Finding the best-suited personnel is only part of the task faced by employers. Nurturing them, maintaining loyalty and retaining them can prove to be an uphill struggle.
The People Bulletin has looked at engagement in the form of the psychological contract (see Mike Wellin’s article ‘Inside their minds’ published on 18 November 2009) and effectiveness (see the news story ‘Do you have a presentee problem?') And nowhere does the impact of being good or bad at employee engagement hit the most than on recruitment and retention. The Sunday Times Best Companies to Work for list was published in at the beginning of March with a charity, P3, topping the list. The list has been going since 2000 and the latest survey of over 276,000 employees conducted during 2009 revealed staff concerns about their pay and benefits have slightly less influence on overall engagement, indicating that employees understand their employer may be having a tough year – demonstrating that it is possible to increase engagement while being unable to raise pay levels.
Best Companies established the accreditation award scheme to acknowledge excellence in the workplace. Based on staff feedback, it looks at employee engagement as an integral part of a company’s success and growth, and sets a benchmark for other employers. The accreditation scheme follows a Michelin star style system with companies awarded one star for first class, two stars for outstanding and three stars for extraordinary performance.
Engagement in practice
Last month witnessed the opening of a new event from Best Companies, ‘The Art of Engagement’ in Milton Keynes, aimed at ways to help improve the engagement of UK employees and the performance of UK businesses. Its aim is to offer a thought-provoking journey of discovery so that organisations can discover for themselves what engagement is all about.
The event uses interactive cutting-edge technology and best practice data gathered over a decade to assist managers and leaders from companies of all sizes to improve employee engagement in their organisations.
In opening the facility, CEO and founder of Best Companies, Jonathan Austin said the Art of Engagement had been created as an experiential learning environment for leaders and management to change the way they engage their people in the workplace. Part of the inspiration for the Art of Engagement came through the old learning mantra, ‘Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I’ll maybe remember, involve me and I’ll understand.’
Austin added, ‘For private and public sector companies to be successful in their markets, they must have engaged staff and it is here we hope to break new boundaries in having companies devise and implement engagement techniques which will have a real impact on their businesses. This is the first time that managers and staff will be able to experience first had what works and what doesn’t, when it comes to engagement techniques.’
Eight of the best
So what is it about engagement that grades the firms in the Best Companies to Work For listings? Over the ten years of the list, much data has been gleaned and the survey questionnaire has been fine-tuned to provide targeted answers in order to offer meaningful comparative information.
There are eight factors of engagement in use and these are particularly significant as they have been defined through the results from the survey process, and therefore by the employees themselves, as critical factors in workplace engagement. The Best Companies survey is designed to measure employee engagement by analysing 70 questions across the following factors: Leadership, Well Being, My Manager, My Team, My Company, Personal Growth, Giving Something Back and Fair Deal. In more detail, the definition of the factors is:
- Leadership measures how people feel about the head of their organisation, the senior management team and the values of the organisation.
- Well Being measures stress, pressure, the balance between work and home life and the impact of these factors on personal health and performance.
- My Manager measures whether people feel supported, trusted and care for by their immediate manager.
- My Team includes encouraging team spirit, feeling part of the company, having fun and belonging.
- My Company focuses on how much people value their company, how proud they are to work there and whether they make a difference.
- Personal Growth examines whether people feel challenged by their job, whether their skills are being utilised and their perceived opportunity for advancement.
- Giving Something Back explores how much people think their organisation puts back into society and whether they believe this effort is driven by profit motives.
- Fair Deal includes how well employees feel they are treated and how their pay and benefits compare to similar organisations.
In practice
Having visited the embryonic event and sampled the engagement journey in its early evolution, I can report that the outcome was one of willingness to progress with the concept of engagement. The experience stimulated dialogue with individual team members and the exchange of collective ideas and thoughts for the benefit of the team performance in the given tasks.
In My Manager, for example, delegates listen to a management scenario via headphones and are asked to interactively cast a ‘good, bad or indifferent’ vote as to the management action in the audio. Several of the other zones have interactive electronic mechanisms to give delegates an immediate result to their question responses.
With all political parties vying to get ‘into the heads’ of the electorate, Best Company believes the event offers politicians a unique ‘zone’ offering the opportunity for delegates to get inside a giant head and view life through the eyes of a disengaged person.
Delegates are given a journal in which they record their travel through the event. It gives them space to make notes on thoughts and ideas and contains meaningful thought provoking questions about their organisation, based on the successful ten years’ survey data collated by Best Company listings. The idea is that the experience provides the space to think, feel and act creatively. Jonathan Austin talks about it ‘energising key relationships within an organisation, giving employees the chance to use all their energy, enthusiasm and creativity in every aspect of their work for organisational success.’
Each factor has a dedicated zone in The Art of Engagement and the aim is to ‘challenge thinking, inspire action and generate a new level of energy around organisational and personal challenges’. Additionally there also is a strategic zone where organisations will be able to build action plans based on what they have learnt.
http://www.bestcompanies.co.uk/
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Business confidence is starting to show signs of improvement across the IT recruitment industry, so it’s vital that employers stay a step ahead and develop a recovery plan – particularly when it comes to retaining employees. People are becoming more mobile as the economy improves, and with the cost of replacing an employee equal to an annual salary, engaging your existing workforce is more important than ever before.
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