Inputs Needed On Employee Engagement Activities

Deall All,
I recently joined in an Automobile dealership (Sales & Service) as Asst. Manager-HR. Our company have around 25 branches with a manpower strength of around 900 employees. I observed the functions of HR department of our company is limited only to recruitment and statutory activities. Because of this scenario, I feel our company lacks in employee relations and team building. Since I am completely new in automobile industry, it will be a great help for me if any of you can suggest how I should start implementing some employee engagement activities (since the branches spread all over the state; activities which can be done on branch wise would be ideal).
Best Regards,
Hari

How about starting a scheme called BRANCH OF THE MONTH and arrange a party for that branch?

If your business has established a 900 employee x 25 location presence it is clearly doing something right. While your perception that employee relations and teamwork could be improved may be very valid, any intervention that does not directly impact business performance is not likely to get much serious or long lasting buy in from senior management.

Perhaps a pragmatic starting point, before jumping at solutions, is to first try and quantify the nature/scale of the problem. There are lots of questions that can be asked:

- what are the strategic and tactical goals of the business?

- what key metrics does the business use to measure its performance?

- in what ways does the business struggle/fail to achieve its goals?

- what are the strategic threats to the business?

- to what degree are the business processes of the 25 locations independent/interdependent/integrated?

- in what way do employee relations and teamwork impact the achievement of business goals?

- how do employees feel about working for the business?

- to what degree are customers' expectations being met?

- where there are gaps in meeting customer expectations what are the root causes?

- etc etc

Data for an analysis of HR-related drivers: turnover, recruitment costs, training costs, appraisal metrics etc should be readily available to you. However, a comprehensive assessment of the issue should also look for input from other operational areas: marketing, sales, finance, qualilty control, maintenance etc.

In my experience the more you can engage your senior management in a) accepting there is an issue, b) agreeing that analysis needs to be done to quantify the issue in terms of impact on business performance, the more likely any solution/intervention will be supported and effective in the long term. If it is not the risk is that your seniors (and consequently the rest of the organization) will dismiss this type of effort as so much HR fluff...

good luck

You could start with some very simple team building activities, starting with low cost meetups in the office, and then if you can get a budget also start a small offsite team activity.
The build up to such activities and post-activity buzz does a lot for teamwork and engagement.
Apart from this, consider a gamified approach, building in rewards for different excellence targets and make a public show of the winners, runner up, etc. Tweak the targets so that different people can keep winning.
Also communicate the organisation values very clearly. Employees like to work and give their 100% when they feel the organisation has a vision and they can align to it. It creates a mission approach vs a task approach.
Some of this can be automated using a HR software but not all. Happy to discuss in more detail offline.

Move strategically. you could...
1. design and roll out an employee feedback form. Let them share their view point, ideas and expectations. This should take you about 02 months.
2. Make synopsis and derive important, implementable points as per budget allotted
3. Include team members through PR and make an informal team (beyond formal) for execution
4. Do the brainstorming & planning before execution, for eg., quarterly activity calendar, performance based titles or star performers, bulletin boards, internal newsletter etc. This should take you about 01 - 02 months.
5. Before the launch, create mystrey and market the product to develop curiosity amongst the crowd and double up the value
LAST.. GO FOR IT!!
Feel free to connect in case any support needed.
All the best!
Regards
Rupinder
in.linkedin.com/pub/rupinder-kaur/14/a72/413/

Hi Hari,
You could use the occasion of X'mas or New Year to engage your employees uniquely. Consider showering some simple, little surprises on them to show that you truly care. Such small things can go a long way :)
Find a collection of unique ideas here : Friend, Surprise your Team on X'mas: Santa Claus in the Washroom, Baraati Welcome, Beer in Tea Jars etc.

Dear Seniors,
Thank you very much for all your views and suggestions which helped me to implement few engagement activities in our organization.
Few of my new initiatives include
1. Distributing Birthday Cards to employees on morning meetings on their birthdays.
2. Branch wise Cricket competition
3. Small peer-group activities.
4. X-Mas celebrations
5. Employee of the month (Branch wise).
The response which we got from the employees for the new initiatives. Once again i thank you all for your guidance.
Harinandan.R