I have been seeing significant
discussion on employee engagement and the futility of it. I completely agree
with all those who think we should not engage employees and instead stay
focussed on business.
I recall meeting the Managing
Director of a large cement manufacturing company during my consulting days, who
told me that cement was produced by kilns and not people. He told me that investing
in employee engagement was good for businesses where factor of production was people- typically service industry. I told him
that I completely agreed with him and requested him to educate me if he had
patented kilns that his competitors did not have access to. I further asked him
if that was the reason- his company was making huge profits while the others
were not. He went on to explain to me that the kilns were manufactured by four
companies in the world and all the cement manufacturers had similar kilns. He
further explained that kilns ran on their own for 300 days and at that level of
production plants made a loss while at 345 days of production plants became
highly profitable. On asking him if all the plants of his company were
operating at 345 days, he answered in the negative. When I wanted to know the
difference between high performing plants compared to others, he told me it was
people. He further said that while they hired people with similar qualifications
and experience, the motivation levels and passion, especially of plant
leadership team, made the big difference. Needless to say that he went ahead
with a program to engage employees, including leaders. The employee engagement program was a result
of MD’s focus on business and to ensure consistent and sustained plant
performance.
Clearly, there has to be a
business reason to engage employees. We should remember that hr is owned by
business and not by HR. Therefore any intervention that does not address
business issues will not stick.
As we discussed in earlier posts,
PMS is a business tool and differentiation is key to high performing
organization. At the same time this could generate significant heat and
friction between the employees and leaders; and leaders and the board
representing the shareholders interest. This calls for some cushioning effect
to convert the friction into passion and motivation which will help sustain
high performance over a long time. Employee engagement provides the cushioning
effect.
There is enough debate on whether
business performance is correlated with employee engagement or which one is a
lead factor and which one is a lag factor. But there is enough research and
experience to demonstrate that engagement is a lead factor and performance is a
lag factor.
If a bottleneck in business can
be identified, quantifying the business benefit of employee engagement becomes
easier.
A word of caution: Engagement
without strong performance management could lead to a country club culture.
Engagement does not mean keeping employees happy, it means keeping employees
motivated and passionate about work.
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