“A productive employee who is kept busy working at his or her job is far more likely to be happy at that job and less likely to look for employment elsewhere.”

Zig Ziglar

Working with corporates for a couple of decades has taught me some valuable lessons.  One observation is that corporate culture, and leadership influences a person’s behaviour.  Most people react differently in a similar situation in different organizations.  It is almost as if they possess different set of values, attitude, and attributes in diverse environments.  Even the leaders, responsible for setting trends, show variations in their dealings, depending upon their place of work.  The thought leadership and the corporate honchos are aware of this fact, yet do little to change the attitudes.  More often, a set attitude is woven into a corporate’s fabric and a change of mindset would require changing the entire workforce.  This is impractical and open to many risks.  Hence, most companies continue to work with the foundation laid at the outset.  These set values, different from the mission and vision statements of the organization, decide the type of employees it would attract.  Mission and vision statements, mostly (and I am being a cynic here), are like elephant tusks, good advertising tool.  Like tusks, they have their use, but not for the owner.

A proper process for employee engagement of new hires stems from the aforementioned organizational attitudes.  A company, which has a set of veterans to boast of, will be less welcoming to fresh ideas, working attitudes, and new processes.  An organization, which has been functioning without set processes, can be a difficult place of work for a new employee.

So, why is employee engagement important?  What are the implications of a non-engaged workforce?  Most reasons are obvious and I am only restating them.  My personal experience says that less engagement means more attrition, with employees leaving for greener pastures.  An engaged employee is expected to be more satisfied.  There could be other factors governing attrition.  However, work satisfaction may not be the major influencer.  An engaged employee, with presumed high levels of job satisfaction, will have positive effect on productivity.  Hiring is a tedious process and return on investment (ROI) may get a negative report if hiring process, training time, probation time, loss of resource to attrition, and the re-hiring of a new resource is calculated as a liability.  The resultant productivity may not even be registered before the cost to the company due to the loss of a non-engaged employee tilts the financial balance.  I am also aware of certain organizations, which find it difficult to hire good talent due to negative word-of-mouth publicity as an employer.

I will sum it up with one statement from the wiki that seemed apt. “An organization with ‘high’ employee engagement might therefore be expected to outperform those with ‘low’ employee engagement, all else being equal.”

||Sarvam Sri Krishna Arpanamastu||