Employee engagement requires trust

Building strong relationships that are built on trust is a vital part of developing an engaged workforce. As economies around the globe begin to strengthen and rebuild it makes a great deal of commercial sense for businesses to be ensuring they have strategies in place to develop their people and be well positioned to utilise their talent when the upturn gathers momentum.

Many businesses have been supported through difficult times by their employees accepting pay cuts and freezes or reduced hours working. In fact a feature of this recession has been the more creative approach taken by many businesses to keep talent in house and work together to build for the future.

It was therefore very disappointing to read over the weekend about businesses that have resorted to very short term, and arguably unethical, practices. A number of businesses have basically sourced workers who are prepared to work for lower cost, typically from other countries. That in itself may well make great commercial sense, however, in these instances existing employees were asked to train these new ‘colleagues’ in practices and procedures before discovering that they were actually training those who would be replacing them. This approach begs many questions:

How quickly will remaining staff limit the training and support they are prepared to give to new starters?

How many of the remaining workforce are rapidly updating their CV’s and will move on at the first available opportunity?

Once new employees discover what happened how confident will they be in their new employer?

What will customers of the business think?

Businesses who build strong relationships based on trust will be those who reap the rewards now and in the future.

How engaged are your people?

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