Total Rewards include everything the employee perceives to be of value resulting from the employment relationship. It is a very powerful tool used to attract, motivate and retain employees. The tool has 4 elements viz Benefits, Compensation, Development and Environment according to Aon Hewitt model and Wal-Mart used it decisively to engage its employees. Long term incentives viz stock option plans were provided to employees at all level at a lower rate and that made them very wealthy. Short term incentives like Profit Sharing made many truck drivers and associates millionaire. This comes under Compensation. We have already discussed about Development and Environment previously as to how employees were given career growth opportunities and made to feel empowered by making the take part in the decision process.
Employee empowerment is a very powerful tool of employee engagement and as discussed earlier in one of my blogs, it makes an employee self directed and self reliant. Wal-Mart, through its profit sharing program, made employees to feel empowered and gave them a sense of ownership! Though initially profit sharing was only restricted to the managers but later it was extended to all the employees and this proved to be goldmine for the company and bonanza for the employees.
Employee engagement could be sliced at different levels. At the primary level, outings, lunch/dinner exists which helps in team bonding. At the higher level, exposure to senior management, giving continuous feedback to the employees to let them know what is going right and what could be done better is the best strategy. At Wal-Mart, Sam was easily accessible to all the employees and every Saturday, the leaders used to have a meeting with the entire workforce to let them know what is happening in the company and share information. Frequent feedback sessions also used to happen in the organization to let people know how they are doing.
Job and Career are two different things. Career provides a higher sense of purpose, job provides an income. Job pays for what we do, career for what we love. If we count for how many hours we have worked, that means we have a job. In career, we have work life fusion and we do not worry for work life balance. At Wal-Mart, people used to work for long hours without any complains and they never used to think about work life balance, this was because they had career and not jobs!
Coaching, Counselling and Mentoring are different ways of informal learning. Coaching is required when the person’s performance is at par with the expectation but he/she needs something else to fuel himself/herself to fill up the gap between his/her performance and potential. In Coaching, the coach and the coachee discusses the end result and fix the output desired and then steps are taken towards it to accomplish it. Robert Levering GROW model is the highly used framework for this purpose. G stands for Goal, R stands for Reality, O for Option and W for Will. Counselling is required to unearth the root cause of the below par performance exhibited by the person. Mentoring is used when person is showing above par performance and possesses excellent attitude. It is used for further development of employees. Wal-Mart used the power of Counselling and Coaching to improve its employees’ performance and productivity.
