Soft Skills

An engaged employee is a great asset

Abhay Singh on the importance, ways and means of employee engagement, to keep them happy and healthy

A recent McKinsey survey rightly suggests employee engagement as an important aspect of organizational well-being. Employee engagement is about motivating employees to do their best. Only an ‘engaged employee’ feels passionately about company goals and is committed towards its vision. All organizations depend almost solely on their human capital to move up the value chain. Therefore, it has become essential for organizations to constantly engage its human capital resource.

We are in a global recession and therefore the organization’s leadership must provide the right direction and empower people to meet the challenges in a difficult situation. Lay-offs, salary cuts and increased work hours are a fallout of the recession and organizations are cognizant of the situation, but are we actually helping our employees work productively and motivate them enough through these times? To keep employees motivated we consistently need to communicate with them and boost productivity.

Employee connect

Monetary benefits alone do not constitute an employee’s reason to enjoy his job. A comprehensive research and survey by Global Talent Metrics on various factors impacting employee attrition says that clarity of career path, relationship and recognition from managers and opportunities for career advancement are top reasons responsible for making employees stay with their current jobs. As an employer, it is imperative to understand the expectations, personal and career goals of your employees. Knowing them always consume significant amount of time and effort but is an essential element of good HR practices.

Employee as partners

One of the fundamental ingredients for creating a good environment is ‘hygiene factors.’ This constitutes elements such as salary, employee benefits and a conducive work environment. The other important aspect is ‘employee motivation’ at workplace. This constitutes efforts such as recognition, quality face-time with managers, career development opportunities, transparent performance management systems, etc.

Retention is a combination of both hygiene and motivational factors, which compliment each other and only when these work in conjunction can we truly create a healthy environment of employee engagement.

Communication is the key

The crux of any successful organization is effective internal communication. It is the lifeline of a company and yet it takes a backseat as it is often considered time consuming. Monthly updates like newsletters sent to employees give them a sense of direction in troubled times. Information about management decisions and clarifying operational processes facilitates in building employee trust. It also helps everyone work towards common goals.

Open house discussions and feedback mechanism

Ideas rule the world. Good organizations recognize and execute great ideas and employees are the biggest source of ideas. The only thing that can stop a great idea and inundate your organization is the lack of an appropriate mechanism to capture ideas. Open house discussions and employee-management meets are the building blocks that can help managers identify and develop talent.

Managing stress

The key to retaining employees and keeping their productivity buoyant is determined by their relationship with their immediate supervisor. It is therefore a manager’s key responsibility area to create a climate and culture that makes staying in the organization non stressful for an employee. In today’s scenario, job cuts across the board increase stress levels among employees. Companies are therefore increasingly looking at various health and wellness programs, memberships at gyms and fitness clubs. Many organizations have started unique anonymous online stress management service to enable employees login and interact with trained counselors who assist them maintain work-life balance and the negative sentiments attached with the downturn. Under wellness schemes, employees across grades are allowed to enroll at health/sports club/Art-of-living courses, which are either partly or fully funded by the company. Some companies have set up their own state-of-the-art gyms, often run by professional trainers. Companies are making that extra effort in keeping their employees happy as well as healthy.

Encourage personal growth

In a high tech industry like ours, an individual may join the company only because it gives them an opportunity to work on cutting-edge designs. Employees are generally highly motivated and ‘cracking the code’ gives them an ultimate high. There is hunger for knowledge and such employees need to be constantly involved with learning and provided generous opportunities to world-class training programs. Employees are considering the downturn as an opportunity to study further. One has to realize that if we need to retain our best talent we need to give them opportunities to achieve their aspirations. Some companies permit employees to subscribe to the Tuition Assistance programs, wherein an employee can take up various skills upgradation courses, which is funded up to a certain limit.

Work-life balance

Management Guru Peter Drucker once said, “The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.” This holds true in today’s work environment where quality of life has become an integral aspect of successful management practices. Surveys have overwhelmingly and repeatedly shown that people highly value the lives they live outside work.

A balance between work and family or social life can help ensure that an employee remains happy in the workplace. For instance, long hours at work can build high stress levels. Technology has simplified part of the problem and we now have unified and virtual communication tools that enable employees to work from any part of the globe. Therefore, companies must avail opportunities to provide complete flexibility to employees to log in from home.

The changes might not be extraordinary but paying close attention to how people are feeling about their work and making small changes can keep employees away from a burnout.

Abhay Singh is Director HR, Applied Materials India