HR Interventions - Building A More Committed Workplace
Sharika Gupta

HR interventions are increasingly finding favour with practitioners in various forms. The author in this essay emphasizes the effectivity of the amazingly simple method of seeking feedback. By leveraging her immense professional experience and judgment the author shows how engagement level of employees can be gauged to develop a committed work force.

Feedback is as difficult to give as it is to get and yet it is so important to be able to express oneself. It’s a key determinant of the psychological contract - an individuals' intent to stay or leave an organization.

I was sifting through old exit feedback files and rediscovered the angst people had expressed. I have been traveling across the country for the last few weeks interacting closely with various work groups, understanding their concerns, how they feel about the work place, their colleagues, their bosses, the kind of work they do and their levers of satisfaction. All of it validating the role of feedback and its criticality to the individual and organization.  

In the transition from B-school to the workplace, it becomes increasingly difficult to express one's self - fear, culture, rewards and consequences, and fundamentally lack of organized ways and mechanisms to channel feedback are largely responsible.  

As an OD person I believe that the single largest contribution one can bring to the table is help organizations develop mechanisms to do more of this. Whilst surveys can be run to obtain feedback on critical processes, the key to shaping organizational health, lies in implementing a sound 'Engagement Framework'.  

This is a tool that gives the organization a measure of its committed workforce. The reason an organization would want to know that is the behaviors of the three are very different.    

THE THREE TYPES OF EMPLOYEES:

1. Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.

2. Not-engaged employees are essentially “checked out”. They are sleepwalking through their workday, putting time--but not energy or passion -- into their work.

3. Actively disengaged employees are not just unhappy at work; they are busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

Most importantly engaged employees display greater problem solving and decision making behaviours on the job. Given they have discretion, they use it to benefit the workplace. The discretion has been ascribed a $ value where surveys have been conducted over a 15 - 20 year span, year after year. This has been found to vary between $1500 - 2500 per person. Which organization would not aspire to have such “engaged” people.

The survey seeks to understand the levels of satisfaction around parameters that are:  

• Specific

• Actionable

• Measurable

• Impactful

The design ensures that these are reflected in the survey questionnaire, the tool that elicits the feedback. The feedback analysis involving multiple regression, factor analysis, t-tests, means & standard deviations for large samples; enables a categorization of issues based on their impact and performance. This is used to categorize and prioritize issues for action.

It always helps to put a voice to the feedback because all the statistical tools cannot capture & enrich what decibels can.

Sometimes people may not understand the questions completely, changes may happen in the workplace impacting their levels of satisfaction, and there is typically a lag between doing a survey and acting on feedback that should ideally be factored in.

Focused group discussions led by a skilled facilitator are one of the best ways to tackle feedback. People articulate their concerns and the facilitator puts them into an actionable framework. He should be someone with high influencing skills reflected in his ability to get resourcing and buy-in for action agenda with key stakeholders.  

Agree on outcomes that will be pursued and closed, tell people you are working on them and show them a dashboard - a simple but effective tracking tool that tells them what you are working on.  

Share successes, celebrate closures and watch the commitment graph move north. I have seen some of the most disgruntled workplaces turn around because commitments to action were followed through. I have also seen the reverse – excellence needs nurturing and great work places need to be sustained. It is a consistent act, not an event.  
 

Look forward to more budding professionals joining the fraternity and doing better work. Touch people in fundamental ways, impact lives.

Sharika Gupta,
E-Commerce, MCSE, MBA, Phd (Pursuing),
Rai Business School, Rai University
Phone: 26959000 (Extn: 336)
Personal Ph: 9811093921
Personal e-mail: sharika_gupta@hotmail.com