3 Most Common Employee Relation Issues in the Philippines

The Philippines has a very unique workplace culture and also have distinct employee relation issues. By knowing these issues and learning how to address them, it will be easier for you to create unified employee relations. With it, you can increase your organization's morale and performance.

1. Leave Issues & Disputes

Do all of your employees know the company's leave policy? Also, are you assured that you're sick and vacation leave policy meets the Philippine labor code? If you are an HR manager, you surely have already encountered many complaints pertaining to leave credits.

Oftentimes, employee relations issues about leaves arise due to the following reasons:

1. Employees are not fully aware of the whole policy of the leaves.
2. They don't know grounds for disapproving leaves.
3. Glitches in leave conversion computations.

How to address:

The key solution to minimize this problem is to, first, ensure that your leave policy meets the law. Second, use leave management automated software tools. By using such, you can have zero human error when computing your employees' leaves. Moreover, software tools can help you be more transparent with your company's leave policy. In the Philippines, you may use JuzTalent or Bitrix2 as your leave management tool.

2. Late Pay

Payroll issues such as late processing and inaccurate salary computation are major triggers for employee dissatisfaction. A one-day delay in salary may have a huge impact on the personal expense/budget management of your employees. Remember that your employees primarily work for you to earn a living after all.

This problem may have employees unsatisfied and worried about the company's financial stability. This is very common especially for start-up companies in the Philippines.

Some employees may also think that you don't value your people. Your employees are expecting you to be extremely proactive in making sure that they don't experience any problems receiving their salaries on time. If in case you are not able to pay them as scheduled, make sure that you communicate it in advance. Let them know the reason and provide a solution on how to avoid this in the future.

How to address:

In order to address this employee relation issue, you as an employer must put a huge priority in terms of payroll. As much as possible, do payroll in advance. It is also better to have an in-house payroll team rather than outsourcing it so you have full control of your payroll system. Firms may often have trouble in handling several accounts and answering the complaints of your employees about salary disputes.

3. Management Issues

This is one of the most common employee relation issues you don't want to hear. But, let's face it, who doesn't experience or at least heard an employee ranting about the higher management? Even though the upper team is doing a pretty good job in many areas like increasing the company's profitability, developing innovations, etc. people seem to be still unsatisfied. The main issue here is not often about the competency of the management team but also the lack of communication. The lack of effective communication to the bottom line usually leads to low morale and trust.

How to address:

In most cases, your bottom line is not involved in the bird's eye view of the company. Thus, it will be better if the rest of your organization has at least the big picture of your company's goals and milestones. This will help the upper management to gain trust from the bottom line. It will also make the rest of the organization feel more involved.

To do this, you may simply open a short but meaningful monthly town hall meetings wherein the upper management is involved. If you have excess time and budget, you can also put up a monthly event with special employee recognition program and awards.