Message From MD – September 2017

Dear friends,

Have a happy Onam with your family and friends! I am hoping that this Bakrid be the start of your good and prosperous life. Have fun with your family! I also Wish you a colorful, bright, prosperous, joyous, merry and successful festival holidays.Always try to Keep the spirit of Onam and eid  in your hearts. May all your homes be filled with joy, love and peace.
Happy Onam and eid mubarak!

The month witnessed hectic and successful activities on all fronts of business. The major activities include CREDAI property shows across kerala and chuttuvattom awards ceremony in association with manorama online. Congratulations to all team members for making the month of august memorable.

The two ongoing programmes , “leading the leaders” and “bandhan” were asking  the question ‘Are we doing a good job of engaging our employees?’ The dominant observation  was that we have to improve leadership talent with the attitude, training, and willingness to devote the time to this difficult task of engagement, which can have a significant impact on performance.

Too much emphasis on “making the numbers” to the exclusion of other goals was cited as a major problem. After each branch audit meeting , I strongly felt that Engagement comes from spirit within and if the organization has little or no spirit—if it see mission as simply ‘maximizing sale value’—then engagement will remain an elusive thing.” Few of our employees are new entrants and they still have to learn a lot to adapt our culture and systems.

Some times I even felt few of the new employees walk through the corridors of asset homes  with hidden skepticism based on previous work experience with other organisations. During the course of these meetings, I strongly felt that only one third of our employees are really engaged. But at the same time many organisations proclaiming themselves as great place to work has only 1/7 th of their employees really engaged according to many HR audits. We have a huge hurdle of mistrust to overcome in theses cases. Because being engaged is an employee choice, they must in essence volunteer.  Branch managers  should see their employees as part of a volunteer workforce. The idea that engagement is a personal, one-on-one, they are not to be seen as body count but as  resources.

One problem may be that responsibility for employee engagement is too often diffused among several functions and levels in the organization. HR too buried in operating details, recruiting, and training related to core job. frontline managers too rarely judged or rewarded on the engagement levels of their charges.

A number of improvement options were suggested in these meetings which include to set the bar high, don’t settle for anything less than excellence; treat everyone with respect; provide training and role models, and reinforce the right behaviors and hold people accountable for the wrong behaviors. Engaging people is therefore very much about talking to them and listening actively to them, taking a keen interest in what is going on in people’s life at work and sometimes outside of work. Everybody needs to be touched by someone who cares. Of course, this takes lot of time. Improving employee engagement is not done through some blanket program run out of HR or Admin or whatever—it’s improved by every single leader in the organization working one-on-one with all of their employees… It’s hard—damned hard.

As a responsible organisation  we should develop employees who are engaged—emotionally invested in and focused on creating value for us  every day. Those who are engaged are:

Likely to remain more on the job as those characterized as disengaged, and more likely to refer friends and family members for employment. These factors lead to lower costs of recruitment, hiring, training, and  productivity. They will be more productive than the disengaged. They are Less likely to be absent, work more safely on the job, produce fewer quality defects, and are less likely to steal. They will Foster higher levels of customer engagement that lead to higher customer loyalty, greater growth, and more profit.

The challenge begins with hiring the right people.

If employee engagement can spell the difference between profit and loss in a business, why can’t we engage our employees? This is the million dollar question to the leaders of the organisation . Wish you another successful September !
Warm regards
Sunil kumar