Cultivating Trust in Employee Relations

At the heart of employment relations is the desire of both management and employees to create an ideal and efficient and effective organisation. However, this does not always happen, and both employers and employees and their representatives share the blame. For employees and their representatives, the “us against them” attitude is a catalyst for distrust. For employers, inflexibility and autocratic leadership styles make effective human resource management extremely difficult. Through interviews with management and union representatives, this experimental research explores causes of distrust, offers solutions and ends by suggesting the adoption of the Soft Human Resource Management (SHRM) approach as a solution to enhance trust in employee relations. The study focused on trust in organisations that have unionised workers