Managing Global Employee Relations: Top 10 Strategies for Success in 2025 — 6-10

Hello. I’m Alan Wild and welcome to the Wild side podcast Managing employee relations in global and millennial times … 10 minutes, or so, at a time.  Today’s episode is part two of the Wild side podcasts that set out ten strategies for success in managing international employee relations today …. and going forward.  As I explained in the earlier pod, I discovered as I worked through my top 10 it had to be split into two episodes of “five” each … so here are numbers six to ten.  If you haven’t yet listened, the first five were Visibility and Trust; Engaging Early; Assured Rapid Response; Risk Mapping and Prediction; and Creating an Event Calendar. Six to ten are; Building a Global Strategy; Building Capability; Modern Forms of Collective Voice; Employee Relations beyond the Employment Contract; and Successful Networking. 

More of all that in a moment …  … as you know, I’m Alan Wild, senior adviser on global employee relations for the HR policy Association … the leading voice of CHRO’s today.  

So – number six – Building a global ER strategy. Logically this should have been number one … but I wanted to get some of the practical building blocks covered in episode one into your mind to prevent this section becoming a cover all. This may seem obvious, but step one in the ER strategy is being absolutely clear what it is you seek to achieve.  If everyone in the ER space cannot explain with confidence what they exist to achieve to business leaders in a few sentences you will face an uphill battle. This is not a list of objectives and has to anchored in the contribution you will make to the success of the business.   You will have your own idea … but for me the role of the function is to enable business leaders to implement business decisions quickly and effectively. At the individual level this is by assuring high levels of employee commitment … what we often call employee relations and is associated with anticipating, listening and responding to employee voice and resolving individual concerns quickly and fairly.  

At the collective level this about maximizing management decision making autonomy in the face of various forms of organized labor … what we often call labor relations.  For an international company, equating the maximization of decision-making autonomy with a simple message of being anti-union or anti works council. The approach had to be much more nuanced.  In Amazon we described it like this. First, to be union free where it is possible and in the business interest. Be mindful that in many countries the business interest is best achieved by establishing positive relationships with employee representative bodies.  Number two builds on this and is assuring constructive relationships with unions and works councils that genuinely represent employee interests.  These last words are important. Assuring that works council genuinely represent the employees they serve and are not driven by the priorities of their trade union or their own individual personal or political agenda. Number three builds further, and that is isolating and eliminating unrepresentative activists. The main route to this is assuring active participation of employees in ballots and elections. 

Some thoughts on strategy there but in sum the company’s HR strategy should have a strong employee relations component and every business plan should have an employee relations plan to support it.  

Number seven is building employee relations capability. The role of the employee relations function is to establish and maintain an infrastructure that delivers business objectives and fixes major problems. From a day-to-day point of view, employee relations is managed by leaders at all levels of the organization who make multiple decisions every day. We all know that some of the biggest collective issues come from the escalation of leader decisions that adversely affect an individual or group and are not felt fair by the workforce generally.  Above the individual level, local works councils ae often managed by local managers and HR business partners rather than ER professionals.  Most companies neither need nor can afford large numbers of employee relations specialists who are close enough to business operations to contribute in a timely and knowledgeable manner.  Employees trust the leaders that are closest to them, so it makes sense to give them the skills to manage employee relations activity. This is a one size fits all mandatory online program.  That may make sense on cyber security and business conduct but not ER.  The training delivered should be based on the specific risks that come out of the risk management and measurement process in the first podcast.  

Eight is about listening and responding to alternative forms of employee voice.  With the massive growth in the influence of social networks the idea that where there are no unions or works councils, employees do not have or wish to exercise collective voice.  With an individual grievance employees are less likely to use a slow and bureaucratic company run procedure than they are to resort to their application of choice whether it is Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram or WeChat.  These are the spaces where employees spend most of their lives and they are not subject to internal restrictions or limitations. For evidence ask the former CEO of Uber, Travis Kalinek who lost his job following media escalation of a Facebook blog by ex-Uber employee Susan Fowler titled “It has been a strange year at Uber.  Susan resigned from Uber because she was dissatisfied by the way the internal grievance process had deal with her allegations of harassment. No-one is suggesting invasive monitoring of employee social behaviors but much of the critical commentary is in the pubic domain. After all that is the way the mainstream media and employment lawyers find their stories.

Nine is working beyond the employment contract.  The idea that employee relations responsibilities are limited to those with an employment relationship are long gone. Let me pick up three flavors of this.  First, Google and others faced action from their own employees over their treatment of contractors. In India the high incidence of contract workers in manufacturing companies … often an 80/20 ration … is a source of friction.  Second, gig workers in Spain and Germany for example have been declared employees overnight.   In my time at Amazon over a 12 month period more than 30,000 gig workers were declared employees and we had no system for a conversion to employment that made any financial sense. Third … and I have a podcast on this … companies after being held responsible in courts for the employment behaviors of employers in their supply chain. This exploded after the Rana Plaza disaster that killed more than 1,000 workers in a Bangladesh clothing factory in 2013.  What was then “name and shame” power has now been built into national legal systems.

Finally, on a personal basis, make sure you are well networked and have a genuine interest in what is going on in employee relations, especially in other companies in your industry or geography.  No-one can know everything everywhere in the employee relations field.    When people ask me where my extensive knowledge comes from, fist I’ve worked in the filed for a long time, but more importantly I know a lot of people to call when I come across something new.  HR Policy Global – my company – do this formally as a network of almost 400 CHROs, but there are many, many less formal and informal networks.  On the issues of most interest to you and your company sources of information are virtually unlimited – just try Googling European Works Ciouncil.  Find the sites that are the most use to you … Labour Start for example on trade union news and spend 45 minutes a week hitting them. You can be proactive … when you read something interesting don’t hoard it, share it. This will build your network and the willingness to share.

So that completes my one to 10 for 2025. I hope you enjoyed it and came away with an idea or two.   If you want to learn more about what we do, participate in one of our formal programs or have a question on an issue we have, or have not yet, covered … you can get me on awild@chro.org(Opens in a new window) or on Linked In.  

I’m Alan Wild, and you’ve been listening to a walk on the wild side.