Introduction
Fife Oil, a European-based Oil company, has been experiencing challenges of favoritism. In addition, there has not been an effective way of airing out grievances and getting resolutions. This has led to low job satisfaction among the employees. Most of the staff have stated that they are willing to quit working for the company, which shows dissatisfaction. This paper will address how the company can improve its procedures and policies to ensure that the employees can voice their concerns and get resolutions. In addition, the research will propose an approach the company can take to resolve the perceptions of unfairness related to the allocation of shifts, pay rates, use of contracts, and overtime.
How Fife Oil Can Improve Policies and Procedures To Ensure Staff Can Adequately Voice Their Concerns
One of the main methods Fife Oil Company can use to ensure that its staff can adequately voice their concerns and get resolutions is documenting the procedures. Suppose something is important for a company’s success should be documented in the employee handbook (Reijers, 2021). When the policies and procedures are well documented, they make it easier for employees to follow them (Martin et al., 2021). The other importance of drafting the policies and procedures in writing is that they give the employees the confidence to apply them in case of any grievances. Fife Oil needs to keep updating workers on the handbook to ensure they do not become outdated and irrelevant. When the processes are well documented, they add more seriousness to the process, which is essential in boosting both the company and employees to use them appropriately (Martin et al., 2021). Thus, Fife Oil Company should document the policies and procedures in the employee handbook to ensure their staff can adequately voice their grievances.
The other main method should ensure that the company consistently applies the policies and procedures. When a company’s procedures and policies are adhered to and implemented equally by everyone from top to bottom, it increases employee confidence (Davidescu et al., 2020). If the rules of a company do not apply equally to all employees in an organization, it brings the issue of distrust. According to Sonmez Cakir & Adiguzel (2020), a company that deviates from its policies and procedures nullifies the employee’s importance. Thus, Fife Oil should set the expectation for consistency and review its policies regularly. The company should make this their culture and incorporate it into recurring meetings.
Fife Oil should ensure that they remove barriers to compliance with its policies and procedures. It is difficult for a company to get its employees to take policies and procedures seriously not unless they are easily accessible (Brooks et al., 2021). Therefore, it will be important for Fife Oil Company to inspect the producers, especially those requiring a specific order of steps, and look for the simplest way to eliminate the barriers. For instance, the policies and procedures for airing grievances may be a barrier by having only physical suggestion boxes at the offices. To eliminate this compliance barrier, the company can establish an online platform where employees can file complaints. This will make filing complaints more flexible and easier, encouraging the staff to raise their concerns.
Fife Oil Company should stay updated with the ever-changing laws and regulations regarding addressing employee concerns. For the company to have active and well-stipulated policies and procedures, the company should stay updated on the latest laws and regulations (Carnevale & Hatak, 2020). This implies that the company should consistently review the laws and update its policies based on the industry’s best practices. In addition, it should ensure the implementation of those changes and see-through changes that guarantee compliance with the new laws and regulations.
The company should schedule compliance audits regularly in the company. This is an effective method of testing the company’s systems to ensure they function effectively. When there are scheduled audits of the complaints system, the people in charge of operating it will ensure that the procedures and processes are working perfectly (Dharmasiri et al., 2021). In addition, when audits are taken, they will help the company to identify any bottlenecks in the complaints system (Kuang et al., 2020). For instance, conducting audits will ensure that the department in charge of addressing the employee concerns in the company solves every complaint. This will lead to a high compliance rate; thus, Fife Oil Company should conduct both scheduled and random audits on the compliance system to ensure that it functions well.
The policies and procedures for filling complaints should be reinforced with training. Fife Oil Company can introduce employee training to familiarize them with raising their complaints. They must differentiate between filing complaints and whistleblowing. Some employees are usually afraid of raising their complaints because they fear being taken as whistleblowers (Yoon, 2021). In addition, training employees remove the stigma of compliance by turning negative complaints into an opportunity to address social issues in the company. Thus, when training is done regularly, employees will be at ease in raising their concerns because they will not be intimidated by the process.
Fife Oil Company can set timelines for solving specific concerns to ensure that all concerns are addressed with a set timeline. When there are set deadlines for solving various issues, the department tasked with this responsibility will work more effectively (Brown et al., 2018). For instance, the company can stipulate that employee complaints should be addressed within two months and resolved. This move will make the process more transparent and proactive compared to the current process, which has no timelines.
Fife Oil Company should use tools and available software to simplify filing and to resolve a complaint. Since the world is in a digital era, it would be unrealistic for Fife Oil Company to dis-integrate its employee grievances system with technology. Effective tools make the complaint process easier by using technology to sort the issues raised by employees (Griep et al., 2021). For instance, if an employee files a complaint about fairness in the workplace, the use of technology through employee management systems will be able to capture the complaint and the resolution that it passed. This will ensure a clear record of the solved concerns for reference and a better employee-concerns management system.
Approaches that the Company Would Use to Solve Perceptions of Unfairness
Rates of Pay
Pay equity is one of the main motivators for employees to perform well in an organization. Thus, for Fife Oil Company to tackle the issue of unfairness regarding the rates of pay to contracts, one of the main actions the company can take is to launch a pay transparency initiative (Irfan et al., 2020). Fife Oil Company should evaluate different models to help them create more transparency in the payment systems, especially for temporary contractors. The company should publish the different contractors’ pay and justify the payment to ensure transparency in the organization. Transparent pay encourages the company’s employees and other interested parties to conduct internal audits of the services provided and the corresponding pay (Kim et al., 2018). In addition, this method will ensure that the company reduces the unfairness in the payment of employees.
Fife Oil Company should ensure that they balance expertise, potential, and market value. Many employees feel demotivated not because they are not given high pay but when they learn that they are not adequately compensated depending on their expertise, potential, and market value (Khalid & Nawab, 2018). Therefore, Fife Oil Company should use multiple perspectives to find clarity on the market value of the current engineering jobs. This information will help the managers to avoid bias, over-estimations, or under-estimations when considering compensation for the employee (Lollo & O’Rourke, 2020). Engineers are employees with higher potential, so they know their worth; hence compensating them fairly starts by identifying and managing them effectively. With adequate market research and integrations of these factors, Fife Oil Company should be able to avoid unfairness in the allocation of contracts.
The other strategy that the company can use is having a clear compensation strategy for all the job allocations. Fife Oil Company should benchmark against other companies in the industry and determine standard pay for all the job posts, whether temporary or permanent. This move will ensure that the company eliminates arbitrary salary decisions and ensure that employees are compensated fairly (Lollo & O’Rourke, 2020). The compensation strategy should be reviewed after a certain time and make adjustments if there are any discrepancies.
Allocation of Shifts
Allocating shifts was another challenge that the company employees regarded as unfair. For Fife Oil Company to ensure fair distribution of its shifts, it should consider various factors, including the qualifications of employees (Scully-Russ & Torraco, 2019). The managers should use the skills and competency criteria to ensure that employees assigned to any shift meet the required requirements (Ray & Pana-Cryan, 2021). The company should confirm that employees are in good standing before allocating shifts. This will reduce legal battles and demotivation of employees because they will consider the process fair.
The company should come up with different scheduling rules that should apply when writing the schedule. These rules should clearly outline the roles and maximum time each employee can get during the day and night shifts. Some factors to consider when preparing the schedule are the employee’s seniority, certifications, overtime payment, personal interests and other internal company rules (Bürgy et al., 2019). In addition, these rules should be known by all employees and, when applied effectively, can help reduce the unfairness in shift allocation.
Another important factor or the company to consider when scheduling shifts is availability. Employee availability issues are a significant contributor to schedule changes in an organization. This can include employee requests, vacations, leaves and other forms of circumstances that do not allow them to work on various shifts. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly contributed to workers’ flexibility, employers still face a major challenge regarding workers’ elder care, children and family needs (Uhde et al., 2020). Thus, the management should significantly rely on staff availability to create smooth schedules for their employees. For instance, in the case study, the engineer reports that he requires day shifts because he has a young family and feels that he is not adequately compensated for night shifts. Fife Oil Company should consider these factors in allocating shifts to the employees and ensure that each employee is satisfied with their working shift.
Due to technological advancement, Fife Oil Company should consider automating the shift assignment task. While the manual shift-assigning process is time-consuming and prone to bias, the company can consider the automated employee scheduling technology an option. This technology considers the company’s various rules, worker preferences, and availability (Zucchi et al., 2020). In addition, the technology has automatic standby filling, enabling it to make changes to employee shifts in case of an emergency. Using this technology would help eliminate shift bias by the employees because they will be aware that there is no favoritism in shift-making.
Use of Contracts and Overtime
Fife Oil Company has been accused of using contracts unfairly. This challenge can be solved by having clear and well-defined rules on when the company can hire based on contracts. Before hiring contract employees in the organization, some factors to consider are the skills needed, task priorities and labor availability (Reig-Botella et al., 2022). Regarding skills needed, the managers should hire contract workers when the skills needed for a specific task are unavailable from the permanent employees. This should be evaluated based on the qualification and abilities of the existing employees. Regarding task priorities, Fife Oil Company should only hire contracts if the work to be completed has a high priority, which makes it impossible for permanent employees to do (Högberg et al., 2019). The other factor is labor availability which should indicate that contacts should be given when there is no labor available within the organization to conduct the tasks. These rules will help to streamline the use of contracts in Fife Oil Company.
Employees are required to work on the agreed contract hours, or any work after that period is considered overtime. Thus, when employees work overtime, they should be compensated with a salary that does not fall below the country’s minimum wage (Högberg et al., 2019). The company should ensure that the overtime pay of all positions is outlined for the employees to enhance transparency in the process. Employees should be paid for working outside the contracted hours and performing duties that are not outlined in their employment contract. Thus, the company can use the transparency rule to ensure that all overtime payments are accounted for and displayed to other employees. This will reduce the unfairness in the company and ensure that all employees who work overtime are adequately compensated for their efforts.
Conclusion
Fife Oil, Company is experiencing major challenges which can derail its recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Employees are important resources of any company; therefore, Fife Oil should consider having fair procedures to increase their job satisfaction levels. To achieve this, the company needs to improve its policies and procedures by documenting the procedures of filing concerns, consistently applying the policies, removing barriers to compliance, updating its policies, and reinforcing training. In tackling the challenge of raters of pay, the company should launch transparency initiatives, balance expertise, potential, and market value, and have a clear compensation strategy. Regarding the allocation of shifts, the company should consider the qualification of employees, devise scheduling rules, consider the availability of employees, and use automatic shifting assignment technology. Finally, in addressing the issue of the use of contracts and overtime, the company can have well-articulated rules for using contracts and compensation of overtime.
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