1) Employee Engagement
As we have seen in the previous post, employee engagement, often neglected as a key
strategy needs to be focused upon to ensure that the overall motivation of
employees stays a high and the organization can march forward towards achieving
its strategic goal by improving on this aspect. The key growth strategy that
the HR organization's should strive for to improve employee engagement is to
involve the employees right from the business
strategy roadmap to process designs that help in achieving the overall growth
goals. Treating employees not just as a critical asset but as a critical
stakeholder will be the paradigm shift for some traditional companies and this
will reap huge benefits. The workforce development initiatives that help to up
skill and be competitive in the emerging markets will be a win-win situation
for both employee and organization. The cost of hire from market vs rotation of
other unit internal resources, the lead time for a hire to be productive vs
lead time for cross skilling of internal resource should be measured as the key
KPI. The employee engagement rate versus the turnover rate would be the leading
(i.e, focused on future state and inputs) and lagging (i.e, generated from past
data or output) KPI that can help improve on retention of human capital talent
and this can immensely help on talent management costs and workforce deployment
costs. Apart from cutting costs that improve the profit of the organization, it
is a must to generate some revenue as well, through employee engagement. One
such revenue generating initiative that a HR organization can float around is to encourage innovations and freedom for
employees to generate revenue out of their innovative ideas that can then be
sold to customers or to markets or to use internally to enhance productivity.
The return on such ideas should be
tracked to measure the profits generated. It is must that to improve value-add
to the business, a good HR manager should focus more on retaining the top
performers rather than blindly measuring a metric that may result in the retention of the not so good
talent and skill sets. This is the key transformation that the HR manager
should focus on by assessing the business impact and derive benefits out of the
KPI measured.
Infosys suggests that the HR
organizations should measure the employee engagement rate as the primary KPI followed
by KPI generated out of employee innovation ideas. The lagging KPI of turnover
rate is something that can show, how with the result of implementation of
employee engagement in different strategic initiatives has started to pay off
and improve the overall profit or ROI on the innovative ideas that the
organization has started off.