Grievance Handling Procedure

Principles suggested by the Indian Institute of Personnel Management for addressing the grievance are as follows.

a. A grievance should be dealt within the limits of the first line supervisor.

b. The appellate authority should be made clear to the employee so that if he cannot get satisfaction from his immediate supervisor, he should know the next step.

c. The grievance should be dealt with speedily.

d. In establishing a grievance procedure, if the grievance is against an instruction given by a superior in the interest of order and discipline, the instructions must be carried out first and them only employee can register his protest.

There should be no recourse to official machinery of conciliation unless the procedure has been carried out without reaching any solutions.

Grievance Machinery:

A Grievance machinery is usually thought of in connection with a company that deals with a labour union. Though the union must be given some credit for stimulating the installation of such procedures, all companies, whether unionized or not, should have established and known methods of processing grievances.

To establish a new grievance machinery, workers in each department and each shift shall select, from among themselves and for a period of not less than one year at a time, departmental representatives, and forward the list of persons so selected to the management. Where the unions in the undertaking are in a position to submit an agreed list of names, recourse to election may not be necessary when a works committee is functioning satisfactorily, for the Works Committee’s member of a particular constituency shall act as the departmental representative.

Grievance Handling :

The details of the grievance procedure vary from industry to industry and from trade union to trade union because of the variations in the size of organization, trade union strength, the management philosophy, the company traditions, industrial practices and in the cost factor. An important aspect of the grievance machinery is the reassurance given to an individual employee by the mere fact that there is a mechanism available to him which will consider his grievance in a dispassionate and detailed manner, and that his point of view will be heard and given due consideration. An employee’s conception of his problem(s) may be quite biased. Venting his grievance and being heard gives him a feeling of being cared for. He gets it “off his chest”