The Hindu Business Line : Engaging the engagers!

Employee engagement is the new buzzword in corporate corridors these days. HR teams are busy chalking out initiatives that they believe would enhance the engagement of employees in the organisation and thereby prolong their stay with the company.

This has also led to the increased instance of what I like to call corporate tourism – visits by managers to other organisations to study and benchmark their best practices in employee engagement.

The so-called best practices encompass many initiatives such as: adding lime juice, tender coconut, and masala tea to the existing supply of coffee, tea, milk and hot chocolate; introducing a tele-commuting policy to the HR manual (with most line managers vowing never to implement it!); introducing gyms and squash courts for employees to work out; celebrating ethnic day and dress to work; and appointing Chief Fun Officers to create a fun-filled work atmosphere. The list is endless. Some of these initiatives are laudable while others are ludicrous.

Let us face the reality. While hygiene initiatives are key to eliminating unhappiness at the workplace, people engage or disengage based on the quality of their relationships and job satisfaction. Both of these lie squarely in the domain of the managers. The question, thus, is how engaged are these engagers of people?

The role of the human resource function is to ensure that the managers are fully engaged in delivering relationship and job satisfaction to their employees. By relationship I mean creating an emotionally healthy context for teaming, sharing information, resources and knowledge and reaching out and assisting colleagues when needed.

Job satisfaction is a complex function and a product of clarity on what is expected, standards for measurement, tools and resources for performing, regular feedback on performance and a perceived sense of recognition that is fair and commensurate.

In reality, many managers need coaching and clear measurements of how well they are delivering on both the relationship and job satisfaction dimensions. If they are disengaged from delivering these to their employees, no amount of hygiene initiatives will deliver the desired return on investment.

The choice of the right managers and their own engagement is the key. HR managers assigned to various businesses within an organisation (HR business partners) should be responsible for monitoring the engagement levels of the managers and reporting their observations to business leaders, with suggestions for corrective action.

Frequent open-houses with employees and discrete one-on-ones could provide clues to gaps in the engagement levels of the engagers themselves.

People engagement is often recognised as a key organisational capability for executing company objectives. If this has to happen, the key is to ensure that the managers vested with delivering engagement are first engaged themselves.

(The writer is Chief People Officer with Symphony Services Corporation.)

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