Are young employees engaged?

This refers the article published in Economic times in the editorial section on 24/2/2018 by well-known professionals Vikas Chaturvedi and Paresh Rajgariha on “Having a Working Relationship”. They have stated in their article that “India must build success stories in local workforces by aligning workers with, and involving workers in wealth creation by improving employee engagement.”

There is a serious issue of engagement found recently in many organizations. Some companies tend to hire people first and then search for work to be ascribed to them, while some companies hire people in bulk and when the project ends, they find them as a misfit in their current jobs. Thus, one reason for the lack of engagement in the employees comes from the lack of long term employee growth planning by businesses. In many such cases, employee planning is left to the Human Resource Department and businesses shy away from their responsibilities. Another reason where employee engagement is affected is due to the non-pay related incentives that a company offers. All the policies of the company are aligned to suit general horde and few policies are focused on employee engagement.

To increase employee engagement, organization should have a proper analysis of the age of the people in the organization and a feedback or a survey must be undertaken to understand the possible causes of lack of employee engagement. Then it is possible that one finds the root cause related to engagement. Though, the solution found out could solve problem of one organization but it will not be a panacea. Customization of solution on this front is needed. Employees who are more passionate about their skill development or entrepreneurship should be treated separately.

So how do we solve this problem when it comes to a specific case of youngsters?

One way to solve this problem is through upskilling. There is an urgent need of upskilling. In the recent forum “ET Business Summit – 2018” conducted in Bangalore, Courseera CEO, JEFF MAGGIONCALDA has stated that “The new world economy has a serious shortage of skilled workers. The ManpowerGroup expects that 40% of employers globally are finding it difficult to fill positions,” he said. “The gap between the rate at which technology is accelerating and the pace at which people are upskilling, is increasing.” Thus there is an urgent need to solve the issue of upskilling. The problem can also be addressed at the organization level rather than shifting it to the government. Latest skills such as those available on communication, language, software, marketing, analysis should be explored so that employees are geared up with the right skill set even before the need arises and they are ready to take up the challenges.

Secondly, companies should also encourage budding entrepreneurs among their employees. One way possible is to let them have their own business and the second one is to assign them with a company problem, checking the long the term viability and sustainability of the business and then allow them to begin the same. This would inculcate the more skills in them which would not be possible in regular course in an organization or through scheduled training programs. It is found that freshers from college who get recruited directly in companies, used to have a busy activity schedule (depending on the college they come from) and then when they join an organization, they find a gap. They do all the assigned tasks in a fraction of what their aged seniors do and then they are idle for the remaining part of the day. When this happens over time, they get disengaged. To those who are interested to explore a new career, entrepreneurship is the best option ( though some join  organizations to help them for their higher education).

I believe these two ideas if explored could result in better engagement levels among the freshers who join the organizations.

The writer has twelve years of experience working with large organizations  and has a MS and MBA (Marketing) degree. The opinions given on this blog are his personal views