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Benefits and Pensions MonitorEmployee Engagement And ProfitabilityFor John Cardella, the secret to business profitability is simple, “having great employee engagement leads to greater profitability.” And he holds out the company he works for as a prime example. The executive vice president and chief people officer at Ceridian Canada Ltd. says “When employees really feel engaged with their work and theyʼre satisfied, typically what happens is it spills on to the customer side. If youʼre an employee, and youʼre talking directly to a customer, and youʼre happy with all the things that youʼre doing, your companyʼs treating you well, youʼre working for a manager you respect, youʼve got great co-workers around you, and you feel good about where youʼre at, that attitude is going to be reflected over to the customers. It leads to better customer service and when you have great customer service, customers are not going to leave. Basically, the bottom line is that having great employee engagement really leads to greater profitability.” Ceridianʼs other motivation for creating an environment of employee engagement is that “first and foremost, weʼre a human resources solutions company. We help other companies to become more productive and help them with their own human resources management issues.” So having great employee engagement shows its customers that it does practice what it preaches. Ceridian only expanded into HR solutions about five years ago. The actual origin of the Canadian operation goes back to 1968 when it started as a payroll company in Winnipeg, MB. Over the next 30 years, it went through a series of mergers and acquisitions until 1998 when Ceridian took over the company in Canada. Connected To Its People Cardella says everything it does is always connected to its people. One way it makes this connection is by surveying its workforce two or three times each year. The feedback from those surveys is then considered by focus groups. It will typically have about 100 focus groups to help it understand where it can improve things. Then the company goes about doing what it can.
Since the process began five years ago, Cardella says there has been an evolution of what employees are concerned about. “When we first started working on all of this, we had a lot of what we call ʻenvironmental factorsʼ related to ergonomics or the immediate work environment.” As those issues were addressed, the feedback became a little more sophisticated and related to issues around “how will I progress within my organization?” Next, the feedback turned to “How can we basically communicate with each other more effectively?” Finally, it started to address “very sophisticated issues” such as wellness “because employees do see the connection between wellness and productivity.” Ceridianʼs experience shows that this evolution starts to take place after an employer has addressed a lot of the rudimentary components of the workplace and “when employees feel good about the fact that this isnʼt just lip service, that youʼre not just wasting their time with all these focus groups, that youʼre generally interested in creating a very positive work environment.” Part of the successful transition to an employee engagement environment in the workplace is an enlightened executive team that believes in people management. People As Investments “Perhaps the difference between Ceridian and other companies is that we look at people as investments, whereas other companies consider them as a cost,” says Cardella. “We look at learning and development as an investment in our people. We look at work/life programs as an investment in our people. We look at allowing our people time off for community volunteerism as an investment in our people and our community. We really do regard our people as the only asset that really grows over time. People, given the proper environment, will, in fact, appreciate over time and become more valuable to the organization.” However, employers also need an “enlightened HR department. Itʼs no longer HRʼs role, in my mind, to process claims or to run picnics. HRʼs role is to maximize the value of people. You canʼt do that if you have all kinds of the transactional work that HR typically loves and gets mired in. First and foremost, youʼve got to come to the realization that youʼve got to get rid of that transactional work. Let companies like Ceridian that does transactional work deal with it. Once you get rid of that, then you will have the time to re-focus on the strategy and on what you need to do to maximize the value of your people.” |
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