Hay Group India Blog
The changing face of reward examines how the business drivers of reward are changing due to the impact of the global downturn and other macroeconomic trends in the global economy. The study is based on face-to-face interviews with senior HR specialists from over 230 companies in 29 countries, which collectively manage more than 4.7 million people and generate annual revenue streams of approximately US$4.5 trillion.
Across all sectors and regions, organizations are struggling to re-build profitability following the recession. With revenue growth hard to come by, they are focusing on cost containment and performance improvement as the paths to profit growth. This requires them to balance four, often conflicting, challenges: cost containment, performance improvement, talent engagement and risk management.
In particular, the tension between cost containment and talent engagement was a very strong theme to come out of the research. Organizations are very concerned about retention and motivation, particularly for top performers, high potentials and those with scarce skills. However, the option of paying more for retention or performance is often no longer available and companies are focusing more on intangible rewards (such as motivational leadership, challenging work and career development) to boost engagement.
Emotional Intelligence helps you measure and develop high performance behaviors.
Hay Group’s research, in partnership with Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, continues to demonstrate that emotional and social intelligence differentiates outstanding performers from average employees.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) helps you measure and develop these star qualities in your employees. It uses the Goleman and Boyatzis Emotional and Social Intelligence Competency Inventory (ESCI) – the most validated measure of EI behaviors on the market.
We’ve all heard the one about the CEO who was asked how many people worked in his organisation. “Oh, about half of them,” he replied.
Joking aside, how true is this within your organisation? If you don’t know chances are it’s not being measured or at least not being measured in a way that gives you the same top line data such as profit, debt days outstanding and units shipped. It’s interesting that many organisations just don’t know, even when perhaps half of their salary bills, their biggest costs, are going on people either not contributing
– what we call non-engaged – or, worse still, those who are actually pushing in the wrong direction. In other words, actively disengaged.
After all, who needs competitors if you’ve got actively disengaged employees on your payroll?
All of our research shows that employees want to work and want to work hard, it’s what human beings naturally want to do. That’s the good news. Given that the vast majority of us want to work, what then is the driving force behind those that want to work in the same direction as the employer and those that don’t? That’s the question a good engagement study seeks to answer. And the answers matter. A well aligned workforce results in better bottom-line performance. It delivers higher scores on pretty much any business critical key performance indicators you care to mention, whether they be profit, innovation, safety or anything else. It also means comparatively better share performance.
To the question of whether employee engagement matters to the CEO the answer is undoubtedly ‘yes’. Highly engaged workers make for better business outputs, more loyal customers, fewer ‘problems’ and better financial performance. What’s not to like?
