Employee Engagement by Debasish Sengupta and S. Ramadoss

Before I read this book, employee engagement meant the following 2 things to me:

1.       Letting employees participate in management decisions, since they are the ones closest to the operations and know what is out there. (employee empowerment)

2.       Organizing events/ activities for employees so that they get an opportunity to interact with each other in an informal environment and feel better connected to the organization.

Additionally, I used to think, it might also include handling employee grievances and work life balance.  Since I was not sure, out of sheer curiosity, I ordered the book from flipkart. I was a little worried initially that my thought process would  be clouded by just 2 authors’ views but fortunately the book is teeming with references to other research papers and reports. As it turns out, employee engagement is all that I thought it was plus a hundred other things. It seems to me it encompasses, in one way or another, the entire gamut of HR topics I have read and experienced so far!

The first chapter Demystifying Employee Engagement mentions the following points that were an eye opener for me:

1.       Culture is an incubator for employee engagement

2.       EE is not only about satisfaction, but also about contribution

3.       It has to be first attained and then sustained.

4.       Engaging, developing and retaining employees cannot be the sole responsibility for the HR function- line managers must shoulder the responsibility too.

The chapter also gives classification of employees as: engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged. The categorization is on the basis of how strongly connected the employee feels to the company. This impacts absenteeism, turnover and other basic performance parameters. What I did not realize was that it can affect creativity and innovation, which I always thought was primarily driven by the culture of the organization. Now looking at point no. 1 above, I can make sense of this. Other points are happiness at work, what employees do with expectations, opportunities etc.

One sentence from the book summarizes the definition of an engaged employee very well:  An engaged employee is “enthused” and “in gear”, using his talents and discretionary effort to make a difference in his employer’s quest for sustainable business success.

Another chapter lists eleven building blocks of engagement: building high level of trust, treat your employees well, deliver promises, envision, provide opportunity for career growth, design meaningful jobs, breathing offices and safe workplaces, collaborate and involve, empower in real terms, encourage informal networking and communication.  All these are supported by interesting examples/ diagrams/ quotes/ questionnaires.

The authors have then dedicated one full chapter to work-life balance, which is not yet given due attention in organizations.

The next chapter Lens of the Service Marketer, provides an analogy between HR and Marketing by treating employees as internal customers.  The 7Ps have been defined as:

1.       Product- Job itself

2.       Price- Energy, Skills, Intellect and time

3.       Place- Placement

4.       Promotion- Effective Communication

5.       People- The Right Guy!

6.       Process- Procedures, Routines

7.       Physical Evidence- Identity

The sixth chapter gives some strategies for employee retention. It defines retention as not about preventing people from leaving their respective organizations, its more about preventing even the creation of this ‘intent of leaving’ in the first place amongst its people. Employee engagement goes even beyond this. It includes the employee’s contribution to the organization’s success. Employee engagement depicts the connection of its key constituents-‘employees’ with their work, organization, efforts and results.

In the chapter Measuring Engagement, some standard surveys are given, which organizations can use to gauge employee engagement. Some of these can be quantified as they use likert’s  rating scale.

The last chapter lists reward and recognition, learning and development, communication practices, employee care and well being and performance management as best practices in employee engagement.

Overall this book has been an interesting read and now, when a placement consultant asks me in a telephonic interview if I have experience in employee engagement, my first response wont be ‘ummmm’… ;)

Competency mapping...

Competency mapping is one of those processes, which despite being old in its inception, is still new in its implementation. Though corporate giants and top HR consultancies have developed customized competency frameworks and do use them religiously for recruitment and evaluation purposes, the concept has still not penetrated medium sized companies. Of course the cost of developing and using such frameworks cannot be justified in a small company of say 50-100 employees. There are however a huge number of organizations who have reached maturity to implement this but are struggling to do so because of lack of experience in this field. Not all HR professionals have undergone a competency mapping cycle and it is definitely difficult to manage if you have not even seen one .

A large amount of documentation can be found on the internet for competency models. Even if you read all of these, you still cannot be prepared to face the process and interpersonal challenges involved in the process. For developing an effective framework, copy paste just wont do, nor would modification of some other organization’s model. As in any other project, the process has to be really strong to come up with a solid framework meeting the requirements of the organization. It could be a 4 page framework or a 100 page one, no one is better than the other, if they help their respective organizations achieve their performance objectives.

Though competencies have traditionally been defined more in terms of behavior rather than technical ability, more and more firms are opting for technical plus behavioral competency definitions these days. When construction projects begin to get delayed unprecedently and when safety standards are not met despite all your best efforts, you do begin to wonder if having thorough subject knowledge and experience is ultimately more important than “willingness to learn” and “good attitude”.  Having said that, it is heartening to see line managers giving more importance to behavioral competencies than the technical ones, and am sure HR folks would heave a sigh of relief when they find such understanding managers. But the question is , are companies willing to pay for technical training in today’s scenario? Would they prefer to hire an aggressive performer with people issues or a person with excellent interpersonal skills, with high delivery focus, trainable but lacking experience? Its not that companies have not faced these questions before, they have just become more urgent in the current economic situation.

Whatever an organization might choose to do, the process used for coming up with behavioral and technical competencies is the same. It is obvious that involvement of line managers is imperative, HR cannot do this job alone. Some organizations have HR as strategic business partners but most, even today, unfortunately don’t. HR executives in these companies do not have sufficient business knowledge to come up with the entire competency framework on their own, hence increased time requirement from line managers. HR would be lucky if line management already understands the importance of an accurate framework (which cannot be prepared from copy and paste), but mostly HR would have to get the buy in from departmental heads even if the initiative is driven from the top. Inputs received out of pressure and those received out of genuine interest do vary significantly.

A competency list can be prepared after job analysis interviews of various incumbents, role shadowing can also be done if feasible (in my experience it is not). Each competency then needs to be defined and then described at different levels. The number of levels can also vary from organization to organization (varies between 3-5 usually). A lot of focus groups, query solving sessions , review rounds and intermediate templates later, you can come up with a competency framework that actually works.

I have an experience of one such cycle and what an experience it has been! Before the start of the project, the General Manager asked me “Do you know how many companies in the world have successfully implemented competency framework? “ I said “Maybe a couple”. His response: “Zero. You might be the first one to do it”. If he was trying to motivate me, well good luck with that, I only got more scared!

Thankfully, we had consultants to do all this :D and I thank them for helping me gain immense knowledge on the subject. Now I am confident that I can prepare competency framework of any organization on my own and maybe will be the first one to deliver two successful frameworks in a row. ;)