Grievance handling procedure in Reliance Infocomm Limited

To develop a “Grievance handling procedure” for Reliance Infocomm after studying in detail the types and causes of grievances those are specific to Reliance Communication Limited.

Objectives:

To frame a Grievance Redressal Procedure for Reliance Infocomm Limited.

To analyze the types of grievances that existed among the employees of Reliance Infocomm Limited.

To obtain suggestions on the kind of Grievance Redressal Procedures from the employers of Reliance Infocomm Limited.

Introduction:

Every employee has certain expectations which he thinks must be fulfilled by the organization he is working for. When the organization fails to do this, he develops a feeling of discontent or dissatisfaction. When an employee feels that something is unfair in the organization, he is said to have a grievance.

In the Industrial Relations language, Grievance is defined as anything which irritates or tends to make work conditions unsatisfactory and thereby harbors a discontent or dissatisfaction arising anything connected with the company that an employee thinks, believes or even feels, unfair, unjust. In this sense many of the controversial issues in Industrial Organizations may be said to arise as a result of incept or ill-advised handling or neglect of grievances which individually may appear trivial but collectively may become explosive.

The basic objective of the project is to frame a Grievance Redressal Procedure for Reliance Infocomm Limited and to analyze the types of grievances that existed among the employees of Reliance Infocomm Limited.

Telecommunications Industry IN India

The telecommunications industries in India are highly competitive. The growth rates in the number of telecommunication lines (both fixed and mobile) have been growing quite significantly, teledensities have been steadily improving and the ratio of mobile to fixed communications has crossed unity. In addition to the distribution of telecommunications services, India has a sizeable telecommunications equipment manufacturing industry. India has followed a policy of establishing a stand alone public laboratory, which was charged with the responsibility of developing a family of digital switching equipments and then transferring this generated technology to domestic public and private sector telecom equipment manufacturers. The telecommunications industry is a good example of the fact while having cheap factor endowments is necessary for a country to establish its presence in the international market; ability to move up the innovation ladder is a sufficient condition for that to occur.

India is been considered to be the emerging technological giant from the developing world. India spent about one percent of their GDP on R&D and have a growing number of patents issued in the US to their local inventors. India is an acknowledged powerhouse in embedded software, business software in general, chip designs and in pharmaceuticals. India has one of the largest telecommunications networks in the world. Reliance Infocomm is part of a large Indian conglomerate namely Reliance Industries. The American telecoms company, Qualcomm that pioneered the CDMA technology, holds about 4 per cent of the shares of Reliance Infocomm. Qualcomm makes money from royalties every time a chipset is inserted into CDMA phones and other network equipment as well as from license fees. Further based on my discussions with Midas Communications, it could be seen that the order from Reliance Infocomm has led to a large quantum of orders from both elsewhere within the country and from abroad. For instance, following test-run with 25,000 CorDect systems in 24 cities across nine states for over an year, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has recently awarded a contract for over 0.6 million CorDect lines. The BSNL contract is worth around Rs. 7 billion and is divided among Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd (HFCL), Indian Telephone Industries Ltd (ITI), and Electronic Corporation of India (ECI), Shyam Telecom and Hindustan Teleprinters Ltd (HTL).

Literature Review

Introduction

In a broader perspective, any discontent or dissatisfaction, real or imaginary, experienced, by an employer about his or her employment constitutes a grievance. In their working lives, employees occasionally become aggrieved at the treatment meted out to them by the supervisors or the management on certain service conditions managerial decisions, practices, etc.,

A grievance should be treated as a “show cause” issued by the workmen against the management by an undertaking. Grievances can arise mainly under two conditions, namely:

When management attempts or does something which it is not expected to do.

When the management fails or refrains from doing something which it is expected to do.

Thus a grievance is also an indicator of the organizational health. The complainant may or may not specifically assign reasons for dissatisfaction. But once the complaint is formally presented it has got be investigated and a solution is found out.

According to Beach, D.S, and Personnel Administration, of People at Work, 1965, “Any dissatisfaction or feeling of injustice in connection with one’s employment situation that is brought to the notice of management.”

According to S. Chandra, Grievance Procedure: A Survey of Practices in India, 1968, the following causes have been given of employee grievances: Promotions, Amenities, Continuity of services, Compensation, Disciplinary action, Fines, Increments, Leave, Medical Benefits, Nature of the job, Payment of wages, Acting promotion, Recovery of dues, Safety appliance, Superannuation, Super session, Transfer, Victimization and Conditions of work.

“The handling of special grievances may involve special steps as well as, or in place of, skipping certain steps within normal grievance channels”, by Petterfer, J.C, “Effective Grievance Arbitration” in California Management Review, 1970.

According to Shea, John, “Would Foremen Unionize?” in Personnel Journal, 1970, “There are always time limits between different steps of the grievance procedure. Additional steps are taken within a grievance system when labour is dissatisfied with the solution put forward by the lower line management.”

According to Jucius, J.M., Personnel Management, 1971, ” A grievance is any discontent or dissatisfaction, whether expressed or not, whether valid or not, arising out of anything connected with the company which an employee thinks, believes or even feels to be unfair, unjust or inequitable.”

“Any real or imagined feeling of personal injustice which an employee has concerning his employment relationship” by Keith Davis, Human Relations at Work, 1971.

“A written complaint filed by an employee and claiming unfair treatment” by Dale Yoder, Personnel Management and Industrial Relations, 1972.

The Indian Institute of personnel Management, Calcutta, in the year 1973, has briefly summarized the grievance procedure in the following five steps:

In the first instance, the grievance should be settled at the lowest level, that is, the employee should raise his grievance with his immediate superior.

It should be made clear to the employee that he may appeal if he does not get satisfaction from his immediate superior. He should know who the next person in the echelon of management is to whom he should refer his grievance.

The grievance should be speedily dealt with

If the grievance is against any instructions issued by the superior, the employee should clearly understand that, in the interest of discipline, the instructions must first be carried out before the grievance can be considered and decided upon. It is only when this has been done that the employer will register his protest and set the grievance handling procedure in motion.

It should be clearly understood by the employee that there will be no recourse to any official machinery till the grievance redressal procedure has been set in motion and that, in the event the employee is still dissatisfied, there will be no direct action by either party which might prejudice the case or raise doubts while the grievance is being investigate.

“The grievance is usually more formal in character than a complaint. It can be valid or ridiculous, and must grow out of something connected with company operations or policy. It must involve an interpretation or application of the provisions of the labour contract” says Flippo, Principles of Personnel Management, 1976.

Chapman, Brad J., 1976, observes: “An employee’s concern for his job security may prompt a grievance over a transfer, work assignment, or promotion. Sometimes bad relations between supervisors and subordinates are to blame: this is often the cause of grievances over ‘fair treatment.’ Organizational factors like automated jobs or ambiguous job descriptions that frustrate or aggravate employees are other potential causes of grievances. Union activism is another cause. For example, the union may solicit grievances from workers to underscore ineffective supervision. Problem employees are yet another cause of grievances. These are individuals, who, by their nature, are negative, dissatisfied, and grievance prone.”

According to Sikula, A.F., Personnel Administration, 1978, “It is not possible that all the complaints of the employees would be settled by first-line supervisors, for these supervisors may not have had a proper training for the purpose, and they may lack authority. Moreover, there may be personality conflicts and other causes as well.”

According to Brian Bemmels, Janice R.Foley, a common criticism of grievance procedure research is the lack of theoretical grounding for much of the research done prior to 1985. Several earlier reviews of the grievance literature raised the challenge of improving on the theoretical aspects of grievance research.

According to Michael Corcoran, 2006 a solicitor in the Steeles employment team, offers advice on grievance procedures:

“The aim of a grievance procedure is to encourage consistency, transparency and fairness in the handling of workplace problems or complaints. It should allow the employer to seek an informal resolution where appropriate but allow for more formal proceedings should the circumstances demand.”

The grievance procedures must be followed in relation to “any grievance about action by any employer that could form the basis of a complaint by an employee to an Employment Tribunal”. A ‘grievance’ is “a complaint by an employee about action which his employer has taken or is contemplating taking in relation to him”.

Research Methodology

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES:

To gain familiarity with a phenomenon or to achieve new insides into it.

To portray accurately the characteristics of a particular individual situation or a group.

To determine the frequency with which something occurs with which it is associated with something else.

To test a hypothesis of a casual relationship between variables.

RESEARCH TECHNIQUE:

A research technique refers to the behavior and instruments we use in performing research operations. Here, regarding this project the techniques of Questionnaire is used with attitude skills, nominal scales, ordinal scales, and interval scales, and ratio scales mass behavioral scales.

RESEARCH DESIGN:

A research design is the arrangement of conditions for collection and analysis of date in manner that aims to combine relevance to the research purpose with economy in procedure.

Regarding this project, descriptive research design is applied. Here, Descriptive research design is concerned with describing the dissatisfaction of each individual on his job and the diagnostic research design helps in diagnostic research design helps in determine the frequency with which something occurs or it’s associated with something else. These two research designs helps in understand the characteristics in a given situation, think systematically about aspects in a given situation, offers idea for probe and research help to make certain simple decision.

The researcher adopted random sampling method which includes 100 executives of Reliance Communication Limited.

Conclusion

In conclusion it is very important to remove the misunderstandings between the misunderstandings between the employer and employee. Human relations are the most important.

It is the duty of the employer to remove the conflict from the minds of his employees and to localize problems and to find out ways and means for redressal of grievance. For achieving this goal an effective grievance procedure will certainly contribute to industrial peace and contended or happy labour.