Rebuilding Trust in Employee-Employer Relationship

In last decade and before, Firms offered lifelong Employment to their employees. They treated their employees as families, which developed trust and loyalty in employee-employer relationship.

Today, it is not possible in this era of globalization and technological change. Rather from treating their employees as families they are treated as free Agents. This has minimized employer-employee relationship on road of trust and loyalty.

Rather the firms in this new era should not treat them as families or agents rather take the employees as allies. In an Alliance, both sides are invested to each other i.e. company investing in employee and employee investing in company.

There should be a new model for defining term of employment, in order to rebuild trust and loyalty between employer and employee. They should be in path of building trust incrementally.

Like there should a meeting between a manager and employee, they discuss the requirement of the work that has to be carried out. The employee gives a timeline and all requirements. Finally they are on to a deal and the work is carried out. Once that timeline is finished, they meet again to discuss the work done and if the employee wants to continue then assign another project or they terminate and move on.

This leads to transparency, defining clear mission and objective. By employee giving his timeline and requirements about the project that has to be carried out, provides the employer with realistic time horizon and goal. Rather this increases a trust and loyalty between employer employee relations.

But, the current scenario states that there is a lot of mismatch between skills employers need and skills employee have. This overall leads to less trust and honesty. The whole thing revolves around three questions:

What skill they have?

What skill they need?

What skill they want?

 Even apart from this if a employee want to develop skills that are not relevant to current job but may be related to something in future that they want to pursue but one won’t tell it to their manager because of not much trust.

Employers must take it that no employee will work in their organization for long because it’s difficult to keep a good talent even if you are the best company in the world.

So, develop a relationship with employee such that you provide them with the career they are looking for and they provide you the services. It should be a two way process defining short term goals with transparency and help in developing trust and honesty.