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29 March 2024

Engage your staff to beat recession

Sustainable performance has to be driven by passion and fulfilment, say experts. (SUPPLIED)

Published
By Reena Amos Dyes

As businesses prepare to face the intense post-recession competition, more firms in the region are focusing on employee engagement by improving leadership and staff management capabilities.

According to those in the recruitment and human performance improvement business this is because performance goes hand in hand with fulfilment.

"Performance alone is not sustainable in organisations anymore," Stephan Melchior, Managing Director and Consultant of Wilson Learning, told Emirates Business. "We need people that invest a high level of energy into their jobs to execute business strategy, be innovative, customer-focused, and focus on implementation. People with a high level of job fulfilment work out of passions and deliver continuously high performance in their positions."

Sudeshna Mukherjee, General Manager at careers portal Careertunity.com, added: "The fallacy in the management circles is to focus on performance and managers tend to react to those, while they miss out on the element of fulfilment. In many cases, performance is affected due to lack of fulfilment and an effective leader is the one who can identify these factors and work on those with their team members."

There are many challenges in driving employee engagement as the main driver for that is usually the line manager and how they motivate their staff generally depends on their leadership skills as well as the organisational culture, the experts said.

Melchior said: "According to our research, the main driver is the direct supervisor and his or her approach towards leadership. Time constraints, organisational pressure and resources are mostly the reasons why managers fail to exercise their leadership skills."

Mukherjee said: "In addition, organisational policy and culture may not support employee engagement as part of the institution."

However, despite all the challenges more and more organisations realise that engagement is not only "nice-to-have" anymore but can directly be related to a tangible business outcome. This applies to businesses globally and also to businesses in the region who foster employee engagement in their offices.

"There are many business houses in the region which have 'employee engagement' as part of their human resource policy. There are conscientious efforts being made to implement these," Mukherjee said.

So how can firms improve employee engagement? According to the experts employee engagement is an organisational commitment to getting feedback from its employees and acting on those findings. An employee survey is the first step and an analysis of this would provide the direction and areas that need to be addressed under employee engagement. Post implementation, conducting a survey would delineate the success and improvement areas, the latter would provide future direction of employee engagement. A successful organisation does not have miserable employees.

Melchior summed it up: "Employee engagement has almost unlimited shapes and faces, thus it is sometimes so hard to achieve. However, it can be summarized in giving employees what they need so they in return can give the organization what it needs."

But the question on everyone's minds is do employers care about employee engagement in a post-recession world where new jobs are hard to find and people are holding on to their jobs despite exploitation by the companies?

Mukherjee said: "Yes, some are still doing this as they believe in the fact that employee engagement brings out the best in people. In fact, a recent survey has revealed that up to 91 per cent of business organisations intend to focus on employee engagement by improving leadership and staff management capabilities."

So what are the key components of effective employee management?

Melchior said: "As leaders, if we make an effort to show our people the big picture and communicate the company vision, show them how they connect to that vision and how they individually contribute; if we give them feedback and recognition for their performance, and the right tools and resources to perform, we have a more than 50 per cent impact on their performance."

According to experts, companies stand to lose if they do not foster a culture of performance with fulfilment.

Mukherjee said: "Strong inter-linkage between fulfilment and performance is evident enough to say that those who recognise this stand to gain. If companies are looking for long-term association with their employees by creating a bond with them, a culture of performance with fulfilment will give that extra mileage and consequent benefit."

Melchior concluded: "Sustainable performance has to be driven by passion and fulfilment. With the volatility in the market and the challenges to predict, sustainability is what organisations try to achieve most to be successful in the long-term. Fulfilment is one component that supports sustainability and integrates employees' motivation into their job role."