Keeping Your Workforce Engaged

Keeping Your Workforce Engaged – a Strategic Challenge

Performance Focused Organisations consider the important issue of a healthy staff turnover rate. In normal operations it is wise to keep it lower rather than higher, but the figure will vary with the industry, the business, its stage of growth, its strategic direction, the size of the available talent pool, and the economy. It will also vary over time, for example, at one time a target of 10% might be set. At another time, it might be much lower.

It is quite a paradoxical strategic challenge – to maintain a culture of engagement that treats and provides for people as valued individuals, while at the same time, inspiring them, individually and as a group, to perform as well as they can and to contribute in a range of ways to the organisation.

It is interesting how “Recognition and Reward”, such a hot topic for the last 5 years, is now out of vogue. The new trend is to promote well-being and provide a range of career-related and professional opportunities that are matched to an individual’s aspirations and key motivators and drivers.

Never before has the need to understand each staff member been so critical. To spend time discovering their key strengths, their motivators and drivers, their preferred approaches to work, what creates job satisfaction for them, and those things that compromise job performance and job satisfaction. To know, as a manager, the sticking points between your style and the individual styles of your team members. To call on strengths, to foster growth in unpracticed areas. To spend sufficient time on these activities and recognise it as a strategic component of your work.

Recently I worked with a Leadership Team that believed that they were highly in tune with their staff’s preferences around job satisfaction, engagement and high performance. However, our survey showed that there was a disparity between the items that the Leadership Team overestimated were important and the feedback on the same items from the staff. This is a common scenario.

We can help our clients become more cognisant of the factors that impact engagement and retention through our relationship with Harrison Assessments. Their Engagement and Retention Report provides very clear information in a graphical format on the factors influencing your staff as individuals, and as a team.

The How To Manage and Retain Report guides managers in getting the best out of their staff. And the Key Strengths Report will show the contribution of each person to the team.

Indra Consulting is one of the leading users of Harrison Assessments in Australia and New Zealand. We are distributors, Expert Level Interpreters and accredited trainers. Our business has worked with Harrison Assessments Intl for the past 10 years.

We wish you a relaxed weekend and a  profitable and inspired week ahead.