Here is how an organisation can make employee engagement more meaningful
Sukriti YaduwanshiSep 5, 2017, 02.54 PM
The relationship between organisations and their employees is a delicate one.
Q. Why does employee engagement matter?
“Engaged employees”, as contrasted with vanilla employee engagement initiatives, are one of the most powerful elements for an organisation’s sustainable growth strategy. Engaged employees have a high degree of belonging (to the organisation and the “cause”), are focused, productive, creative, and importantly happy! Often, if you hire right, they are better team players as well. These are elements integral to success for every corporate. Engaged employees also build longer careers with an organisation, resulting in lower attrition rates and higher performance levels. This also means that hidden costs of attrition are lower.
Q. What is a workplace culture like where employees are actively engaged, and how can organisations create this winning culture?
Organisation cultures build up over a period of time. There are no rights or wrongs, no easy answers and “cultures” can be “felt” more often than measured. To create a “successful” (successful is what works for your organisation) organisation culture, business imperatives, growth opportunities, and mind-sets for success need to be identified and nurtured, slowly, surely and consistently.
And these “macro-factors” need to be cascaded to all the teams and individuals that work in the organisation. This cascading is where “employee engagement” sits.
Q. How does employee engagement impact the bottom line?
In today’s context, technology has resulted in significant “democratisation of ideas”. Engaged employees, in an open culture, generate new ideas, and often find ways of implementing them in their own spheres of influence.
Vibrant organisations spot these successes and scale them up into winning initiatives resulting in enhanced earnings and /or new revenue streams. At another level, as mentioned earlier, engaged employees build longer careers with an organisation, resulting in lower attrition rates and higher performance levels. This also means that costs of attrition are lower (loss of time and consequent productivity, onboarding costs etc).
Q. How can smaller
In start-ups, creating engaged employees always starts with hiring “right” and is often not about large-scale engagement programs. A high level of an “insurgent” mind-set (borrowing the phrase from a book read recently), a passion for growth, an ability to pivot and that too fast, spotting opportunity in adversity and a strong focus on delivery should lead to “engaged employees” championing the problem the start-up aims to solve. A sense of belonging and an open culture is central to this theme.
Q. What trends and issues do you see arising in employee engagement in the coming years?
The “millennials” entering the workforce today have very different aspirations and expectations. They are looking at experience rather than engagement. It is becoming essential for the leadership to handle the expectations as well to make engagement more meaningful. In this context, employee engagement programs need to focus on the following aspects – create a sense of achievement, contribute to a “legacy”, have a positive impact on people including but not limited to creating happiness!
Q. Give us one relatively simple way that a company or manager can start increasing employee engagement immediately.
A lot has been written about the need for organisations to practice “diversity” in today’s environment. However, one sometimes under-stated aspect of diversity is “diversity of thought”. While diversity at an organisation level becomes the business imperative, each and every employee can, by becoming more open to new ideas (“diversity of thought”), encourage creativity and experimentation, an aspect critical in today’s democratised world of opportunity (employees may tend to gravitate towards workplaces where they have the independence to “make a difference”).