Furthering Employee Engagement for Business Success

And with increasing diversity of businesses and expanding footprint of the group across geographies, a common language of employee engagement was seen as a thread that could bind all group companies together and help in delivering on this objective. With this intent, the group started measuring and managing employee engagement in 2008. While the employees rated the parameters being measured to assess employee engagement favorably, their experience of working was not encouraging them to engage themselves fully. The organizational leadership and systems and processes were geared towards encouraging a focus on driving a number rather than bringing about a change in the way a manager thought and acted towards engaging his/her team. A closer scrutiny of the existing numbers highlighted that there was a disconnect between what the topmost leaders expected and what the employees understood and experienced on a day to day basis. Furthermore, while workplace relationships were strong they were not translating into business performance for the organization.

A Snapshot of Our Approach

• PB consultants analyzed the available employee engagement data by different demographic cuts such as hierarchy, tenure, geography etc. Additionally, employee and leadership interviews were undertaken to identify the barriers and enablers to creating a truly engaging work environment.
• The measurement framework used was no longer predicting whether the organization was successful in creating an engaging work environment or not, PB recommended a shift to a latest research based framework for measuring and improving employee engagement- EE 2.0
• Leadership team was made responsible for driving the organizational agenda on engagement and was supported with one on one executive coaching support for topmost leaders to foster a mindset change.
• Manager level scorecards were generated for all people managers and customized managerial capability programs were initiated. Content of these programs was tailored according to the engagement level and people management skills required by the participants (managing frontline staff, managing other people managers, managing a business etc.)
• Qualitative discussions were carried out and action planning exercise was initiated at a team level. This process was initiated for the topmost team of the organization and then rolled out to the next level.
• Engagement clinics were organized across locations on a monthly basis to provide knowledge support to all the people managers and employees.
• Monthly one on one reviews were undertaken by PB coaches with the topmost leaders of the group to enhance their effectiveness as managers and leaders and enabler a mindset change. Leadership level reviews were initiated across all business where engagement initiatives were reviewed in addition to the business/function reviews.

Outcome

Engagement index for the organization stood at 52nd Percentile (on the PB-Coffman Global DB) with 32% employees falling in the Not Engaged category.

Visible and measurable change in employee morale at the end of year-2 and engagement index moved to 72nd Percentile with only 16% employees in the Not Engaged Category.

In the subsequent years the organization has moved to 80th Percentile and was placed on the 88th Percentile in the most recent wave of the study.

Revenue growth for the group has been more than 35% y-o-y for the last 2 years.