How a Digital Employee Relations Tracker Supports HR Functions

Maintaining good employee relations is essential to a healthy workplace, but employee relations issues can be hard to track and measure. Employee satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, and performance issues are all interconnected, and any one of them can have a big impact on productivity, compliance, and company culture.

With the rise of remote work, an increase in leave of absence laws, and other trends in the human resources department, HR professionals need new ways to track employee relations cases and the metrics associated with them.

Here’s why a digital employee relations tracker can be so impactful for HR teams and how you can use HR automation to keep tabs on real-time ER case data.

What Is an Employee Relations Tracker?

An employee relations tracker is a tool that HR departments use for employee relations case management. While small businesses might get by with Excel spreadsheets and rudimentary templates, larger organizations can benefit from HR case management software with automated workflows and built-in reporting dashboards.

Ideally, an employee relations tracker provides:

• Checklists for common ER processes
• Detailed recordkeeping to ensure compliance
• Automatic notifications and follow-up reminders
• Communications between involved parties and external stakeholders
• Analytics to track employee relations trends over time

Essentially, an employee relations tracker helps you navigate a case from start to finish. A tracker may be part of a comprehensive HR case management platform that also supports performance management and other HR functions.

What Can You Track With an Employee Relations Tracker?

When you use an employee relationship management platform like Pulpstream, you can track a range of employee relations issues, from disciplinary processes to performance improvement planning. Here are just a few of the most important things to use it for.

Complaints

Employee complaints always need to be taken seriously, no matter how large or small. Complaints about unequal pay or a hostile work environment may expose a breach of employment law, while others may be due to confusion over company policies.

Use an employee relations tracker to log complaints from team members — including anonymous ones — and ensure they’re handled appropriately.

Incidents

Incident management encompasses a broad range of cases, from workplace safety violations to employee misconduct. Incidents may result in filing business insurance claims, workers’ compensation claims, and other paperwork, giving you even more moving parts to track and multiple parties to deal with.

An employee relations case management system helps you store everything in one place, maintain a paper trail, and comply with your reporting obligations.

Investigations

Workplace investigations may involve interviews with a complainant, witnesses, and other involved parties. You’ll also need to gather and document evidence, including photos, videos, voice recordings, email threads, and more.

Employee relations software like Pulpstream makes it easy to attach documents to individual cases, storing them securely in the cloud for future reference.

Resolutions

Some employee relations issues can be resolved quickly, while others take months or years. Use an AI-powered chatbot to provide instant responses to simple issues, and case management tools to assign and manage complex ones. Both options are available as part of the Pulpstream platform.

Tracking case resolution rates and time to resolution can serve as good benchmarks for the effectiveness of your employee relations team.

3 Key Benefits of Using an Employee Relations Tracker

An employee relations tracker can help you monitor employee satisfaction and address employee engagement issues before they become a problem. Tardiness, absenteeism, and employee complaints can all be a sign of an unhealthy work environment, so use an employee relations tracker to identify issues and increase employee retention.

While you can use traditional methods to track employee relations, here are three key benefits of using a digital employee relations tracker.

1. Streamlined Case Management

Employee relations issues may move through the hands of multiple team members before resolution, especially complex cases that require significant oversight. Emails, Excel spreadsheets, and manual workflows can lead to errors, missing documents, miscommunications, and other issues, delaying prompt resolutions.

With a cloud-based case management platform like Pulpstream, everything is stored in a central system, making handoffs between team members a straightforward process. Employees can even log in to a self-service portal to get updates on their case.

2. Improved Regulatory Compliance

As employment laws become more complex, an employee relations tracker is essential for legal protection. It creates a digital paper trail, serving as evidence that you did your due diligence before taking disciplinary action or terminating an employee.

Pulpstream’s AI-powered recommendation engine can even check your actions for HR compliance, for example, by verifying eligibility for a leave of absence. Check out our HR compliance checklist for 2026 to see what else should be on your radar.

3. Real-Time Analytics

An employee relations tracker can help you manage individual cases but also zoom out to see the bigger picture. From performance reviews to exit interviews, you can use HR data analytics to monitor employee relations issues, measure employee engagement, and take proactive steps to improve job satisfaction and reduce turnover rates.

It’s not about turning people into data but about using data to better understand your employees’ needs and foster a positive work environment. Conduct surveys and ask follow-up questions whenever you identify an unexpected trend.

How HR Software Supports Data-Driven Employee Relations

Effective employee relations requires HR teams to know what their employees want and to respond promptly to complaints and other workplace issues. By using an employee relations tracker to inform your decision-making and strategic initiatives, you can be proactive rather than reactive, giving you an advantage over your competitors.

Modern employee relations software integrates directly with your other HR tools, so you can improve the employee experience across the board. For example, organizations that invest in modern leave management experiences report 60-75% reductions in administrative time and increased employee satisfaction (4.2-4.8 vs. 3.0 out of 5) compared to baselines.

Whether you want to measure employee sentiment or address employee engagement issues, a cloud-based employee relations tracker centralizes information in one place, allowing you to make data-driven decisions that wouldn’t be possible with traditional processes. Additionally, a self-service portal supports faster resolution times with automatic notifications and built-in communications between stakeholders.

As HR technology continues to advance, organizations that implement new tools to track employee relations will be able to provide a better experience than those who don’t. They can also reduce compliance costs thanks to automatic record-keeping, process standardization, and AI-powered recommendations.

Track and Improve Employee Relations With Pulpstream

Employee relations touches on every aspect of the employee experience, from incidents and investigations, to leave of absence management and even the onboarding process for new hires. At every step of the way, employee expectations are increasing and HR compliance obligations are growing more complex.

Without a centralized platform for managing employee issues and tracking employee relations, it can be hard to gauge sentiment and take action. It can also be difficult to maintain the paper trail you need to show you’ve done your due diligence when it comes to investigations and audits.

Pulpstream supports employee relations with digital workflows, automatic document generation, integrated reporting dashboards, and more. Use our built-in AI engine to analyze patterns in employee relations and get actionable recommendations. From employee counseling to disciplinary action, Pulpstream handles it all in one place.

Request a demo today to see how it works!