Engaging talent
Vibha Sharma

THE longer an employee stays on with a company, the less engaged he/she is likely to become, thus making it essential for the employer to maintain and boost adequate engagement levels at the workplace.

This has been pointed out in a study by the Gallup Organisation, the global management consulting giant. It suggests that one way to ensure adequate engagement levels is by helping employees gain skills and knowledge that turn their talents into strengths. However, while many people have talent, unleashing it and creating winners is not an easy process.

Leslie Swanson, Principal Consultant of the Gallup Organisation, the knowledge partner of the CII in the recently-held fifth HRM Summit on "Igniting Minds: Building Achieving Organisations" in the Capital, felt that people were most productive, fulfilled and likely to achieve excellence when they build their lives around their talent.

The summit aimed at providing participants with a perspective on how best to utilise the existing pool of talent within their organisations.

Unleashing and channelising talent, however, requires a lot of sensitivity and empathy and a manager has to understand what makes an individual in the team tick. "Along with the manager's support, initiatives are also required at the organisational level to facilitate the process," she said.

According to the summit theme paper by Gallup, most organisations were built on two flawed assumptions-that each person could learn to be competent in almost everything and each person's greatest room for growth lay in his/her greatest weakness. "On the contrary, assumptions that guide the world's best managers are: each person's talents are enduring and unique and that a person's greatest room for growth is in his/ her greatest strength".

Strategies about how organisations with a set of highly engaged employees, psychologically committed to their workplace, could create higher customer loyalty for a long-term competitive edge in the market were also discussed. Customer care employees were the prime drivers in attracting repeat business and customer commitment as they could build loyalty or erode it.

The biggest challenge before industry was to make an organisation's core value and operational principles percolate down the line to ensure growth on a sustainable basis. Besides this, companies were increasingly realising the importance of fun at the workplace, especially in these times of rising

stress levels, to make people more productive. The better-performing organistations took fun seriously, it was stressed.

"Igniting the minds of employees is the key to building Achieving Organisations," opined Sanjeev Aggarwal, CEO, IBM Daksh Business Processes Pvt Ltd in the keynote address.

"HR needs to be seen as partner in business, not just a supplier. However, it is equally important that the high-growth organisations invest in creating a high performance workplace", felt Ajay S Shriram, Chairman, CII Northern Region & Chairman & Senior Managing Director, DCM Shriram Consolidated Ltd.

Anupam Bhasin, Chairman, HRM Summit & Director (HR & TQM) stressed upon the importance of managing human capital in the light of India's growing influence in the global economy with the country destined to emerge as one of the largest providers of workforce.