Organizational leaders often speak about crafting an employee value proposition – creating a great place to work; a great place to learn, or a great place to grow. As is usual with a lot of these huge corporate transformation campaigns, plenty of money is spent, and most times the only people that come out smiling are the HR executives who can nicely tick off their performance scorecards and the consultants who got paid for designing the EVP and running internal road shows and publicity. Months down the line these superficial programmes yield very little – employee engagement remains low, and talent retention is still at risk.
Obviously there are a number of organizations who have gotten it right, but they definitely went a bit deeper than an EVP campaign and road shows. It boils down like everything else to the character of the leadership in the institution, and where this is wrong, no amount of branding or re-branding can make a change!
We are preparing this week for a trip to the ancient city of Kano, and I am really excited about visiting my favourite hotel in the world – Prince Hotel. Perhaps its owner has never sat down to think about crafting an Employee Value Proposition, but judging from my visit over 5 years ago, he has an EVP well wrapped up under his belt. Employee engagement is about incentivizing the right behaviour, rather than playing favourites with a bunch of yes men that is typical with organizational leaders today. At Prince, the hotel staff members get a big share of the service charges, so they would do everything to keep you satisfied and locked up in your rooms ordering room service all day long – It works you know! Conversely, I recall how a young employee in a bank once told me that he suffered under his boss for a while for calling her by her first name, which was the right thing to do since the organization had a first-name open-door policy. He soon learned of his “unacceptable” behaviour, began to append Aunty and “Ma” before and after her name, and soon he got a long-awaited promotion!
You may recall episodes of the award winning TV series on NTA – Super Story where a company CEO served up some specially concocted jollof rice for lunch each day at the canteen and got away with hypnotizing his employees to work without a salary. One day the spell wore off, and the attempt at manipulating employees in the short term like many of our organizational leaders try to do with myopic incentives and political camps in the workplace.
One of the saddest leadership stories around motivating employees that I remember from my own career was the end of year party where the party committee had set aside lavish gifts of microwave ovens and deep-fryers for the “managerial” cadre staff and less stylish plate sets and cup sets for the “non-managerial” cadre. I may be wrong, but I would have thought that in terms of impact the wife of one of our drivers would have been more impressed with a deep-fryer, that my wife who already could afford one and indeed still had two extra in her store from our old wedding gifts. Right thinking leaders would have either provided the same gift items for everyone or perhaps even taken the higher road and given the more junior staff the more lavish gift items. It’s just a grab-grab attitude that is becoming so pervasive. We all know you are the managers – your salary, status cars and other perks already show it. Do you have to rub it into the faces of the spouses and children of your junior colleagues even at a Year- end Party?
We have even had CEOs of Nigerian organizations who have separate elevators in their buildings, forgetting that someday when they leave the headship they have to join the regular lifts. I saw that happen in a government building in Abuja with a former minister, and had a really good laugh!
We can go on and on, but I believe the point is made, if you really want to create a great place to work you need to incentivize the right behaviour, be gracious with your employees – pay them properly, invest in their development, and most of all do not rub in the fact that you are the boss by creating all this power distance. Next time you hear about a corporate EVP programme, reflect on these real life examples of what works and what doesn’t and make sure that yours does!
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