Support and engagement are the keys to retaining your employees

With the flood crisis in November and inflation pushed up to 3.53 per cent in December, our real wages, or pay adjusted for inflation and ultimately indicating disposable income, would be less. To be competitive, this puts pressure on companies to offer higher increments or wages if they want to attract, motivate and retain their key talent. Today’s uncertain economy has made it more difficult to rely on financial compensation to make people stay.

-How should a company react?
Organisations must focus on two key concerns to retain and motivate their talent – increasing employee engagement and developing systems that enable them to be productive and successful.
To foster high levels of engagement, companies must make greater use of non-monetary rewards such as career growth opportunities, meaningful job designs, training and recognition programmes. For these measures to be effective, companies must be able to establish a clearer linkage between performance and rewards for their employees.
And the best way to do this is to create a performance rating system that could clearly differentiate performance among employees. An indicator in evaluation should be reflected in meaningful differences in payroll and advancement prospects.

-How do you ensure that you are doing the best possible job of enabling your employees?
The first step is to make sure you are putting the right people in the right job, as putting an employee in a wrong role can quickly make him disillusioned and unproductive.
In deploying talent, leaders must consider both the requirements of the job and the employee’s ability to meet them. They also have to think about to what extent the job will draw upon the employee’s distinctive competencies and make the most of them.
On the other hand, it’s also crucial to root out bad business practices, such as unnecessary or duplicated work, to ensure that work environments are supportive of high levels of productivity.

-Create the right climate
Finally, organisations have to understand and manage the work climate. The benefit of a positive work climate is often underestimated, but our research studies show that the differences in the work climate created by the manager alone could significantly vary the business results by as much as 30 per cent.
To create a positive work climate, leaders must have the right competencies to engage and enable employees. For instance, leaders have to understand how to give employees the authority to get on with their job so the employees can act and respond in an area where decisions are best made at a local level.
If organisations succeed in putting these measures in place, they will reap the rewards of highly engaged employees who are willing to go the extra mile to make an organisation successful. And harnessing this “discretionary” effort through enabling work environments will provide companies with a competitive edge that will prove invaluable in helping them to ride out the stormy economic conditions. It will also ensure that they are well positioned when the upturn eventually arrives.

-Six steps to better engagement
In order to succeed in engaging and motivating employees, organisations should:
1 Ensure that there is a communicated link between performance and rewards within the organisation.
2 Ensure that there is proper differentiation in performance ratings among employees.
3 Root out bad business practices, such as unnecessary work and duplication that can adversely affect enabling of the employee.
4 Put the right people in the right job by focusing on job sizing and the kind of person who best fits the role.
5 Monitor and improve the work climate within the organisation by ensuring that leaders have the right competencies and management styles to motivate employees.
6 Focus on non-monetary rewards such as career growth opportunities, development and recognition programmes.
“While financial rewards are important, they are not sufficient! Particularly for young talents, the non-monetary aspects of rewards play an equally important, if not more important, role. By taking steps to address the above to enhance employee engagement and enabling, you will go a long way to stopping your good people from walking away,” says Mana Lohatepanont, managing director of Southeast Asia at Hay Group.

Sirintip Kudtiyakarn is marketing executive of Hay Group. For more information about employee engagement, please contact [email protected]