Do you have a 360° employee engagement plan?

So, what is your idea of an employee engagement plan? I have been shocked to meet clients who believe that a wholesome engagement plan simply constitutes quarterly outings + team offsites + an annual family day. If you find nothing significantly wrong with this plan, please read on.

It is critical for us to have a 360° perspective of an employee engagement plan and the benefits it can lend to an organisation. Employee engagement is one of your most effective tools to bring your employees together as one unit. Please do not make the mistake of viewing it as merely fun and games and a budget that has to be exhausted by the end of the year.

Although your employee engagement plan will have a fun-at-work element, its utility doesn’t end there. Engagements can also be used as one of your most resonating communication tools. Messaging that is picked up during an interactive fun session has a more lasting impression. More important, the messaging is not ‘in your face’.

Your engagement plan is also an effective way to connect your employees, thus creating a sticky workplace. Engagement always brings like-minded people together, creating a community. A culture like this at work will have a positive impact on your retention rate.

All employee engagement plans should also contain a health-and-wellness angle to it. Having a long-term perspective on this will give you results in the form of reduced sick leaves and a lower health insurance premium.

Don’t forget to add your CSR initiatives to the employee engagement plan either. Apart from joining hands with the employees to contribute to society, you also help build a strong value system into the organisation.

Also make sure that your employee engagement plan works in your favour when you apply for the ‘Great Place to Work’ ranking (I do hope you apply for it each year). Being ranked a top employer is your assured source of quality talent pool to hire from.

Apart from ensuring that your employee engagement plan is a sum of all of the above-mentioned parts, I have two key points for you to keep in mind:

One – make sure your employee engagement initiative is run by a brand, not a department. Most corporates make the mistake of not having a brand that holds all these parts together. We can learn from the likes of Intel, for example, which has a brand called ‘Sparsh’, and Dell, which has ‘Well at Dell’ to constitute its wellness initiatives. It is very critical for you to have this in place at the start of your employee engagement initiatives and bring all your efforts under one umbrella.

And two – make sure you tightly integrate your management and the internal communications team into the plan. To ensure that your plan is effective, you need your management to first buy into it and your internal communications team to support you throughout. Help your management see the positive business impact of your initiative and the new communication channel that you are enabling for the internal communications department.

Do not limit your employee engagement plan to individuals or a team…take the organisational view with regard to it. There are millions of opportunities you can tap into. Your imagination is the limit.

Suhail

:peoplehood