What is employment relationship Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

What is employment relationship - Essay Example A good stable working environment, encouraged by good employment relationship, is critical as it has noteworthy implications on the health and well-being of employees. It is an imperative characteristic in any success of any business or organization within the service economy. Service economy is the term used to refer to the comparative importance of service when presenting products. Whilst many people look on the jobs created by the information economy as "high tech", in actuality and in many respects it is merely new levels of de-skilling and pay differentials. Some parts of the new information economy, such as telesales or call centres, and some information processing jobs such as web content production, have been likened to the sweatshops of traditional manufacturing industries. These jobs even have a high job insecurity ratio. As Belt, Richardson and Webster (2000) put it "Call centre operations do not constitute an 'industry' in the commonly accepted sense, but it is considered sensible to refer to call centres as an industry." So for all required purposes call centres are an excellent example of how employment relationships function within the service economy. Call centre agents are supposed to be friendly cheerful and helpful as we as customers tend to expect this kind of behavior from interactive service workers. This was perceived as "emotional labour" by Hochschild (1983) because a certain degree of emotional investment was required to produce the desired effect. It seems to be a new way to exploit the workers. Van Maanen and Kunda (1989) have said that "organizational culture management, only seem to want to mask managerial attempts to control not only what employees say and do but feel as well." Emotional management seems to have been organized even more efficiently and pushed to the next level. Emotional labour increases stress and decreases job satisfaction immensely. This is proved in the study of five call centres conducted by Deery, Iverson and Walsh in 2000, where "excessive demands on emotional labour lead to a higher propensity of stress, anxiety and emotional exhaustion amongst call centre agents". In her book: Human Resource Management and Occupational Health and Safety, Carol Boyd (2003) has said, "the role of call centre agents is dictated by the immediacy of the production process and a dependency on employees' personal characteristics to deliver high-quality service" and "this is where various techniques aimed at maintaining their sweetness will be deployed". Now thanks to the leap of technology managerial control can even delve and investigate every tiny detail of the call centre agents' work, offering scrupulous and immediate particulars on each agent's activities. The monitoring of the communications and activities of employees in the workplace in the UK mus t, however, be balanced with requirements under the Human Rights Act 1998 and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights; organizations must have regard to the private lives of individuals. Tight call-handling times and monitoring combine with performance targets to accelerate the pace of work, without gaining much job satisfaction. This tendency to micro manage results in a sense of self, which is vital to be lost; when agents feel that they are no longer in control of their lives and their