Ask any HR manager about employee engagement and pat comes a ready list of actions: offsite parties and picnics, birthdays and anniversaries cricket matches, quizzes and painting competitions, cultural festivals. Friday bashes etc.
I was most surprised when a friend pointed me to the following excerpt from Express Computers (July 2010): "When Sergey Brin and Larry Page had to select a chef for their Google campus they interviewed 25 candidates before settling on Charlie Ayers. For a company founded by two mathematicians who owe their stupendous success to a culture of innovation and creativity, they understood early that it was employee engagement that set them apart from the thousands of other technology companies. Free, healthy and well cooked food was a key ingredient of its employee engagement strategy. The day the company went public the celebration was not a series of senior management speeches about its vision and bright future - but a free ice cream station for employees."
I have no quarrel with Google or its founders. However, I certainly have difficulty in understanding how good food improves employee engagement. I am sure neither Sergey nor Larry said this - but it is the writer of this article who has attributed this great wisdom to them.
In most companies, engagement is (mis)understood as having fun and food. The unsaid message is: work is boring and painful. Let's have some fun and atone for the sin of asking people to work.
In this context, there are two strong workplace myths that have come to stay in India Inc. (1) Work can't be fun and we must therefore have fun - separately at work (!). Worse still, (2) employees will be engaged if we create a lot of fun at work. For now, let me talk about the second myth - though, the first one is another serious problem.
Just a little enquiry - beyond popular myths - will reveal that engagement is a serious topic. It refers to employees being involved with and enthusiastic about their work and the company. Engaged employees have a positive emotional attachment with their work and talk positively about it to others. This state of satisfaction, passion and commitment clearly can't be achieved by 'bribing' employees through food and fun events.
Let me propose 3 Cs (I hate to do this, but found it easy to communicate in the formulae-infested corporate world!) to gain true employee engagement:
Career: The opportunity to grow career through promotions, rotations and significant assignments is the most important need of employees. If the company and its managers spend meaningful and genuine time in helping employees grow their careers - employees will definitely feel engaged. Incidentally, if because of your attention employees grow wings and fly away to another company, it's fine. In a growth market full of opportunities you cannot, in any case, keep employees arrested. However, if you truly invest in careers of your employees they will stay engaged for the time they are with you - breeding enthusiasm and good will.
Competence: While career is about the actual growth, competence is about the ability to grow. Opportunities to learn and apply the learning in real life tasks grows competence. And most employees are looking for competence-boosting opportunities. They would like to stretch, learn and improve as long as they feel they are growing marketable skills. Employees who know that their current jobs are helping them become competent for future jobs will stay engaged.
Care: Caring is a fine art that requires managers to be sensitive, empathetic and spontaneous. Caring is experienced by the small day-to-day gestures of managers (not by grand policies of the company). Are you sensitive to the 'mood' of your employee? Does your employee share with you that her child is sick or he has to attend a parent/teacher meeting? Do you volunteer some time off during those times? Do you know their workload? Are you doing something about easing their stress? There are many daily gestures that comprise caring - which no major investment in swanky gyms and food courts can substitute. Caring is a culture that good companies foster through a set of sensitive managers who balance tasks well with relationships. Incidentally, sometimes fun and food-based entertainment helps express caring. Thus entertainment is perhaps 5% of engagement. And genuine caring deepens engagement.
Just as band, baajaa and baaraat does not equate wedding, fun, frolic and entertainment can not create sustainable employee engagement. Its time we got serious with employees.
Chandrasekhar Sripada
(The author is VP and head, HR at IBM India, South Asia )
