In today's competitive corporate environment with companies trying to attract talent with lucrative offers, 'workforce engagement' or rather making an employee feel at home in the office, is the new mantra to stem attrition.
With companies looking to provide the right balance between professional demands and personal lives for its employees, HR experts believe the concept is one of the main drivers to stem attrition and enhance productivity.
According to HCL Technologies' Senior Vice President Anand Pillai, engagement of employees has been found to be very fruitful and creates a conducive ambience at workplace.
"Engaged workers are more productive and they add to the bottomline of the company without the employer having to force them for the required work," Pillai, who also heads company's global talent transformation and intrapreneurship development, added.
Though a precise definition of 'engagement of workforce' is elusive, a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers quoting a research puts the concept as 'a heightened emotional and intellectual connection with a job, organisation, manager or co-workers' and the influences that such a connection brings 'to apply additional discretionary effort to his or her work."
Global science products and services firm Dupont Vice President Human Resources Maritza Poza-Grise told PTI that for managers it is critical to engage their workforce and the organisation goals have to be transformed into personal goals for the employees.
"We have introduced an innovative method to aimed at engagement of employees known as performance partnership which helps an employee to judge his core competencies and build on them in line with the organisation's goals," she added.
Interestingly, levels of employment engagement are even perceived among investors as an important indicator of a company's financial health and long term sustainability.
The PwC report had said that engagement (of employees), leadership, talent management, learning and innovation are the factors that would significantly influence the organisational performance in the coming years.
"It is these employees (those who are engaged) for whom the company organises training, comes up with innovative ways to rejuvenate their skills and expects even more productivity from them," Pillai said.
Besides, Dupont also uses an online education series named 'mPower' for managers and supervisors who have direct reports. mPower is designed to provide a high-level overview of the management concepts, capabilities and tools they need to develop and support employees in today's environment.
'mPower' covers several concepts relevant to the work of managers including alignment of objectives, DuPont competence model, organisational development tools, recruiting and onboarding practices, career development, and team and individual performance.
The series has been developed to ensure managers and supervisors are positioned to take advantage of improved processes, systems and tools supporting the development and management of people.
Further, most of the companies are of the view that employee engagement would result in high output, flexibility and innovation, among others.
HR experts also feel that success of recruitment lies in offering the workforce, appropriate ambience to utilise his or her full potential. Pointing out that there is a lot of unemployable pool of educated people, Pillai added that talent and culture are key factors in recruiting a highly productive workforce.
