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Employee engagement dynamics-why Indian corporates need to look at EB consulting in a major way

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Image courtesy : https://fr.checkmarket.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/employee-satisfaction.png

Today, leading organizations realize that driving employee experience is key to enhancing engagement, resulting in a reinforced employer brand supporting the larger concern of attracting and retaining the best talent, while enabling business growth.

This journey of improving employee experience evolved from just employee engagement and took a crusade during COVID, where “safe-workplace” was added to the mix. The initial focus was to impact every experience during their employment journey by making it, gratifying and consumer-grade, based on feedback and data. The focus was to ensure enhancing interviews, hiring, onboarding, HR services, and exit experiences while transforming the culture to be more inclusive and data driven. Today, the focus has evolved to creating a company where people want to show up vs need to show up.

HR focus on digital strategy became critical in this journey that led to digital transformation to supplement employee experience through simplicity, transparency, and access to HR processes on a single web and/or mobile application to their employees. Today, most employers offer a digital solution to employees for all HR related processes, information, documents, and data.

As this crusade continues, there is a great opportunity within the employee benefits spectrum, especially as when aimed to make them meaningful and personal to meet employees’ needs.

 

Need:

The employee’s awareness of benefits and behaviour of consuming the same in the market has changed. This is similar to the convenient experiences of consumers to get their demands at their fingertips for meals, groceries, banking, or even in viewing entertainment

There is an expectation that consumers are pushed with relevant information or services suiting their needs and therefore enjoy the convenience to build their loyalties.

The benefits offered by peers will not necessarily build such experiences unless it imbibes a sense of belonging that is relevant to the company’s culture, ethos, and values. As such, the benefits are not merely the design, it encompasses communication, access, processes, technology, and relevance in creating value.

Employers who can implement strategies to offer personalized benefit designs to meet their critical talent needs will be in a better position to build a stronger brand in the market and successful businesses.

The opportunity of benefits creating value higher than that offered by compensation is worth exploring.

 

Current Practice:

It is customary to seek market benchmarks & practices to design their benefits in the current scenario. The primary purpose is to understand the prevalence in the market to reduce gaps in the benefits offered and to ensure talent attraction and retention, besides supporting the budget’s justifications. This process enables employers to align their benefits to market practice and understand the gaps to better manage their talent strategies.

Many employers also engage insurance brokers to seek wider perspectives based on market practice and claims analysis to decide the design for their insured benefits.

HR typically also reviews employees’ inputs and feedback, or concerns received during the year, but most fail to evaluate and recognise the employee need which could be diverse. This leads to design and benefit structures that are relied on benchmarks and a few major escalations/concerns.

The real employee needs are revealed outside of the typical market benchmark, claims analytics, and mere escalation during the year. Consequently, the larger concern is the benefits may not be relevant or meaningful to most employees or even align with company culture and strategy.

 

An Alternate Approach:

To truly seek an employee experience that is gratifying and consumer-grade, the approach to structuring employee benefits needs to be human-centric.

Benefits play a vital role to attract and retain talent and more importantly creating a strong employer brand. Though it is underplayed currently as it is generally “one-size-fits-all” which will need to change to make it meet the diverse needs of employees.

This can be achieved by following a multiple facet approach. The key aspect of the approach is to seek a credible understanding of HR’s business goals and its corresponding talent strategy and closely working with the HR to understand the diverse stakeholder perspectives and seek structured feedback from employees, carefully not to set expectations while getting a deeper understanding and differentiation of needs and demands.

These invaluable insights allow businesses to understand the connections, communications, and celebrations that support HR in driving talent strategy for business growth. The outcome of the exercise allows to identify gaps in alignments and define novel challenges that need greater focus and critical problem-solving methods.

Advisories work with teams to clearly chart out the benefits philosophy, principles and pillars that support the benefits decisions. With an aim to generate innovative and original design opportunities that are relevant to the employees and the company’s culture, workshops are conducted to leverage co- creation tools. It assists in offering employers a clear transition plan to make employee benefits relevant and personal uniquely positioning them to compete in the market while attracting and retaining talent.

 

Concerns:

Employers experience reluctance in seeking employee feedback, and therefore miss out on much information on evaluating the demands and needs. In such cases, adoption of an alternate approach where representative voices are sourced and expectations managed.

Another concern is most organizations believe in scripting google mission statements and philosophy to customise, while it’s the easiest way out and doable, it is observed that it’s not scientific and generally may differ in alignment with the companies’ culture and progressive talent strategy.

It is also experienced, that some creative and innovative ideas are really endearing and can augment the experience, though they are ahead of time and may not have immediate feasibility. In such cases, striving to build a transition plan and working towards creating partnerships and ecosystems for reality in the short or long-term horizon, is feasible.

 

Towards holistic transformation:

With HR’s focus to build a stronger employer brand, it is crucial to drive holistic transformation to build an employee benefit approach aligning with business need, talent strategy, and culture.

Such an approach will ensure the unique positioning of the benefits that should enable organizations to build a sense of belonging to show up to work and build a stronger organization.

 

(The author is Mr. Sachin Kilpady, Head- Health & Benefits Consulting, Gallagher Insurance Brokers and the views expressed in this article are his own)

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