Seeking Ideas for Boosting Employee Engagement Across Our 25 Branches – How Do You Do It?

Dear All, I recently joined an automobile dealership (Sales & Service) as Assistant Manager-HR. Our company has around 25 branches with a manpower strength of approximately 900 employees. I have observed that the functions of the HR department in our company are limited to recruitment and statutory activities. Due to this situation, I believe our company lacks in employee relations and team building. As I am new to the automobile industry, I would greatly appreciate it if any of you could suggest how I should start implementing some employee engagement activities. Since the branches are spread all over the state, activities that can be conducted branch-wise would be ideal.

Best Regards, Hari

How about starting a scheme called "Branch of the Month" and arranging a party for the selected branch?

Understanding the Business Context for Employee Engagement

If your business has established a 900-employee, 25-location presence, it is clearly doing something right. While your perception that employee relations and teamwork could be improved may be very valid, any intervention that does not directly impact business performance is not likely to get much serious or long-lasting buy-in from senior management.

Perhaps a pragmatic starting point, before jumping at solutions, is to first try and quantify the nature/scale of the problem. There are lots of questions that can be asked:

- What are the strategic and tactical goals of the business?
- What key metrics does the business use to measure its performance?
- In what ways does the business struggle/fail to achieve its goals?
- What are the strategic threats to the business?
- To what degree are the business processes of the 25 locations independent/interdependent/integrated?
- In what way do employee relations and teamwork impact the achievement of business goals?
- How do employees feel about working for the business?
- To what degree are customers' expectations being met?
- Where there are gaps in meeting customer expectations, what are the root causes?
- Etc.

Data for an analysis of HR-related drivers: turnover, recruitment costs, training costs, appraisal metrics, etc., should be readily available to you. However, a comprehensive assessment of the issue should also look for input from other operational areas: marketing, sales, finance, quality control, maintenance, etc.

In my experience, the more you can engage your senior management in a) accepting there is an issue, and b) agreeing that analysis needs to be done to quantify the issue in terms of the impact on business performance, the more likely any solution/intervention will be supported and effective in the long term. If it is not, the risk is that your seniors (and consequently the rest of the organization) will dismiss this type of effort as so much HR fluff...

Good luck.

You could start with some very simple team-building activities, beginning with low-cost meetups in the office. If you can secure a budget, also consider organizing a small offsite team activity. The build-up to such activities and the post-activity buzz do a lot for teamwork and engagement.

Apart from this, consider a gamified approach by incorporating rewards for different excellence targets and publicly recognizing the winners, runners-up, etc. Tweak the targets so that different people can keep winning.

Also, communicate the organization's values very clearly. Employees like to work and give their 100% when they feel the organization has a vision they can align with. It creates a mission approach versus a task approach.

Some of this can be automated using HR software, but not all. I am happy to discuss in more detail offline.

Strategic Steps for Employee Engagement

Move strategically. You could:

• Design and roll out an employee feedback form. Let them share their viewpoints, ideas, and expectations. This should take you about 2 months.

• Make a synopsis and derive important, implementable points as per the budget allotted.

• Include team members through PR and create an informal team (beyond formal) for execution.

• Do the brainstorming and planning before execution, for example, a quarterly activity calendar, performance-based titles for star performers, bulletin boards, internal newsletters, etc. This should take you about 1-2 months.

• Before the launch, create mystery and market the product to develop curiosity amongst the crowd and double up the value.

Final Steps

LAST.. GO FOR IT!!

Feel free to connect in case any support is needed. All the best!

Regards,
Rupinder

LinkedIn: in.linkedin.com/pub/rupinder-kaur/14/a72/413/

Thank you very much for all your views and suggestions that helped me implement a few engagement activities in our organization. Some of my new initiatives include:

1. Distributing Birthday Cards to employees during morning meetings on their birthdays.
2. Branch-wise Cricket competition.
3. Small peer-group activities.
4. Christmas celebrations.
5. Employee of the month (Branch-wise).

The response we received from the employees regarding the new initiatives was positive. Once again, I thank you all for your guidance.

Regards,
Harinandan.R