Employee Engagement is one of the most important aspects for any company to strengthen its overall reputation. A motivated, enthusiastic and loyal employee always speaks positively about the company and thereby contributes to the overall image of the company. Hence a key activity of the Public Relations function is to build a solid employee engagement plan to make its employees positive mouthpieces for the general public. Any employee engagement activity should aim at accelerating their staff’s productivity and overall commitment towards the company. A few key elements of a good employee engagement function are as follows:

Trust:

It is very important for an employee to trust the organisation with which they work. Weather it is in having faith in the product/service offered by the company or having faith in its leaders. The employee engagement should ensure that there is transparency in the company so that its workers are able to have more belief in the place they are working. 

Motivation:

At the end of the day the aim of any company is to keep its employees productive so that they produce better results. If the employees are motivated in the right manner they work upwards to achieve excellence and produce good outputs for their business.

Relationships:

This is another element that affects the productivity of the employees in a big way. One spends more than 1/3^rd of the day at their workplace and if their relationship with their colleagues is strained it impacts their work in a big way. Every employee engagement action should focus on improving and maintaining interpersonal relationships of employees so as to create a comfortable and happy work environment.

Profits:

The overall aim of the company is to generate profits and its employees are the backbone to achieving this goal. The company should invest in their talent to ensure that the company reaps profit because of the high quality workforce employed by them. The employees should work towards higher sales which eventually lead to higher profits and growth of the company.

Loyalty:

As mentioned earlier, employees are one of the biggest mouthpieces of any company. In fact like many others I too feel, that in many matters, the employees are more credible than the CEO of the company. Many employees have a bitter taste after they have left the company because of various things involved at the time of separation. Employee engagement activity must make sure that the transition of members is smooth and they part from the respective organisation on a good note.

Employee engagement is often mistaken as the sole responsibility of an HR manager but it is equally important for the PR function to participate in a healthy employee engagement. After all a company’s reputation is based on two things – its product/service and the way it treats its employees!

– Radhika Nandwani

Radhika is the Corporate Communications Advisor at Dell’s Performance Analytics Group. She started her career in 2011, with one of the leading public relations firms of India – MSLGROUP, specialising in technology brands. The campaigns executed by her while at MSL, have won several public relations industry awards including SABRE and PR Week Asia. In her last role, she was the founding team member and the marketing communications manager at SCoRe. Radhika is an English graduate and holds a Master’s degree in Mass Communication. She loves reading and is passionate about gender equality, food and Bollywood. She can be reached at @RadhikaNandwani on Twitter and here on LinkedIn.