5 Steps towards Employee Engagement Framework

There has been a lot talked about & being done by the Organizations for keeping the Employees Engaged, but, digging deeper reveals that we have still been struggling to find answers to: –

How big is the problem we are looking to solve?

Are existing systems / processes deployed helping us reach desired objectives?

What will be a simple approach to establish Framework for Employee Engagement?

In this article I am sharing insights whatever bit I have been able to derive out of my working experience & extensive research on the subject

How big is the problem? Few important facts: –

• Around 85% of Global employees are either Actively disengaged or are not engaged, Gallup
• 31% of Employees in India are actively disengaged (Near double than Developed Nations)
• Global loss of productivity due to disengagement is around $7 Trillion Annually
• 34% of median salary is the loss of productivity due to disengagement
• 75% of the causes of employee turnover are preventable
• 81% of employees would consider leaving their current role for the right offer
• 46% of employees would consider a job that matched their current salary or even paid less
• 17% of employees reported quitting a position because of a bad manager 
• 47% of people actively looking for new positions say company culture is the main reason 

There are these & many more numbers thrown away by World’s leading Companies involved in HR Consulting / Survey’s. While they all insist the view further to focus on Employee Engagement they still add a little towards resolving the problem faced by HR Leaders / CEOs / CXOs & help them realize their dream to keep employees in the Company engaged

With this arises the second question -> Are existing systems / processes deployed helping us reach desired objectives?

I further analyzed the solutions existing & found: –

There has been a lot done in the direction in last more than a decade, but, there is very little change it has brought, Why?

1. Most of the movement has happened towards giving perks, reward & recognition, celebrating birthdays, throwing parties & several other such initiatives, but, there has been no or minimal mechanism established so far to check the direct impact (If Any) of these all initiatives
2. There are lot of Feedback / Communication platforms available which are surely good to communicate with employees or collect feedback for any specific initiative, but again they fail to provide unified view of Organization’s health with perspective to employees engaged

• Last but not the least due to dearth of such tools or mechanism there are Employee Surveys conducted on Annual / Bi-Annual or Quarterly basis which while gives consolidated / unified view across Organization it still fails to connect with employees & doesn’t help Organization directly to make any impact. More often than not 20% to 30% of high impact areas are picked as a project for next year leaving 70 to 80% to solve itself and HR / Leadership teams are engaged for an year only to see the impact the next year

• Apart from these above mentioned methods, Organization’s end up assigning this responsibility of  unfolding this enigma to external Consultants who surely with their expertise on the subject shares list of activities to be performed in the Organization leaving HR Department to implement the same without much support and HR Department with limited bandwidth keeps struggling to implement the recommendations completely (Many being missed on the way)

I still remember an assignment in my journey where we designed a complete plan for engagement from Talent Matchmaking to Onboarding to training to deployment to different phases of employee’s lifecycle, but were not able to find any tool supporting the same which I still find missing when I look around all the products / tools available.

The real problem as I see is that none of the solution provider actually wants to take this responsibility of making in impact & therefore keeps on focusing on one or few areas which actually is not helping solve this problem with the Organizations simply ending up money into it & HR Department remaining in disarray.

One common statement which I am sure all HR Leaders & CXOs will relate to is “there are many other factors” which we get to hear each time we ask for ROI from any Product / Solution provider 

Simple 5 step approach to establish Framework for Employee Engagement: –

1. Expectations & Purpose

Establish Expectations & Purpose and communicate them clearly at each stage – Hiring, Onboarding, Change of Role, Performance Assessment, etc

• Factors effecting employee behavior

Establish what are the factors which effects employee’s behavior in your Organization the most & the ones you will like to focus on to start with as working on all the factors at once may effect your bandwidth & may not give you desired outcomes.

• Different factors for different set of employees

Establish different factors which are important to different set of employees at different stage of Employee’s lifecycle. Example – For Front end sales employees reward & recognition may be more important whereas for Engineers it may be Learning & Growth Opportunities during initial period of 90 days. So try to decode this before you go forward on mode of action

• Measure performance on factors frequently

Find the way you will measure performance of these factors frequently so that you do not lose your connect with the employees & are late in finding the existent issues / problems

• Act promptly & record actions

Act promptly on the feedback to let your employees know that it is important for you to resolve their problems & find a way to capture all the actions you have taken so that you can develop a repository for enhancement of knowledge within the department

I will love to hear your comments and any challenges you may have faced around employee engagement and any views on how you have been able to improve it—after all, we can all learn from each other!