The Impact of Technology on the Employee Relationship

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The Impact of Technology on the Employment Relationship “The employment relationship has fundamentally changed in the last quarter century, thus creating significant challenges for managers in today’s organisations.” Technology is undoubtedly the greatest game-changer of the post-Industrial Revolution employment relationship. While technology has enabled organisations to improve numerous aspects of their operations and productivity, it has also proven to permanently alter the relationship that employees have both with one another, as well as with their employers. With these ever-evolving changes to the employment relationship, a number of challenges have been presented to managers that will prove to dramatically impact the way that human relations management is shaped moving forward. Organisational Socialisation – The Onboarding Experience In June 2003, Melissa Montgomery was hired to work as a service manager in the Fremont, California office of Papé Material Handling, Inc., a US-based corporation. The location of Papé’s headquarters in Eugene, Oregon, is located more than 800 kilometers from the company’s Fremont branch. Upon being hired, Montgomery was informed that she would spend her first week as a Papé employee in Eugene meeting her support team and being trained on both how the company functioned, and what programs she would need to familiarise herself with before starting in the Fremont office. In a telephone interview, she described her response to the training experience (Montgomery, 2014): “It was a very exciting experience for me, as it was the first time an employer had paid for me to do any kind of travel. It was my first job out of college, so I felt a strange sort of pride in being sent to Eugene, as though I was, for lack of a better word, an investment. I stayed in a nice hotel, and had all my meals and transportation paid for; it made me

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