What makes an Organization as “Employer of Choice”?

It’s a normal practice that organizations are in look out for good employees. Organizations look for qualifications, skills, experience, expertise, attitude and fitment of prospective employee to the job position and culture of the organization. Likewise employees are also on look out for great organizations. What does employees look in organizations? Or simply, what makes an Organization as “Employer of Choice”?

Organizations adopt several practices to help attract and retain employees. By adopting practices on higher compensation than market standards, more & unique benefits, perks will make an Organization as Employer of Choice? No, it’s not true. It is lot more than compensation, benefits and perks. It is an employer who offers a work culture and work environment that attract and retain employees. An employer of choice favors the well-being of employees. 

Not every employer of choice fits every employee.  Your employer of choice may not be the same as another employee’s employer of choice. 

Below are some of the characteristics which make an organization as “Employer of Choice”. These may differ from organization to organization and can be varied in different industries. The below list is only a few factors, but it also incomplete.

• Compensation: Compensation may include a salary and benefits that are equal to or above market standards. A comprehensive employee benefits package may include but not limited to paid time off, paid holidays, paid vacation, health insurance, accident insurance, life insurance, medical check-up(health, dental, eye), allowances for gym, periodicals and many more. Compensation and benefits should be benchmarked at regular intervals (like half-yearly or annually).
• Incentives: Incentives may include bonuses, profit sharing schemes, restricted stock units and restricted stock options.
• Opportunity to career advancement: Professional development opportunities should be given via internal recruitment program or internal job postings. Allowing employees to demonstrate the new skills through learning and promotion shows dedication.
• Training and Development: Employee boredom when there is no learning. Learning can be for acquiring new skills or sharpening their existing skills. For new hires, learning can be about making them understand about organization’s policies, culture, vision, mission, values and etc. This can be done through a new hire orientation or new hire training. For employees, learning can be for acquiring new skills or sharpening their existing skills. This can be done through arranging training sessions or sending employees/managers to seminars or conferences.
• Rewards & Recognition: Rewards and recognition go hand-in-hand.  Employees want to be rewarded in recognition for the contribution of the work done. These rewards should be equal to or above the market level. These rewards and recognition should also be bench-marked at regular intervals for maintaining a competitive edge.
• Fairness: Employees wanted to be treated fairly. Key factors that demand fairness are workload, promotions, salary, incentive, rewards and recognition.
• Freedom and respect: Employees should be given freedom to express ideas. Not all ideas will be benefitted by the organizations. But employees feel respected when they are allowed to express their ideas.
• Access to Information and employee communication: Employees need to know what’s really going on like any organization restructuring, merger, de-merger or acquisition, financial progress like year on year company revenues, expenditure and etc.  Communication plays a vital role in any organization. Organizations often practice to maintain a good communication through various programs like skip-levels, town halls, focus groups and etc.
• Commitment: Employers of choice are committed to employees. This is reflected in everything right from policies to business strategies. Employees are more committed when they agree with the organization’s goals, values and ethics.
• Involvement: Involvement is identification with one’s job. Employees who are involved with their jobs are proud of what they do and feel responsible for their quality of work.
• Positive relationships with coworkers: Successful organizations motivate people to accept each other and to work as a team(s) to achieve common goal(s). Organizations encourage building personal relationships. Employees who have coworkers they respect are less likely to quit due to single negative event. This is not just limited with coworkers in the same department or coworkers in other department but also extends to bosses from the same or other department (wherever matrix reporting is applicable).
• Work/life balance programs: Most employees want a reasonable balance between work and personal life. Increasingly, organizations are attempting to become more sensitive to the personal or family needs of the employees. Some of the practices may include flexible work hours, work from home, paid vacation and or additional paid leave.
• Job security: Employees are attracted to stay with organizations where they feel that they will have a job if they do a good work. Employees with job security are more willing to take risks for the organization and will be able more focused on their core functions without any worry.

Tips to boost employee engagement

Organizations seek to maximize the productivity and profitability of their employees. Employees seek satisfaction from their work. If both can be achieved concurrently, there is a true win-win. The impact of “engaged” workforce over an “unengaged” one is dramatic.  Employees must be engaged in productive tasks so that they do not lose their focus and avoid conflicts and unnecessary disputes. 

Employee engagement has become an area of focus within organizations for the purpose of retention as a means of avoiding expensive employee replacement costs resulting from employee(s) who voluntarily quit their jobs. 

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is a measurable degree of an employee’s positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and organization that profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work.

Why employee engagement?

Engaged employees care about the future of the company and are willing to invest discretionary effort. Engaged employees feel a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them, which results in higher retention levels and productivity levels and lower absenteeism. Employees who are actively engaged help move the organization forward. 

Drivers of engagement: There are a range of factors, known as drivers that are thought to increase overall engagement. By managing the drivers, an organization can effectively manage engagement levels of its employees. Drivers such as communication, performance clarity and feedback, organizational culture, rewards and recognition, relationships with managers and peers, career development opportunities and knowledge of the organization’s goals and vision are some of the factors that facilitate employee engagement.

Employee perceptions of job importance: An employee's attitude toward the job's importance and the company had the greatest impact on loyalty and customer service than all other employee factors combined.

Employee clarity of job expectations: If expectations are not clear and basic materials and equipment are not provided, negative emotions such as boredom or resentment may result, and the employee may then become focused on surviving more than thinking about how he can help the organization succeed.

• Regular feedback and dialogue with superiors: Feedback is the key to giving employees a sense of where they’re going. A simple “thanks, you did a good job” will add more value.
• Quality of working relationships with peers, superiors, and subordinates: If employees' relationship with their managers is fractured, then no amount of perks will persuade the employees to perform at top levels. Employee engagement is a direct reflection of how employees feel about their relationship with the boss.
• Effective Internal Employee Communications: An effective internal employee communication conveys a clear description of "what's going on". The effect of poor internal communications is seen as it’s most destructive in global organizations.
• Reward & Recognition: A good incentive scheme tends to improve the employee engagement which results in overall productivity. Setting realistic targets, selecting the right rewards for your incentive program, communicating the scheme effectively and frequently, have lots of winners and reward all achievers, encouraging sustained effort, present awards publicly and evaluate the incentive scheme regularly.

Some of the initiatives towards employee engagement can be:

• On-boarding gives an overview of the organization. The on-boarding event experience itself leaves a mark on the minds of the new hires. Remember first impression is the best impression;
• Learning and development events which foster enhancing skill levels of employees;
• Internal job posting for career advancement;
• Rewards & Recognition results in increasing motivation levels of employees;
• Fun at work initiatives or team building activities are great for generating a feeling of belonging.

Tips to boost employee engagement:

Firstly, determine whether your organization is active or reactive with respect to employee engagement. If an organization is spending a large amount of time combating absenteeism, addressing underperformance, coping with high turnover and dealing with negative and frustrated employees, then the organization’s approach is reactive. If it is active, organization is deliberately takings steps to influence employee engagement.

Secondly, be aware of two key aspects, cultural reality and employee job satisfaction, when influencing employee engagement.

Below are the steps which can boost employee engagement:

• Get the facts and be open to them. Communication plays a very important role. Encourage an honest two-way communication.
• Understand that engagement is not a survey; it’s a daily action. Avoid believing that actions don’t make a difference; they do. Management should get involved with teams every day and show that they are interested in what they do.
• Management must constantly motivate his employees. Cash prizes, trophies, gift vouchers, certificates are an effective way to motivate the employees and keep them engaged in their work. Give them a target and ask them to achieve that within a particular time frame to earn handsome incentives or lucrative prizes. This way, the employees would not waste their time and spend their maximum time working and aiming for the rewards.
• Accept that engagement is a dynamic process. There is no goal line; it’s a moving target that requires constant attention, commitment and action.

Is HR analytics future of HR?

Human resources analytics have become a hot topic in organization of all sizes. Interest is rising. Organizations are reaching out to learn more about analytics and how they can use them to improve organizational effectiveness. Today, most of the organizations are encouraging HR to design various types of data or metrics or analytics which are not just related to people but also on various processes - recruitment, compensation, grievances, benefits, training & development, separation and etc.

What is HR Analytics? HR Analytics is an area in the field of analytics that refers to applying analytic processes to the human resource department of an organization in the hope of improving employee performance and therefore getting a better return on investment. HR analytics does not just deal with gathering data on employee efficiency; instead it aims to provide insights into each process by gathering data and then using it to make relevant decision about how to improve various processes.

Benefits of HR Analytics:

• Respond to business in advance through predictive analytics for Human Resources;
• Improve organizational performance through high quality talent related decisions;
• Optimize talent supply chain;
• Increase ROI on Talent;
• Serving as a source of competitive advantage for organizations;
• Execution of business strategy.

 Below are some of the few processes where HR analytics can be applied:

      a.       Talent Acquisition:

·         Ratio of offers made to open positions;

·         Ratio of offers made to acceptances;

·         Ratio of acceptance to joining;

·         Cost per hire;

·         Time to fill open position;

·         Ratio of offers made to employee referrals.

      b.      Talent Development:

·         Feedback analysis of participants attending training;

·         Effectiveness evaluation of training;

·         Ratio of participants to nominations for a training program;

·         Cost per participant.

      c.       Grievances:

·         Grievances received to resolve;

·         Time to close a grievance;

      d.      Employee Separation:

·         Total separation ratio in a month/year;

·         Involuntary separation;

·         Voluntary separation;

·         Voluntary separation by length of service.

      e.      Head count:

·         Hires as a percentage of total employees;

·         Hires to separation;

·         Demographics – age, gender, geographical, departmental, qualifications and etc;

      f.        Compensation:

·         Compensation as a percentage of Revenue;

·         Compensation as a percentage of Expense;

·         Benefit cost as a percentage of Revenue;

·         Benefit cost as a percentage of Expense;

·         Benefit cost as a percentage of compensation;

·         Supervisory compensation percentage;

       g.       Other analytics may include

·         Revenue per employee;

·         Expense per employee;

·         HR Department expense per company employee;

While the above list is only a sample, HR Analytics can be used in various other HR processes. It depends on the need and necessity of the organization.

Usage of HR Analytics:

Human Resources analytics has become an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of activities and processes. HR Analytics are used in various ways and forms.

• Reporting: A substantial amount of effort in the study and practice of analytics has focused on reporting. Reporting incorporates decisions about what analytics will be reported; How analytics will be packaged; How, when and whom they should be reported?
• Dashboards: Dashboards are enriched component of reporting. Dashboards contain business unit analyses to permit managers to drill down to examine analytics on several levels of the organization. 
• Benchmarking:  Benchmarking provides insights into what is possible.
• Data Mining: Data mining refers to efforts to identify patterns that exist within data and that may identify unrecognized causal mechanisms that can be used to enhance decision making. To identify these causal mechanisms, data mining used correlation and multiple regression methods to identify patterns of relationships.
• Better problem solving and decision making: In organizations, decisions result in tactical decision. Making these decisions requires: understanding the outcomes that one is attempting to achieve, understanding the factors that influence those outcomes and their current states and knowing available tactical options and their costs.

 Useful things to remember about HR analytics:

• Don’t “Do Analytics”: The primary objective of developing capabilities in HR analytics is to increase organizational effectiveness. Simply conducting the analysis and developing reports are activities and activities raise cost. Developing HR analytics to be used by managers must involve a return on the organization’s investment.
• Bigger is not always better: The success of any analytics is not measured by how many people are involved, but it is measured on how many analytics are tracked, how many people receive reports. It is gauged by the impact that the results have on managerial decisions.
• HR Analytics is a journey and not a destination: Because the focus is on identifying and responding to opportunities and problems, useful and effective HR analytics projects change over time. If organizations are successful in solving operational problems, the focus for managers naturally shifts to other problems or new opportunities.
• Be willing to learn: Organizations that have an HR analytics function will develop a bias for experimentation to try out new HR activities, programs or processes. Organizations should develop analytics “laboratory” where the HR professionals can experiment with new analyses and test existing assumptions about the requirements of the organization’s current systems.
• Avoid the temptation to measure everything aggressively: Not every function, process that can be analyzed should be. Successful efforts will focus on those things that are most likely to have the greatest impact on managerial decision making. The analytics should be focused on factors, processes, and functions related to those things that are likely to have the greatest impact on organization effectiveness.

HR analytics in the present competitive world is the future of HR

The development of useful and effective HR analytics is already viewed and if not, likely to be viewed in the future as a very significant source of competitive advantage. By using HR analytics, decision makers will acquire the ability to more effectively manage and improve HR programs and processes as well as to improve the organization effectiveness.