknowledging the existence of social groups within an organization. For example, an organization includes employees, customers, and other stakeholders such as investors, suppliers, and the board of directors. Each group has specific needs that should be met to meet the organization’s goals and objectives. Therefore, all groups must interact to ensure that their needs are met.

The Argument on the Role of Human Relations in Worker Productivity

According to Priya (2022), there is a positive link between human relations and employee productivity. According to the author, employees with large human capital are highly productive, reduce the size of inputs required to complete tasks and increase the use of resources that reduce production costs. Human capital includes training, education, skills, intelligence, punctuality, and loyalty. Organizations can increase human capital through training and development programs, thus increasing the quality of human relations and creating a sense of belonging that can be leveraged to increase productivity. Organizations that allow employees to participate in decision-making also create good human relations that increase employee commitment and hard work, improving productivity. Human relations have various advantages in employee productivity, such as improved recruitment and retention, creativity and innovation, teamwork, and collaboration. Strong human relations can be used to recruit and retain talented employees by ensuring that employee benefits and wages are streamlined while supporting equitable and fair treatment. Organizations can also use human relations initiatives to ensure that current employees receive the training needed to equip them with the knowledge and skills to perform their work effectively, thus increasing worker productivity.

Human relations also assist in employee retention by ensuring employees work in a conducive environment and collaborate to handle organizational issues. The role of human relations in promoting creativity and innovation is evident in how positive human relations promote open communication and trust among employees, thus increasing the sharing of ideas. For instance, organizations such as Apple Inc. promote good human relations by allowing employees to try out new ideas, leading to creativity and innovation, which has played a vital role in the company’s productivity and success. Human relations also promote teamwork and collaboration by eliminating barriers that could hinder employee interaction. For example, organizations like HP have created a strong diversity and inclusion policy to allow all employees to share ideas, thus increasing productivity. The company, HP, also emphasizes that results are derived from teamwork (Jardin, 2019). Good human relations also create a positive employee experience, leading to more collaboration, trust, and respect, which are linked to job satisfaction. Notably, Tentama et al. (2019) argue that job satisfaction is among the main factors contributing to high employee productivity. Therefore, human relations can be viewed as the main driver of employee productivity.

The cons of viewing human relations as a driver for productivity can be interpreted based on human relations theories. Human relations inadequacies can be categorized into the limited nature of incentives, lack of social significance in goals, and participation without substance. The limited nature of incentives emerges during change. Human relations is the responsibility of management during change since management is expected to change its practices and style to meet the competition, profit, and production interests. The main goal is to ensure the change succeeds despite placing employees at a disadvantage. Therefore, employees may be given incentives to accept a change, thus reducing human relations to a manipulative tool used to ensure that employees act according to the organization’s expectations.

The main strategy used in such instances is behaviour management. Behaviour management is based on the principle that behaviour leading to a positive outcome tends to be repeated, and offering a suitable reward can change a person’s behaviour. Therefore, as long as a specific behaviour and its outcome are identified, motivation strategies can be selected to manipulate the individual to behave as the change initiators expect. Many organizations consider financial incentives such as increasing salaries and wages, stock ownership, profit sharing, and fringe benefits to influence employees to accept change. Employee unionization has also made it challenging to convince employees to accept benefits so that they can accept change because the unions consider the long-term impact of the change on their employees. For example, changes such as using autonomous cars in logistics may be resisted despite the organization offering incentives because of the likelihood that the cars will replace employees in the long run. Such a case was witnessed in Missouri when truck drivers organized a protest outside the Jefferson City Capitol building to push for the ban of self-driving trucks in the region (Robitzski, 2019). Therefore, human relations in behavioural management is a disadvantage because it aims to manipulate employees.

The lack of social significance in goals is evident in an organization’s expectations of its employees. Employees are expected to identify themselves with their organization’s goals and develop loyalty to the organization. There is no reference to the relevance and significance of the organization’s goals to social purposes such as public good, humanity, and social welfare. Therefore, the main assumption is that commitment, motivation, and loyalty cannot be purchased but can be elicited based on the global view comprising purposes and values shared by managers and employees as reflective and mature individuals. Organizations also fail to acknowledge that sharing profit and monetary reward cannot offer a lasting basis for sustained commitment and loyalty, particularly when monetary benefits are acquired through unions, salary and wage levels are inadequate to meet employees’ basic economic needs, and when labour solidarity provides a strong source of warm relationships, social affiliation, and shared purpose. Therefore, it is hard to change the organizational climate when there is a lack of unified vision, shared ideas, and common purpose. It is also challenging to restructure or unstructure employees’ perceptions of resistance to change without goodwill and trust. Goodwill and trust should focus on shared goals and purposes. In human relations, shared purposes and goals are mostly confined to non-monetary and monetary benefits such as participation in decision-making and stock sharing. These benefits lose value over time, thus making them ineffective in sustaining human relations and productivity.

The issue of participation without substance emerges because many human relations recommendations focus on participative management that leads to various unintended consequences such as unreasonable benefits, disharmony, and inefficient decision-making. Unreasonable benefits are caused by leaders’ use of economic benefits to maintain their privileges, status, and positions. Therefore, they select any benefits to keep employees happy, including benefits that may not be compatible with the organization’s financial capacity. Therefore, employees get the impression that the organization’s role is to provide economic benefits, thus disregarding the organization’s obligations to the national economy and customers. For example, there is a wide gap between the salaries and benefits employees within the same industry work because some organizational leaders prioritize winning employee trust and goodwill to maintain powerful positions in the organization.

Moreover, disharmony arises when employees have representation issues due to a lack of cooperation in decision-making. Inefficient decision-making is a major issue in human relations management because some leaders cannot balance the organization’s and its employees’ interests due to the fear of leaders losing their privileges and positions of power. The emphasis on meeting specific targets and rewarding employees for meeting those targets results in misreporting capacities and costs, hoarding human resources, equipment, and supplies, and suppression of innovations and suggestions from employees, thus putting human relations at risk. Therefore, the participative management approach to human relations is ineffective in interpreting the relationship between human relations and productivity because it does not inspire employees.

My Stance

Maintaining good human relations in an organization plays a vital role in the organization’s success. Therefore, I believe that strong human relations are needed for high productivity. Organizations should use human relations to resolve and avoid conflicts among employees and link employees and their leaders in the communication channel for engagement in decision-making. Organizations should also focus on enhancing transparency in communication to create and maintain healthy and strong human relations where employees can exchange information and ideas to complete assigned tasks effectively. Strong human relations are also vital in promoting teamwork, leading to high productivity because team members can effectively exchange opinions, ideas, and resources to complete assigned tasks. Teamwork promotes innovation as employees interact and exchange ideas and opinions, leading to high productivity and improved organizational performance. Good human relations also include fitting employers into work situations to motivate them to collaborate, thus achieving high productivity while bringing employees social, psychological, and economic satisfaction. Organizations should also focus on understanding employee attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours to ensure that conflicts are handled fairly, thus enhancing the quality of human relations.

Achieving productivity from human relations includes establishing proper communication between employees and management and among employees. Therefore, creating an open communication channel and a diversity and inclusion policy that allows employees and leaders to interact and exchange information freely is important. It is also important to embrace a leadership style that enables leaders to interact with employees. Some leadership styles support employee involvement and increase motivation by making leaders sympathetic to employee issues. Therefore, employee productivity and the success of an organization rely on effective leadership, including using the right leadership style. For example, transformational leadership can improve human relations through employee motivation and engagement in change implementation. However, it is important to consider the long-term impact of a change on employees and respect their opinions rather than rushing to use motivation to influence change acceptance. After all, that can be viewed as employee manipulation, leading to poor human relations and reduced productivity. Organizations should also understand the impact of leadership on employee productivity to determine how organizational performance can be improved through effective employee management.

Human relations attributes have a reciprocal impact on the organization based on shared values, profitability, innovation, and performance. Shared values and goals in an organizational setting are often viewed as what the organization values and the extent to which the employee and the organization value similar goals, thus reflecting a shared purpose between employees and the organization. Therefore, shared values are the extent to which employees and organizations hold common beliefs about the attitudes, behaviours, goals, policies, and objectives that are jointly desired. Based on this argument, the role of good human relations in an organization leads to sharing common goals, thus enabling employees to stay committed to a specific cause and direct their efforts to increase productivity. Sharing common goals also positively influences employees’ performance because they develop a sense of direction, leading to high productivity. Employees may also align their goals with the organization’s goals, leading to high productivity. For instance, if an employee’s goal is to become a senior executive in the organization, they may work hard to get promoted until they get the desired position, leading to high productivity and improved organizational performance.

The interpretation of the link between human relations and productivity based on human relations theories outlines the main weakness of the perception as the use of motivation to influence behaviour under the assumption that behaviour shapes how employees and the organization interact. It is important to consider the impact of motivation on how employees interact with one another. Motivation may improve human relations among employees and between employees and leaders, but it could also create conflict between employees. For example, suppose an organization motivates employees to accept change by giving them incentives. In that case, employees unwilling to accept the incentives may conflict with those who accept the change, thus putting human relations at risk. Employee conflicts are among the factors that negatively impact productivity because they reduce morale and may affect the organization’s distribution of resources needed to complete tasks. Therefore, organizations should consider non-monetary rewards in motivation programs to improve human relations. For instance, organizations can use autonomy to create employee self-confidence, thus promoting good human relations and high productivity. Self-confidence improves employees’ attitudes toward work, leading to high productivity. Therefore, organizations should encourage autonomy and risk-taking to promote self-confidence and reward employees who come up with creative ideas.

Conclusion

Human resources play a significant role in the performance of an organization based on its commitment to meeting its goals and expectations. However, the performance of human resources in an organization is influenced by their work environment and job satisfaction. Therefore, organizations are responsible for maintaining good human relations to promote high productivity because employee productivity is tied to organizational performance. Good human relations can be achieved by creating a conducive work environment and meeting employees’ needs. However, ensuring the right strategies are used to create a conducive environment is important. For example, employers should avoid using manipulative motivation, especially when initiating and implementing change, because such measures create good but short-term human relations. Consequently, manipulative motivation could create issues such as employee protests and strikes when employees realize they were manipulated to change their behaviour and attitude toward a decision. Employers may also consider consulting employees on improvements that should be made to enhance the effectiveness of motivation in increasing the quality of human relations and productivity.

References

Jardin, D. (2019). HP way, a culture with trust in the employees. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hp-way-culture-trust-employees-denis-jardin.

Kurki, M. (2020). Relations, human and non-human. International Relations in a Relational Universe, 106-135. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198850885.003.0006.

Priya, S. (2022). Employee relations and its effect on employee productivity. International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management, 06(05). https://doi.org/10.55041/ijsrem13062.

Robitzski, D. (2019). Truckers want to ban self-driving trucks in Missouri. Futurism. https://futurism.com/the-byte/truckers-ban-self-driving-trucks-missouri.

Tentama, F., Subardjo, S., Mulasari, S., & Meilani, E. (2019). The role of job satisfaction on employee work productivity. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Progressive Civil Society (ICONPROCS 2019). https://doi.org/10.2991/iconprocs-19.2019.25.

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