The term 'employee relations' has been used for many years as an alternative to other, better-established descriptive terms such as 'personnel management', 'industrial relations' and now 'human resource management'. Each of these is used to describe a particular feature of the world of work and employment, but each overlaps with the others across ill-defined margins. The result is both confusing and misleading, especially when, as in recent years, the meanings of the terms begin to change. 'Employee relations', used as a descriptive label, has the potential to unify this confusing picture, and may well become widely adopted as 'human resource management' falls out of favour.

The variety of managerial styles to employee relations can be related to a variety of internal and external conditions in the business, economic and legislative environment. Choices about the way individuals are managed can be related to business strategies and underlying requirements for the type of employees recruited, defined in terms of skills, qualifications and experience. In general terms, the more emphasis the company puts on added-value, product differentiation strategies, the more likely it is that high-commitment work practices will be required. In contrast, cost minimization and lowest-cost price strategies will generally be linked to simple work processes where it is easy to recruit cheap labour. Each of these requires its own approach to employee relations.

John Purcell