Iqbal Sachdeva

Public Relations: Principles and Practices

Chapter 14
Employee Public Relations
Teaching Notes
Employees are our best asset, says one multinational company. Many professionally
managed companies now call their employees as associates or partners in business.
Rightly so the success or failure of any organization depends on the responses of its
employees.
The top most priority of any company is to run the factories to the fullest capacity in
order to keep up of their share of the market and maintain profitability at a particular
level. The enlightened managements also realize that employee are human and cannot
be equated to other assets of the organization like plant and machinery etc. People,
who work in company have their hopes and aspirations and personal growth in mind.
They have families to support and children to groom.
So employees have certain expectations from the organization like better wages,
bonus/incentives, safety from injury or accidents. Therefore, managements, today
encourage employees to show interest in the affairs of the company and run
programmes to encourage workers participation in the process of management.
Suggestion schemes run by some is an example.
Managements too have problems to solve in which employees cooperation is essential.
Productivity maximization, quality improvement, waste reduction, safety and house
keeping, banishing absenteeism, generating loyalty and discipline are the management
priorities.
Running an internal public relations or communications programme is a challenging job.
The basic essential for this is for the company to have a clear cut HR policy which should
foster trust between the employees and the management. The fact remains that most
of managements commit a mistake of imposing their idea on the employees resulting in
conflict and strife. Although labour management adversary relationship is hard reality of
industrial life.
Internal communications is a two way street. Whereas management should
communicate regularly to the employees, at the same time keep their eyes and ears
open to collect the feedback on responses and reactions of the employees. Public
relations uses some methods of collecting feed back through supervisors, surveys,
interviews and the grapevine system.
All said and done, employee communication is a challenging area for public relations to
be taken seriously as it should pay dividends to the management when handled in a
professional manner.

Copyright Oxford University Press, 2009

Iqbal Sachdeva

Public Relations: Principles and Practices

Copyright Oxford University Press, 2009