Personnel Committees

Frenchie · June 2003

Do any of you have Personnel Committees who review policies, evaluations, and personnel related problems? I envision the committee being comprised of managers from different divisions in the company, along with an HR representative. Many times, the perception is that HR is making all the decisions (generally discipline). With a committee, I'm wondering if employees would feel they would have a better chance of being treated fairly? Your thoughts on this are greatly appreciated.

Margaret Morford · June 2003

Just be aware that sometimes these committees are considered concerted employee activity and suddenly you fall under the NLRA. I think as long as you only include managers, you'll probably stay out from under the Act, but you might want to run it past your employment lawyer before you do it.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge
615-371-8200
[email]mmorford@mleesmith.com[/email]
[url]http://www.thehredge.net[/url]

Rockie · June 2003

The only employee committee we have is what we call a "Customer Care Team" which stays strictly involved in our customer/patient care issues such as how to handle complaints from patients, how to deal more effectively with the workflow, they also publish our Employee Newsletter, etc.

Not to say...that we have not had to pull them back from trying to get involved in issues, policies, etc.

As Margaret said, you have to be careful here.

ray a · June 2003

Along the same line, I have heard that a "Recreation Committee" can lead to NLRA problems.

How much authority would this committee have? Would they set policy or just be advisory? What if they wanted to make a particular policy that you felt was not advisable based on your HR knowledge and were unable to persuade the others? Who has final authority?

Parabeagle · June 2003

Ditto. Be very careful. Sometimes these "personnel committees" degenerate into tribunals or worse. When I first started here, one of my first challenges was disbanding an informal circle of managers who felt that no personnel action should be taken against any employee without their input. The first time a supervisor showed enough backbone to discipline (and eventually terminate) a nonperforming employee, these managers were actually upset that they weren't consulted about the disciplinary action, despite the fact they had no supervisory authority or operational control over the affected individual. I was flabbergasted! Long story short, be careful.

MrCreosote · June 2003

The last thing I would ever do is create another committee. We do the HR stuff because we are the experts. We know how to create policies and evaluations, and we are more capable of treating employees fairly than anyone else. If your employees think they're being treated unfairly, you should address that, but a committee is not a solution. In my opinion, it will just be an obstacle between you and the solution - a way to get nothing done and spread out the responsibility for getting nothing done. You can form a committee to decide who will be on the committeee, etc..

As an HR professional, I do not participate in Operations committees or Accounting committees. If I were asked to be on an accounting committee I would ask why we hired accountants.

Nothing personal, I just don't like committees...

gillian2 · June 2003

They won't feel any better when the committee is made up primarily of managers.

maryfmurray · June 2003

We have a have Personnel Committee who review policies? The committee is comprised of managers from different divisions in the company, along with the Personnel Manager. This committee gives input on ideas for new policies and presents them to our Executive Director. A new policy may affect a different program in a different way so the committee places as many issues on the table that you can possibly think of. We created a snow policy that took our organization two years to write because of the input from the committee. Our Board has the final say over any policy decisions.

mbeam · June 2003

When we enact new or update existing policies, I typically send it out for our managers to review prior to sending it out company-wide. It has worked quite well as we have more buy-in when the final version is sent out. Be sure to use it wisely though and only send items that you are willing to change your view on (dress code & where to hold the annual picnic versus any item mandated by the state or federal government)

This is not a forum that would be used to discuss personnel decisions such as hiring, promoting or terminating employees.

Frenchie · June 2003

Thanks to all of you for your input. This is a great forum.

Don D · June 2003

I can't imagine personally wanting to create yet another committee, especially not one that interfaced in any way with 'personnel policies' and HR functions. The last thing I would want to do is suggest by implication that HR decisions, policies and processes are open to debate by committee. Ironically I just reviewed a file I inherited in this new job. It's a file containing the monthly minutes of an ongoing 'Employee Council'. Three years worth of minutes. Typical items in the minutes: Why do people in assembly get to spit and chew when machining cannot? What about the lights in the parking lot that are still not replaced? How can we get writeups out of the personnel file after the commitment has been met? Why do supervisors not listen to our suggestions? Why do supervisors ask for our suggestions? Why can't we put fans on the assembly side jut because we have helium there? Why do we have to bring a doctor's note? Why do I have to schedule vacation in advance? What about people who take up two parking spaces? Why is my supervisor in a bad mood all the time?

I understand that people need a voice and need opportunities to give and receive feedback, but this file indicates to me a terrible time-wasting exercise. We also have a suggestion box and everybody has computerized access to a suggestion system for improvements plus we have multiple monthly group meetings by managers and supervisors. Seems to be overkill to me. A new committee? No way! Maybe someone can correct my perception of this.

Shawn · June 2003

We have a saying...........if you want to kill an idea, then send it to committee! Keep control in HR where it belongs. Who should be making the discipline decisions, the janitor?

Trinity · June 2003

I agree with Don. We have a suggestion box to enable employees to have a voice for their complaints and suggestions as well. Being a credit union, we do have a committee of sorts to approve policies..that being our volunteer board of directors. But they are management, so it doesn't really apply.

We do have one employee team called the "Funkadelic Posse" (they named themselves) whose job it is to come up with ideas to make the work environment fun and upbeat and to suggest ways to improve morale. They recognize employee birthdays, anniversaries, etc. They aslo arrange employee get togethers like a pot luck dinner after work, and work with Marketing to coordinate special events and promotions our credit union is running. So far it has worked very well. It is composed of an employee from each dept. with one manager and VP as advisors..completely voluntary.

This is the only committee of sorts we plan on having..

gillian2 · June 2003

As usual, it depends on the culture of the organization, or in the case of my former employer the staff council (elected non-exempt employees) was a way of making a group who had been working in an abusive work environment feel like they had a voice - and they did, too. I made sure at the beginning that it was merely a sharing of information in both directions and it worked very well. I have no idea what happened to the group after I was no longer employed.

Don D · June 2003

I've been told by attorneys that recognizing and meeting with such groups is defacto recognition with a quasi usion, as it were, and that this makes a union campaign guy's eyes light up with glee. Especially if they are meeting with management and representing the concerns of a group or of others and are returning to that group or to others with information shared with them or gathered during the meetings. The ones I've participated in in past places of employment were more like a committee of ee's making a list of gripes to read off at the meeting, management returning at the next meeting with answers to those gripes, even making and posting minutes of these meetings on bulletin boards. Caution is the word of the day. The downside is the value of this sort of thing in organizing unions.

gillian2 · June 2003

That's the typical "take zero risk" legal response. There is a risk to everything and my research said that so long as we stayed away from addressing group concerns we would be OK. There is a fine line of course, but I think that the risk of that group turning into a union was next to zero and the benefits were much greater.

Don D · June 2003

> my research said that so long as we stayed away from
>addressing group concerns we would be OK.

But that's literally impossible. Have you ever been in a group meeting of employees, standing or sitting at a head table sort of arrangement, and NOT been asked about or presented with 'group concerns'? Typically the meetings digress to precisely nothing but that.

gillian2 · June 2003

The fine line is what you do with the concerns, which could be "group concerns". The finesse is how you respond so it isn't literally impossible, just requires finesse so that the exchange is not negotiating, not responding directly to concerns but sharing information.

Don D · June 2003

In other words, "Perfecting the fine art of Bull-Sh---ing your employees into thinking you answered their question without having done so. I see. I will try to improve on that skill. x:o

gillian2 · June 2003

No, that is dishonest and doesn't work. One issue was the funding of a new college. The employees, as did a lot of people, thought that the funding was coming out of the budgets of the other colleges, thus impacting them. The VP of Finance was a guest speaker at the next meeting and explained where the start up money came from. It was nothing more than an exchange of information - there were no changes as a result of the meetings.

njjel · June 2003

We are unionized and have a labor/management committee. I have yet to see anything good come from those meetings! It is unfortunate.

Needtoknow · June 2003

We had such a committee until it became quite political and the employees suffered rather than benefitted from it. This committee was comprised of representative senior managers who would review all requests for new hires. Given that our Company, as probably most, work within a budget for FTE's, these managers would fight for their own resources at the expense of anothers. In essence, they would lobby to fill a position, without considering multi-tasking and conserving resources. We are a small company <100 ees, and this type of territorial grab simply didn't work for us.

Personnel Committees

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