Economic Meltdown Increases Pressure on Employers and Employees
Acas, an agency working on employment relations, recently stated that due to recession and the reactionary measures of companies towards it, the tension level and disputes have increased in the offices.
Acas receives employment disputes and also gives advice through its helpline. There has been a more than 20% rise in the number of unfair dismissal conciliation cases among other employment and workplace stress related disputes. There has also been an increase in request for redundancy advice.
According to Acas Chair, Ed Sweeney the data shows that both employers and employees are under pressure due to economic meltdown. The key to good people management is having a sound stress management system in place, click on CIPD training course, which imparts training to managers in necessary skills in this regard.
Acas has received 18% more conciliation cases from the Employment Tribunal Service according to its annual report - the total number of cases being 78,000 in the current financial year. The total number of unfair dismissal cases received by the agency this year is 55,000 which means the number has gone up by 12,000. As compared to last two years, the rise has been close to 20% which is quite substantial.
Redundancy advice calls have also increased significantly. There has been a 100% increase in the number of such calls in the financial year 2008-2009. There have been 10 to 15 thousand calls every week in the past year, a large proportion of which were for redundancy advice.
