​Three Efficient Ways to Improve Employee Engagement

In the era of technological superiority, a manager isn’t someone who merely knows how to ‘manage’. The role has gone beyond its literary meaning, and has taken over a space that is niche. Communication skills are as important as the technical know-how of the job. In other words, if you are someone who believes that you can lead your team, create things that can shake the market or better people’s lives, and yet have the team together for the second product to come out; you are simply The King.

Employee engagement today is a huge challenge for companies and organisations that put in a lot of efforts and time into recruiting right kind of people. Once recruited after a rigorous training process, it is important to hold them together because you know they are worth more than their time at the organisation.

Booming companies and a vibrant array of opportunities make it difficult to keep the employee attrition rate in check across the table. But the effort of having to go beyond the call of duty to consider the employees as your partners in the path to success, and have them stay with you is something that yields rich dividends.

Just because, employee engagement has a vast base that touches almost all aspects of human resource management we have known so far. Pillars that hold the employees together are varied and all encompassing. For instance, some may feel job satisfaction is of highest importance for an employee to stay motivated and remain longer in an organisation; there might be a few leaders who would associate more importance to aspects such as commitment stemming out of creation of motivated environment and largely the behaviour and trust exhibited by the organisation’s leadership; starting from, say, the immediate manager.

Pallavi Jha, chairperson and MD, Dale Carnegie Training India, has spent years together studying both the corporate set up and employee behaviour. She has some useful insights pertaining to the topic. Pallavi says, employee engagement is not a segmented aspect that can be compartmentalised and is tied to various aspects that influence the concept.
There are three key factors that influence the employee engagement.

Relationship with immediate surroundings
This could be the supervisor, co-worker who is in charge of the team, or even the manager an employee is reporting to. “The relationship with the first contact person, or immediate supervisor plays a very significant role in establishing how the employee feels about the company. This is crucial and a compounding part that builds and retains the employee engagement,” says Jha.

She further adds, “No matter how motivated an employee is, if the manager isn’t able to address the concerns or provide satisfactory response to the challenges an employee faces, an asset of an employee has the potential to turn into a dead investment. Hence, it is important to treat this as a foundation level and ensure this has been addressed as and when needed.”

Trust and pride
Though this is a prominent characteristic that decides the employee loyalty to the company, it is also a two-pronged strategy. When you build the manager-team worker relationship, infusing trust by way of ensuring the worker has placed his faith and trust in the highest level of leadership.

Complete trust in senior management has to be ascertained through various contact points. Reaffirming employee’s commitment to the company’s vision in a manner that increases credibility has to be done periodically as against a fire fighting method. But, more often than not, companies do not invest in this exercise and lose out on very skilled and highly qualified workers, for ignoring this at their own peril, sometimes.

When an employee joins the company, he/she would have attached a certain brand value, some sort of relationship with the company’s vision and ethics. Making sure that these remain intact through the time of employee’s stay in the organisation will only add to the values of the company and increase productivity of the worker.

Bridging the generations
Jha says that millennials are what drive the companies in the contemporary scenario. “Today, millennials are driving the organisations to a great extent. They are a competitive, confident and hard-working lot and very globalised in their working approach. I call Brightness combined with attitude, ability and potential as 'wisdom' and millennials have got all that. They are go-getters and do whatever it takes them to get involved in the organisational processes. One aspect of employee engagement is to manage these millennials!”

In many organisations there is a huge generation gap and young workforce face challenges initially but HRs in companies today have learnt to iron out the differences. The HR segment has hugely evolved in India over the last few years and modern companies have become more active, innovative and alert. Most importantly, they play a major role in employee engagement and leadership initiatives.
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