Hi Neel,
If you want to go by the prevalent practices of companies to establish an Employment Engagement Committee, certainly the guidance given by Radhika should suffice. That's what most modern companies do in the area you are looking into.
Yet, I invite your attention to some grave failures of Employee Engagement that came to light post 2008-09 depression - caused by the failure of Lehman Brothers and others - which were in turn caused by disengaged employees!
Even the recall of millions of vehicles by quality conscious Toyota is indication of what bad results employee disengagement could bring to business, even in reputed, well established companies!
Whether at Lehman Brother or at Toyota, these 21st century employees certainly knew of the failure of their products, services or their companies much before anyone else, but they were not feeling sufficiently engaged/involved in safeguarding the company.
We realize more and more that existing practices of Employee Engagement are not sufficient and they are no guarantee to safeguard business today!
What is worse, the business is so complex that we can't leave it to a few at the top management to safeguard Organizations!
If you have powers to include whatever is needed for Employee Engagement, you may find these following reflections useful.
My Reflections for Employee Engagement of Futuristic Organizations:
- Every business starts as a result of the intense involvement of a few. A business by definition is the end result of the involvement of an individual or a group of people to realize his/her/their dreams. And, as business grows and inducts more people in, it is crucial to keep everyone aligned to the original purpose of business, so all are engaged in taking the business to desired goals.
- With business tasks divided/fragmented between separate managers and teams like the HR, Admin, Material Management and other divisions, there is the risk of missing the common goals by its constituent elements... the lower level employees as well as top level managers!
- See what the dean of Harvard Business School has said:
Managers have lost legitimacy over the past decade in the face of a widespread institutional breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society's trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role...
- This widespread institutional breakdown results from the managers and the managed, together, not relating themselves to the long term interests of the Company. That is because, for too long, we have believed that any integrated reality (say, a business) can be broken down into their constituent parts, and by managing isolated parts well, the integrity of the whole will be enhanced! In the complex world today, this assumption is proving false! Take a look at this quote below and the article about Peter Senge' Theory of Management from which the quote is borrowed:
The defining characteristic of a system is that it cannot be understood as a function of its isolated components. First, the behavior of the system doesn't depend on what each part is doing but on how each part is interacting with the rest ... Second, to understand a system we need to understand how it fits into the larger system of which it is a part ... Third, and most important, what we call the parts need not be taken as primary. In fact, how we define the parts is fundamentally a matter of perspective and purpose, not intrinsic in the nature of the 'real thing' we are looking at.
That is, an ideal and hence the most useful approach to promote Employee Engagement in 21st Century Business Contexts is not in what activities the Company does for its employees, but what the company does to enable and qualitatively enhance their ability to interact with the rest of the organization!
That will require that we think of workers and Managers as integrated part of the system, and that employees have more than physical labour to contribute to business. And, to think in such systems perspective, we need to break some assumptions on which business operates today, as indicated in the article cited above:
- "I am my position"
- "The enemy is out there"
- "The illusion of taking charge"
- "The fixation on events"
- "The parable of the boiled frog"
- "The delusion of learning from experience" (1990, pp. 17 - 26)
To expand on these assumptions, this is not the right place.
But, those who are heading HR and Operations that relate to the human side of business will do well to imbibe this systems thinking and organizational learning process so there will be true, visionary engagement by Managers and the managed in any organization, ensuring the safety and growth of the organization, and the welfare of the nation.