Employee Engagement: Another Opportunity to Challenge the People Riddle

Business leaders cutting across all industries, functional areas and size of operations have one common challenge: People. In fact, if we ask entrepreneurs and professionals in leadership positions to name  their top three challenges – the answer will be people, people and people.

The real issue is not only how to get the best resources but also  how to get the best out of them. . The first part – how to get the best resources depends upon the talent pool available in the market and the competition for it. External factors have a significant bearing on recruitment effectiveness. On the other hand, how to get the best out of the resources is internal to an organization and offers myriad opportunities for the innovative business leaders and HR managers to play around with. There are a large number of tools and frameworks available in the human resource domain to increase organizational performance, employee engagement is one of the foremost.

What is employee engagement?

Employee Engagement is the extent to which employee commitment, both emotional and intellectual, exists relative to accomplishing the work, mission, and vision of the organization. Engagement can be seen as a heightened level of ownership where each employee wants to do whatever they can for the benefit of their internal and external customers, for the success of the organization as a whole. [Source: Wiki]

Base Facts:

Only 31% of employees are actively engaged in their jobs. These employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. People that are actively engaged help move the organization forward. 88% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact quality of their organization's products, compared with only 38% of the disengaged. 72% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively affect customer service, versus 27% of the disengaged. Engaged employees feel a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them. [Source: Wiki]

Employees that are engaged can be considered strategic investments – as they often improve their respective organizations and make a strong impression on their customers. 

The Insight:

From this perspective, employee engagement directly affects business results. While there is an expectedhigh level of co-relation between employee motivation, loyalty and retention; employee engagement is clearly distinct from them. Intuitively employee motivation, loyalty and retention may also be pre-conditions to employee engagement but most certainly they do not ensure employee engagement. In this context employee engagement is an end in itself and becomes the cornerstone of business leadership focus. 

Five Actionable Points:

I have included some of the practices we as business leaders and HR managers can adopt  to align teams and individuals to the overall organizational objectives and incentivize them to focus their energies towards the same. 

Communicate – Values and Strategies: Have I consciously asked myself what values I want to pervade within the organization. Have I communicated the same. Most importantly – as much as saying what I want – have I unambiguously articulated what I do not want. Generous use of anecdotes and live examples maybe very effective in the process. 

Ensure fast tracking of talent, limit cross-subsidization amongst employees – As an entrepreneur, I can vouch that employee engagement in an organization can dip when highly engaged employees leave for more exciting career options. On one plane, as an entrepreneur it gives me great pleasure when colleagues get fabulous breaks after working with us. It is a re-validation of one of the purposes of becoming an entrepreneur. But from a business point of view this an opportunity to improve. Business leaders have to spot talent regularly and then fast track them. Leaders will have to show the gumption to have exceptionally talented and engaged resources supersede their seniors. 

Very often because of lack of objective wealth creation measurements the contribution of highly engaged resources goes un-noticed. Thus sometimes they get a 50% hike [when the average raise is say 20%], when actually they deserve a 200% hike. Timely and objective rewards and remuneration that are aligned with both tangible and intangible wealth creation mechanisms are crucial to engagement levels of an organization. Engaged employees need to be proactively identified and handsomely rewarded both by giving them  strategic and challenging roles and by giving fast track remuneration growth. At the same time, less-engaged people – to be incentivized to be engaged, or encouraged to re-look at their involvement with the organization. 

Aspiration & Ambition: As I see, every engaged individual will have to ambitious. Every human being has a huge dream. Therefore every human being is potentially high on aspirations. For many this is reflected  in their behavior and actions. However most others this attribute is dormant. To unlock this attribute, we have to make employees who are  self-sufficient and self-assured. Essentially it is about helping people break out of their comfort zones and encouraging  them to fly high. Theoretically, eco-system initiatives and peer group activities can help. However if we try to dig out empirical / anecdotal evidence, individuals or teams changing their aspiration and ambition levels based on organization interventions have highest acceptance when resources have high levels of self-assurance and are innately in sync with themselves. This takes us to the realm of SQ or Spiritual Quotient. Potentially, this is a only tool that that can help people intrinsically can get into a different life & career trajectory. In my working life, I have seen friends and colleagues making dramatic changes to themselves. If we demonstrate that SQ is valued - both by examples and by enabling policies, then we may be able create positive examples and the associated auto-pilot. 

Measure Commitment to Engagement – Both lag and lead indicators.  This is an activity that we business leaders and HR managers have to own and measure ourselves objectively. This is what business leaders and HR managers are supposed to do well. That is measure and create an annual calendar of initiatives.  Failing  our commitment  towards employee engagement is essentially failing ourselves. 

Continuous Development – Every engaged employee will inevitably be an ever evolving resource. To harness the energy of the engaged employee is to give him a defined road-map and encourage him to self-pace himself by integrating his overall learning process into the organization strategic road-map and performance management process. Initiatives like career planning, mentoring, competency mapping come in handy. As much as creating a framework of continuous development for engagement employees, the same is equally crucial to encourage fence-sitters to become more engaged employees and dis-engaged employees to be fence-sitters.

The above points here have been discussed specifically from the context of employee engagement, they are likely to overlap with other HR strategies and initiatives to create a healthy, conducive and effective work environments. Same is true for recruitment also, even though earlier we have discussed that business leaders and HR managers have less to innovate when it comes to recruitment; it is still a critical lever for engagement. Even though we may not be able to create pervasive and organization wide engagement levels through effective recruitment alone; an effective recruitment process will ensure that we have hygiene levels of internal champions who will pivot any employee engagement initiatives. During the recruitment process – as much as the competency; we have to look for value and aspiration alignment. These are the two factors which most enhance or hinder employee engagement.

Re-emphasising the Need for Top Management Commitment:

Last, but not the least, the leap of faith has to be taken by leaders in allocating money, talent and resource time for employee engagement. The return of investments in these initiatives need to be internalized. Employee engagement [like most other HR initiatives] is an investment and not an expense. HR is as much a line function, as much as support function. Like any other strategic objective it needs to  have a champion and it needs be continuously measured and talked of in the boardroom for results to follow. In short, as much as understanding the values of employee engagement as Business and HR leaders we need to walk the talk and commit ourselves to this. We need to have our own job descriptions and score-cards reflect the employee engagement language. Only then the initiatives and then the results related to employee engagement will pervade through the organizational psyche. 

December 14, 2012

Bhubaneswar

PS: This write-up was written for a talk that was delivered at National HRD Network seminar on Dec 14, 2012. The write-up was meant to educate and sensitize myself and clear my thoughts on the topic of employee engagement. Certainly, this helped me identify area of focus in terms of enhancing employing engagement. I must share that it has helped me raise my bar and resolve in the realm engagement.