Employee Engagement Approach - Conventional or Unconventional?

What do we understand by the term "Employee Engagement"? Does this really work? Does it help in motivating your workforce? Or connecting employees with company's goals? Do really employees give a fig about company's goal?

Well... I think the toughest and most important challenge you face as an entrepreneur, especially now a days is connecting the workforce with your company's goal. People who work for the company build the stakeholder value. A CEO, HR or Finance alone can't do it. It's the collective efforts of the employees build the stakeholder value of a company. But if they are not connected or engaged, they would not be an active part of your company's goal.

Isn't it, employers are more focused on productivity? Yes. And Employee Engagement influence Productivity. People who are being valued, recognised and involved at work are more likely to be engaged and productive in turn. But How to engage them? 

Companies are failing in engaging their employees since they follow a conventional approach. What they forget to do is to consider their work life balance. Do these companies really bother about the life their employees live after their work or what are their personal interests are? The answer is..No. They don't. Look around yourself. The work pressure is all around among the environment. The environment which is demanding and expecting you to be a top performer. In this scenario, why do employees have to be engaged in company's goal, when they have their own goals to achieve? That's where the failure lies for employee engagement.

Companies succeeding  now a days  are following the unconventional approach to engage their employees. They are wanting their employees to master skills which are not only useful to their work. They sponsor for the skills employees are interested in outside their work. A Company which is trying to connect to employees' personal goals, can expect it's people to be connected to it's Goal. 

The simple and easiest way to engage your staff is to look after them. And they will look after everything else. 

Ethics at work - Whose responsibility?

What ethics are? How much ethical you are? Do these affect personally or only at work? There is a saying "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay".

There are common ethical dilemmas we face everyday both at work and home. Dealing and handling those dilemmas are difficult but is critical to have an ethical environment. Ethics begin with the sense of social responsibility one has as an individual. Moral values which are inherent in the society help creating a difference between right and wrong. These moral values give an individual potential to lead a team with ethics, with a culture having trust and with a sense of acceptance to right and wrong. Someone once asked me the definition of right. Definition of right is not one drives based on perception and justification. It is driven by Integrity. Integrity to the system you work for and honesty to yourself. An integral system builds a culture of social responsibility.

What can be the situations where ethics are being exploited?

Harassment, misusing IT infrastructure of the company you work for, cheating your employer or not treating your co-workers well. There can be numerous issues. Off the job, an employee may show questionable actions about people or things. Which can be risky to address this. Avoiding such behaviors and not dealing with the root cause may lead to low trust work environment where employees tell lies and manipulate at their convenience.

If bad behaviors are not identified and eliminated, if the root cause are not found and corrected, the culture is going to be impacted. And the culture threat is to those of the Start ups specifically who are in process of setting up their values in place. Similar with employer. Exploiting employees, assigning work in odd hours, not giving the right opportunities, divide and rule an so on. 

It is always assumed that Upper Management and HR hold the responsibility to have an ethical environment. Is that true? And if the Management itself is creating an unethical environment and pretends to create a positive atmosphere, whose job it is to have a right culture in place?

Culture within the organisation is always affected by daily actions and decisions. If these actions and decisions are begun to be overlooked for individual's gain, the whole concept of social responsibility and ethical environment is begun to be defeated. We as an individual are less conscious about the affect our decision is going to make on the other counterparts. But it does.

A company's major contribution to an ethical environment is to focus on the different groups of people both for practical reasons as well as ethical. Employees are the group of people critical for success working for the common purpose. A pool of high potential talent with appropriate skills is one of the greatest strength a company can have. The major responsibility of an employer is to protect the relationship of the organisation to the environment, the nature of reality and truth, the nature of human nature, the nature of human activity and the most important, the nature of human relationships. Letting you people know as to what is the right way to interact and to distribute power and resources. to distribute information.

Organisational ethics always focus on the choices of the individual and the organisation. Its a broad concept that talks about not only the internal trust but also the processes, rules, outcomes and a way of working basically not a set of few principles. It's a continuous effort to create a literal meaning to common purpose and shared set of believe set.