Ethos Issue 6, Jul 2009
Rethinking Incentives
for the Downturn
Stephen Choo
• Frustrated employees (which may
account, on average, for 20%
of all employees) represent lost
opportunities for their organisations.
These employees are aligned with
the organisation’s direction and
are enthusiastic about making a
difference but are nonetheless held
back by jobs that do not suit them or
work environments that get in their
way. Managers are often surprised
when such people leave as they appear
to be highly engaged employees.
• Detached employees are in roles that
suit them reasonably well, and find
themselves in a broadly supportive
work environment. But for various
reasons, their levels of engagement
with organisational objectives and
task requirements are insufficient
to make them optimally effective.
This group is often populated with
individuals willing to do what is
needed to meet their objectives, but
no more.
What these employee types make
clear is that both engagement and
enablement are necessary to provide
an optimal climate for effective
employees. Take away either strong
support structures or high levels of
staff engagement and you end up
with either frustrated or detached
employees. What is worse is when
both support and engagement
are lacking: employees become
ineffective and often a drain on
overall morale.
Consider these numbers: frustrated
employees represent as much as one
third of the Asian workforce with only
16% of them believing that they are
effective in their jobs. Despite being
well engaged by their employers, the
frustration of these employees largely
stems from a lack of empowerment and
professional development. This is in
contrast to a similar Hay Group Insight
study conducted in the UK, which found
that only 21% of the UK employees were
feeling frustrated and two out of every
five employees considered themselves
effective workers (Table 2).
The highest percentage (35%) of
Asian employees was found to be
detached. They are the ones who will
only perform the minimum of what is
needed to meet their objectives, and
no more. What is worrying with these
detached employees, despite the high
level of training they have received, is
that 60% of them intend to leave their
organisations the minute someone
makes them a marginally better offer.
So if key talented employees are
leaving after all the effort put into
engaging them, it may well be that
they have not been able to convert their
enthusiasm into effective action on
the job.
Singaporean organisations that
focus only on engaging and motivating
employees may ironically be missing out
on getting the best possible performance,
even from committed employees. In a
downturn, both effective engagement
and enablement are critical to retaining
the talent that organisations will need
when the upswing inevitably returns.
As Regional Director of Hay Group Insight,
Dr Stephen Choo works closely with
senior executives of leading organisations
throughout the region, developing highly
effective management strategies with
the use of strategic diagnostic tools in
employee opinion research. He works
closely with senior executives and middlelevel
managers in converting survey results
into workable action plans. Dr Choo received
his PhD in International Management from
the University of Western Australia and
has written a book entitled Entrepreneurial
Management (Victoria, Australia: Tilde
University Press, 2006) and more than 20
papers on leadership, entrepreneurship,
innovation and strategic human resource
management in several academic and
professional publications.
II 3 |
