Top Employment Engagement Strategies

What companies offer some of the top employment engagement strategies? Whether small or large, all companies have ways to engage their employees in a meaningful way and create a successful company with a motivated workforce. Below are a few examples from firms around the world who have found ways to engage employees across a wide array of backgrounds.

AMD: Organizing “green teams” to root out waste and inefficiencies is a start. Listen to employees’ insight on how they think the semiconductor manufacturing company is performing. Team up with other companies and non-profits to do good in communities and allow employees to network in the meantime. AMD does all of the above and ties sustainability to leadership.
Intel: Intel has tied bonuses to the company’s sustainability performance. Both top executives and individual contributors have part of their bonuses tied to energy efficiency performance and greenhouse gas emissions.
Kimberly-Clark: One company that melds embedding sustainability throughout its business while motivating employees is the maker of Kleenex and Huggies. MIT researchers described the company’s culture of innovation as a bottom-up/top-down approach towards improving products’ performance while reducing their environmental impact. Hunter Lovins notes the company’s encouragement of “out-of-the-box” ideas that can score top employees trips with partner NGOs on various international projects.
KT Telecom: Companies are stepping all over themselves proving how focused they are on developing programs for youth. But what about people over the age of 50? Across the Pacific in Korea, KT Telecom will hire over 1,000 retirees to train them on a variety of technology issues from web etiquette to online copyright. Giving experienced professionals the chance at a second career is a win-win situation.
Marks & Spencer: Few retailers can match the efforts venerable M&S has invested in making its products and stores more environmentally and socially responsible. The company encourages all staff to share ideas about sustainability, and offered employees a free energy monitor and home insulation. The lesson is simple: if you want to encourage your customers to reduce waste and energy and change their everyday thinking, it is best to start with your workforce.
SAP: Volunteering boosts the morale of employees and communities, and companies are doing an excellent job tallying the amount of hours their employees work with non-profits, schools and community groups. SAP goes beyond that with a competitive sabbatical program that sends its most promising employees to remote communities in Brazil, India and South Africa to advise local NGOs. For a few weeks, these professionals consult on anything from information technology to communications to business model innovation. SAP employees in turn gain new skills and networking opportunities.
Social Strata: Not all companies are miserly with their paid time off (PTO, one of the worst HR acronyms ever) policies. When Rosemary O’Neill announced her social media advisory Social Strata would offer its employees unlimited paid leave three years ago, blogs all over the map were chattering about the possibility of managers actually having faith in their employees to set their own schedules. At last check, O’Neill is still satisfied with her decision. With a close friend of mine having to take vacation time and then even a cut in her paycheck because of recent bereavements, companies (Netflix is another) with unlimited PTO define engagement in one word: trust.
Vodafone: Unless I’m missing something, Vodafone seems to have a CSR agenda tailored to just about every country in which the company does business. Vodafone’s World of Difference program is similar to SAP’s program, only it is more extensive. CSR in India scores a boost from Vodafone’s current class of employees who are working in some of the country’s most challenged communities. And judging by the data, the affinity Vodafone’s workers have for their company is improving.

For companies of any size, the path to effective implementation of environmental and social programs is through the engagement of its people. The strategies we see here can be scaled down for smaller organizations or applied to specific programs—there is no wrong way to apply them. Taken as a whole, the ideas collected here provide an important lesson about implementing organizational change—leadership creates the system and the people bring it to life.