Culture of Employee Engagement: Are You Ready?

 “In a world where most factors of production are increasingly standardized, where a production line or the goods on a supermarket shelf are much the same the world over, employee engagement is the difference that makes the difference” (Macleod & Clarke, 2008). 

Employee Engagement is defined as harnessing of one’s complete self (physically, cognitively and emotionally) to the work role. And has been very well document in both academic and practice writings, your ability to invest yourself completely in your work role results in higher productivity, customer engagement, profit, quality, retention, discretionary effort and safety. Additionally, research also highlights that a high quality work environment that furthers employee engagement has a better impact on employee wellbeing as compared to measures like hours worked or time off. Furthermore, Employee Engagement is viewed as forward facing indicator that has predictive linkages to the above mentioned critical business outcomes.

Considering the well documented benefits that an engaged workforce delivers, creating a work environment that allows employees to flourish and results in business success ranks high on agenda of business leaders. A work environment that furthers employee engagement is an outcome of a cultural change program that involves- establishing a tight link between organizational strategy and culture, deep research that draws on individual’s experience and expectations, strategic analysis that offers actionable insights, suggestions and support to change how leaders view their work, their employees, and their customers and encouraging individual’s to take accountability for their engagement and success at the workplace.

First step in this journey for most organizations starts with measuring the current level of employee engagement and then using the information to devise action plans for improvement. However, the decision to measure employee engagement should not be taken lightly and must be carefully evaluated. Measuring employee engagement without a clearly articulated agenda and plan for managing and enabling a cultural change has the potential to do more harm than good. This process of cultural change involves educating your workforce, reorienting your people manager’s, encouraging role modeling by your leaders and enriching organizational systems, processes and policies to further employee engagement at every touch point.

Even before we take this first step of asking employees for their views, there may be some introspection that we may need to do assess our readiness as an organization and as leaders. Some of these questions may revolve around:

•  Need: Why are we undertaking this employee engagement measurement exercise- what is it that we expect to accomplish?
• Commitment: Are we willing to allocate resources and nominate our best and the brightest to champion this process of cultural change? Are we as senior leaders willing to accept the employee feedback and take corrective actions/decisions which may or may not be comfortable for my division/function/business in the short term?
• Cascade: Are we willing to shoulder the responsibility of encouraging employee’s to participate, share their feedback candidly and then champion of the process of disseminating the findings and enabling actions across levels?
• Change: Are we willing to empower people across levels and enrich systems, processes and policies to further employee engagement?

If you are uncertain of your response on any of the above questions, perhaps, it may be useful to assess the organization’s commitment to this process of cultural change. A deep introspective discussion with senior organizational leaders and employees provides a starting point for assessing our readiness and commitment to this process of transformation. However, if you answered favorably to all these questions then you must congratulate yourself, for now you are on path of building a workplace where your employees will feel fulfilled, superior business outcomes will be well within reach with an enthused and excited workforce and your organizational culture will amplify your strategy and become your greatest competitive advantage.  

Management: Are we Free from it Ever?

Henri Fayol (1841-1925) is often one of the first few names we are exposed to as students and practitioners of management. He opined ‘To manage is to forecast, to organize, to command, and to control.’ 

What’s striking is that a closer scrutiny of our everyday lives reveals that this conception of management is not only limited to our working lives but actually extends to the fabric of our everyday life. The ‘hegemony of management’ overpowers almost everything that we do in our day to day lives.  Right from the time we wake up till the time we go to bed and for some of us even our sleep time and thoughts within are not our own but are governed by the ‘management speak’.   Following headings from some articles published in the Men’s Health magazine provide us some insight on what I am referring to here:

• How to have the Sexiest, Most Relaxing and Most Productive Hour of Your Life 
•  Trusted Advice On How to Secure Your Future and Avoid Costly Mistakes 
• How to Deliver in the bedroom 
• Life Management Principle: What Gets Measured gets Managed

The liberal splattering of management jargons signifies the widespread understanding of these ideas and the seepage of managerial discourse in our everyday life.

Furthermore, books like ‘The Checklist Manifesto- How to Get Things Right’ or ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ have made it to the best sellers list and have sold millions of copies underlining the supposed superiority and  popular uptake of managerial recipes to achieve success in everyday life.

In fact for most of us even the early decisions on what hobbies to pursue or what sports clubs to participate in are governed by the future jobs we seek to chase. So, mere participation is not adequate but we have to demonstrate leadership skills and strategizing ability to have adequate talking points in place for the job interviews we will face 5-10 years down the line.

The managerial pursuit of ‘excellence’ extends to our personal life where we are expected to establish our personal goals, create strategies for achieving them, put in place plans that will get us there, set up rigorous execution schedules and adequate review mechanisms to keep the achievements on track. So, right from weight loss to getting married anything and everything must be subjected to this managerial approach to achieving success.

Now, if there is this widespread seepage of managerial discourse and excellence is seen as an outcome of following a managerial approach to planning and achievement, then why is it that we often see management and by extension our working lives as constraining our ‘true’ selves? We have images of suit wearing corporate honchos staring forlornly at the sea wanting to break free from the monotony of their working life and seize the waves as a surfer or the successful lawyer who actually wanted to be a musician and still has guitars stacked somewhere in the closet. This dichotomy of ‘management’ as a constraint and a hegemonic force and at the same time a tool to achieve excellence in everyday life makes me wonder if we are caught in this web of our making where we are constituted by and are constitutive of ‘management’ as a way of thinking and being. What are your views- are we ‘free’ from management ever?       

Monday Morning Blues to Monday Morning Sunshine: Is Changing Your Approach to Work an Answer?

‘You wake up in the morning and look out of the window, blurry eyed but hopeful, ready to welcome a new day, take on the challenges that it has to throw at you, wanting to stand up and be counted’.

This description would have probably resonated most with you when you were young and clueless. The ruthless world of working people had not depleted your enthusiasm and the cynical side of your brain had probably not developed. But as you grow up, things start changing, the pressure to pay the EMI’s, meet the sales targets and please your boss, takes away all the charm and promise that everyday used to hold. The pall of gloom of a Monday morning starts clouding your Sunday evening and eventually you go to bed cribbing and complaining about beginning of another week at the office.

I am sure not every one of us feels this way and there are many of us out there who simply love their jobs and cannot wait for the week to begin. But why is it that such lucky people are so far and between. Why is it that the hope and promise of youth is replaced by cynicism and distrust as we step in to our workplace? Where we spend close to 80% of awake hours every day.  Just imagine, you spend more than 40 hours each week, 160+ hours every month at your workplace and most of it is spent harboring negative emotions. Thinking and complaining about things that never go right, colleagues who are trying to pull you down and a boss who does not appreciate you.

What if there was a way to reverse this trend and start everything over? What is it that you would want to change? Think about the things that are in your control, don’t try and enlist stuff that you practically cannot do anything about, stuff like corporate policies or your ‘not so nice’ boss.  Things that were in your control, like changing the way you approach your work, prioritizing stuff in your personal life, treating everyone the way you would like to be treated etc. Basically simple things which all of us were taught when we were young but we somehow forgot all of those, the basic ingredients of a living a good life- simple values like- respect, integrity, and honesty.

While these are the basic ingredients that I think could help transform my work life, do share your thoughts on the basic ingredients that you think could help make your work life better.  Help you in changing the Monday morning blues to Monday morning sunshine…

Global Standards for HR: Are We Missing Something?

Standards may be defined as a set of rules. Rules that determine how certain people would behave in certain situations. Rules and predictability go hand in hand and predict the behavior of individuals in given situations. They also act as a means of classifying people into categories- as those who follow certain standards and those who don’t.  Recently I read this piece on tlnt.com on approval by ISO to create Global HR Standards. This acceptance got me thinking on how feasible it will be for ISO or any other such body to create universally applicable standards for a domain as socially constructed as Human Resources (HR) and what it would mean for organizations adopting these standards.

Much like the Fair Trade standards governing the procurement of coffee or the fair labor practices standards, most standards are created by voluntary bodies and are free for adoption or rejection by the larger audience for which it has been designed.  Also, standards can be created by anyone and it’s the adoption of it that determines its success. In effect there could be numerous available standards whose success would be determined by the willingness of organizations to adopt them.

Unlike the organizational rules which are backed by a hierarchical authority to ensure their adoption, standards have to rely on other means of adoption.  A standardizing authority may use scientific evidence as a means to highlight how the standard created by it is backed by science and hence warrants an adoption. ANSI (American National Standards Institute) will be developing standards for global HR and how effective they will be in convincing organizations on the scientific validity of their measures beyond statistical correlations would be interesting to see.

Additionally, a standardizing agent may try and create an elite identity around the followers of its standards and thus encourage active membership.  Most organizations are forever attempting to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the hope of attracting the brightest and the best talent. While following a global standard and benchmarking of performance may please the analytical side but I have my reservations on the kind of usefulness that such global standards could offer in terms of actual improvements on the ground. Unless this is actually backed by active nurturing by corporates which would mean active sharing of best practices and in turn a perceived threat to the pursuit of uniqueness that I earlier referred to.

Furthermore, standardizers may actually involve certain organizations in the design stage and the power equations at the design stage could determine the final shape of the standards as and when they emerge. This could in effect mean standards would mirror the practices of a few, with the expectation of making them applicable for a larger audience. This could actually undermine the creativity in practices and may actually encourage firms to look more like the powerful elite who created the standard in the first place.

I am not against a globally accepted measure on the cost of hiring or the heads to account for while calculating it, but my point here is to highlight how in our effort to standardize we may be turning a blind eye to certain realities which could have a bearing on how our organizations may look like in future.  My two cents on this would be for organizations to assess their existing systems, account for their own realities, outline their future outlook and then determine the relevance of these standards in their own context. Our organizations are loaded with numbers and standards to follow and it may be wise to take an informed call before deciding to add to this long list of numbers we track.    

Look Back & Move Forward

Source: www.scientificamerican.com

I know it’s a bit late in the year but it’s never too late to make a fresh start so a very Happy New Year to all of you! Hope this greeting helps you restart the year and shake off any negativity that a not so pleasant start (I hope not) would have brought with it.

Starting off is something that can be very exciting and scary at the same time. Exciting because you are embarking on something new, and, scary because you never know what this new challenge might throw at you or the lurking feeling ‘if I am good enough for this’. Well at least these were the two predominant emotions that were clouding my thoughts when I started this blog on 29^th November 2009. Over the past 14 months a lot has changed in terms of the layout, content and of course my philosophical and professional stand.

When I started this blog I was focused on using this as a platform to spew on the world the ‘wisdom’ I had gained while working as a consultant, advising some of the biggest and most reputed Indian business houses with a global footprint. Over the course of the past 3-4 months that I have been back in school (Warwick Business School, UK) for my second masters I have started questioning a lot of the things that I wrote and suggested to my clients. This is not to say that I was recommending actions that I did not believe in or I suggested action plans to my clients that were not right. Everything that I wrote or suggested my clients was a testimony of my understanding of the given context. All the advice that I gave or the programs that I designed were taking into account the ‘world view’ that I had at that time.  

Reflexivity is a great tool, it helps you take a look from the outside and critique your own work. That’s exactly how I feel at the moment, taking a step outside the boundary of my self-constructed world and looking inside to assess, evaluate and critique my own actions. In fact how interesting would it be if our hard working, extremely busy and under pressure executives could step outside their little constructions and peep in to see how it all adds up.  I understand that the pressures are relentless and expectations abound but is it too late to Assess, Recognize and Reflect!  Unlike my other posts where I try to outline a problem and attempt to underline certain prescriptive actions as a solution, in this post I would urge all my readers to adopt a reflexive view of any situation or action in their personal or professional life and unwrap the strands of  behaviours  which govern it. You are bound to unravel certain thoughts, ideas or actions which are embedded in your behavior and are playing a part under the surface to propel you to act in certain ways. And I am sure this renewed understanding of self would go a long way in helping you make more informed if not better decisions in future.

I hope you found this rant useful in some way and I look forward to hearing your views as always.

Stay blessed! 

Harmless Lies & Unsaid Truths- Do They Matter?



Source: www.thisislondon.co.uk


Every time we are faced with an unpleasant situation our immediate reaction is to either find a way to avoid it, or, if we have some thinking time, craft a logical explanation to rationalize our actions.

At work, missed a deadline- point out how the person in the other team never came back with the background data that you had requested him for and hence you could not meet the deadline. Business review with the boss- simple, get your creative juices flowing and fill the damn client sheet with meetings that never happened and the phone calls that never got through. Meeting with the HR on recent spurt in attrition in your team- tell them how you made every possible effort to bring them up to speed but there is only so much you could do and how attractive compensation from others is luring them away. 

Every one of us has been in such situations where we resort to a course of action which though not in line with our personal values is still the favored option. No one ever joins an organization thinking that, I will be a lousy employee or a lousy manager and I will lie my way through tough situations. Each one of us wants to do a good job, work hard and be appreciated for his/her contributions. But why is it so that we are forced to depart from our favored value driven actions to seemingly harmless lies which appear to be highly logical responses and do save us the headache and heart burn till the next encounter??

My view here is that the ephemeral nature of employer-employee relationship is at the heart of this deteriorating situation. ‘Job for life’- the motto is dead and gone, no longer people join companies with this view and even the employers while expecting loyalty from you, don’t expect you to be under any impression that your job is for life. Your job is yours till the time you are performing and you are fitting with the organizations chosen course of action for future. The employer-employee relationship needs a constant feed of performance and rewards respectively, from both the parties involved to keep it going. Thus, in this pressure to keep this relationship going, we end up acting in ways which while being against our personal values, help us keep this equation balanced.

While I will not suggest that organizations need to change their policies and start mirroring state bureaucracies where you may hold jobs for life, but is it possible for organizations to transform the nature of this relationship from transactional one to a relationship based on love, trust and respect. A relationship which while valuing results does not forget the person bringing those results and appreciates him/her for their contribution. I understand that bringing this kind of a change warrants a change in the DNA of the organization and is indeed a daunting endeavor but one step at a time will be a good start.

As a suggested first step, is it possible for us to broaden our relationship with our employees? An employee who comes to work for us is a person first and we could start by connecting with him/her on that level. Our managers while pushing for outcomes, can they spend some time knowing the people in their team? Simple things like a kind understanding word, an appreciative pat on the back and a congratulatory note on welcoming a new dog to the household may seem like very trivial gestures but if done with the right intent, they can have a very lasting impacting in cementing that employer-employee bond.

Your employees do have a life when they step out of the office and they have family, friends, fiancée’s and girlfriends who have an equal part to play in enabling your employees to contribute to building your company. So why don't we start by thanking them for their contribution and telling them how much we appreciate their role in enabling these people to give their best at the workplace. Indra Nooyi (CEO, Pepsico) in a recent interview to NDTV’s Barkha Dutt mentioned how she personally wrote to parents of all her direct reports, thanking them and telling them the great contribution their children were making in building Pepsico. 

Harmless lies and unsaid truths, may appear  inconsequential but they are like little termites eroding the strength of an already weak and strained relationship. Every little lie dents the relationship further and even if we choose not to admit it, it eventually does accumulate into an insurmountable mountain of lies thereby leading to severing of the relationship. The idea of this post was not to give you an exhaustive list of suggestions to improve but to draw your attention to something which appears insignificant but can have serious implications on our working and personal life. I hope it does get you thinking and encourages you to do what is "right".

Is it time we changed the view- Different perspective for a different solution?



Source: http://cabaretstills.deviantart.com

Corporates have traditionally been seen as being in the business of maximizing output while minimizing input. This precise mathematical equation like definition of business, however shallow it may be, is still seen as the reason for businesses existence and any deviation from this definition is seen as an aberration.

It is because of this mathematical nature of business that we always rely on a particular lens of numbers to visualize any organizational challenge and then use the vision obtained through this lens, to chart out a solution to address that challenge. While letting go of this lens of numbers may seem too inappropriate because we all have been made to believe for far too long that “whatever gets measured, gets done”. But I just think that for once if we decided to look at challenges through a different lens, then we may still be able to get things done while not getting bogged down by what and how of measurement. I am totally in favor of assessing outcomes and tracking progress, but don’t you think there are far too many uncountable’s out there which impact our everyday working. Hence if we looked at organizational challenges differently, then maybe we will be tackling these same challenges very differently and probably covering a lot more ground then if we were to look at these challenges solely through the traditional lens of numbers.

Job motivation has for long been a topic of great debate and discussion and our managers have always been brought to book for not being able to impact it positively. There has been a lot of research on what factors impede or promote job motivation and how these factors should be assessed and accounted for. But if we were to just forget all of this mathematical assessment exercise for once and just look at job motivation as a state of being and a way of doing business, don’t you think we will be able to achieve a lot more whilst not limiting ourselves with a fixed set of numbers and parameters. What that means is, if we looked at job motivation as a cultural imperative of the organization and how it is important for the organization to have a motivated workforce, we may be able to achieve a lot more by way of positively impacting our people, than being constrained by a set of pre-defined conditions and parameters. As a manager if you realized how critical it is for your people to be appreciated for their work and how each member of your team likes being recognized, wouldn’t you be more successful in positively impacting their motivation levels at the workplace than if you were working with a pre-defined set of conditions which highlighted what all is wrong with your team and how “that” score on “this” parameter had to go up for you to get your year-end bonus. Bringing that cultural change and sensitizing people to each other’s needs and aspirations, while being a long drawn process, could actually be a more rewarding and long term solution to this challenge of improving job motivation.

While numbers may be critical to assess achievements and reward performance, I personally do think that creating relationships that last, be it with your employees or customers, requires a lot “more” and that “more” goes beyond numbers. The ability to appreciate others point of view, visualize the challenges that your team members will face when chasing that target and how hard it can be to be away from one’s family during festive season, may just sound too fluffy and soft to have a place in hardcore numbers driven business world of today, but it may still be more important to your team members than having that team meeting to discuss how you can improve “that” score on “this” parameter.

You may have strong opinions on how critical it is to measure to achieve results, but I personally do think that it may be helpful to change the lens to take that next leap of improvement.

Look forward to hearing your views…