In recent months, I’ve spoken to many HR professionals about all things employee relations or “ER.”

What stood out was the challenging nature of the role of those in ER.

The role of ER has never been more valuable to Australian employers, whose workplaces have never been more regulated.

Yes, compliance is a must, but so too is meeting business objectives.

ER is at the pointy end of keeping a business out of trouble and getting things done.

The passion with which some very experienced HR leaders spoke inspired our paper Navigating Employee Relations: The Advisor’s Role (available upon request here). The paper is based on that feedback.

It’s built on four themes: mastery, judgement, strategy, and influence.

Off the back of our paper, Navigating Employee Relations: The Advisor’s Role, I’m writing a series of five blogs in five weeks.

So here’s blog three in our ‘5 of 5’.

This week’s theme is “judgement”.

Judgement calls for what’s “right” in the moment having regard to the principles that matter.

Effective judgement involves a complex process of gathering, assessing, and weighing facts. Judgement involves applying knowledge within a particular context. It is the proper filtering and weighing of knowledge and facts. Therefore, the context needs to be understood, be it internal (the organisation) or external (environmental factors). It’s the cornerstone of moving from an “expert” to an “advisor.”

Our paper Navigating Employee Relations: The Advisor’s Role applies a five step model aimed at flexing the judgement ‘muscle’ being:

1.   Gather the facts

2.   Generate options

3.   Balance the consequences

4.   Apply what matters (or ‘values’)

5.   Review by learning from what happens next.

Good judgement calls for good questions. A mix of closed, open-ended, and evaluative questions will bolster a judgement call.

• Do we do a deal or not?
• What is the balance of consequences here?
• Do we terminate the employment or not?
• Did this actually happen?
• What’s the impact here?
• How likely is this?
• How do we know?
• What is missing here?
• What’s the opportunity here?
• What matters most here?

Judgement often calls for weighing “strategy” (making progress in line with organisational needs) with “risk” (the downside of things going wrong). These can be difficult to measure in a balanced way. A typical example is the benefits of removing a poor performer on team culture (intangible but certain) versus the risks associated with a claim (more tangible but uncertain).

There are times when risks are overestimated, with the path of least resistance as the preferred course. Conversely, there are times when risk is underestimated with the consequences of not appreciating them at the outset magnified. To quote the Stoic philosopher Seneca:

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and the unexpectedness adds to the weight of the disaster.”

There are short term risk impacts and long-term impacts with the human condition prone to averting the former (industrial action) despite the bigger consequences of the latter (doing a deal that undermines the capacity to manage). Accepting voluntary redundancies is easy in the short term but hard in the long term when we are left with poorer performers.

Risk can be evaluated in terms of exposure (what could happen), impact (the harm), and prospect (or likelihood). In the ER context, there is a menu of typical risks. These are, in no particular order:

• a legal claim
• the costs of the defence to a claim
• reputational impact
• employee disengagement
• stakeholder impact
• employee harm
• union agitation
• industrial action
• productivity impact
• delay e.g., implementing change
• business confidence
• customer discontent.

Understating risk is important, no doubt. But that doesn’t mean becoming obsessed with its avoidance at any cost. Again, judgement is about doing what’s right having weighed all relevant factors. And, the ER advisor needs to be solutions-oriented asking and answering “what can we do” to balance “what can’t we do”.

I want my ER managers providing options, ideas, solutions, they need to do more than present the problems.”

– HR Director, University sector

I look forward to sharing part four of this five-part series with you next week.