Human Resources (HR) today is not just the recruitment or payroll management. It has moved much beyond the realms of the yesteryears to innovative HR and employee engagement practices in order to retain employees and allow them to remain cultivated and effective, considered essentials for business success and growth.
Energypac Fashions Ltd. (a part of Energypac, one of the largest power engineering and power distribution equipment manufacturer of Bangladesh) headed by MD & CEO Humayun Rashid, is a strong believer in skill development as an active medium of employee engagement for business advancement. “Training is a continuous process to find an optimal solution in building the capacity of our labour force to strengthen our overall business performance,” observes Rashid, who offers abundant scope of career growth to retain the employees while also engaging them effectively through skill building programmes.
“My workers are my biggest assets… It’s the proximity with the workers, which motivates and keeps me going,” underlines the MD of Mohammadi Group, Rubana Huq, who has initiated a slew of measures to improve the livelihood index of the workers in an effort to engage them productively. Starting operations in 1986 in the garment industry with merely 52 workers – increasing the workforce strength to over 10,000, over the years and diversifying into Real Estate, Power Generation, Information Technology and High-tech Entertainment in-between, Mohammadi Group has now tied up with the Asian University for Women (AUW), Chittagong, to enable the women workers pursue higher studies after which Rubana’s plans are to upgrade them into managerial positions.
Rubana’s endeavour to impart higher education, besides fulfilling the objective of employee engagement, may well prove to be what is perhaps required to meet the demands for quality middle-management as well, something that is in short supply in the industry according to many. “Earlier the scales were small, but now the factories are getting bigger and it is increasingly becoming obvious to the owners that they cannot handle everything by themselves, so it has become important to have competent people in the middle,” observes Rahul Chhabra, General Manager – Bangladesh & India, s.Oliver Overseas Ltd. According to Chhabra, a major reason for the lack of trust and dependability on the middle-management, apart from lack of training, is high rate of job migration/attrition.
Spearheaded by A H Aslam (Sunny) as the Managing Director, Crony Group has found in employee engagement the right tool to deal with attrition successfully. Crony Group’s migration rate of meagre 3 per cent is a clear testimony of its successful employee engagement initiatives that has proved to be the game changer in retaining the workforce.
Following the specially-designed path to connect employees with the organisation, Aslam has started Calorie Distribution Programme, under which Crony Group spent a total of BDT 25,000,000 (US $ 321,000) in 2014 alone. At the mid-management level, Crony Group also offers performance-based sponsored holiday packages as a measure to engage and motivate them to do well.
For Ananta Garments, employee engagement is not only a means to ensure business growth, but a much-needed requirement to retain its competitive edge. “The workers who leave for money come back to Ananta Garments as they miss the employee engagement activities in other companies,” underlines MD of Ananta Group, Inam Khan, who has created a separate employee welfare department to serve as the nodal point for all employee engagement activities. No wonder the company boasts of labour turnover of just 6-8 per cent in a total strength of 15,000-strong workforce, mainly due to such initiatives.
Spending between US $ 1,300 to US $ 3,000 per annum on training, Manvill Styles besides engaging the employees successfully is also upgrading the skill set of the middle-managers with great results.
“Middle-management is the heart of a company’s operations, and is also instrumental in earning profits for the organization. The companies can fall or face huge problems due to a ‘misleading’ middle-management which is a critical link between the top management and the workers…,” shares M. M. Nazrul Islam, Dy. Managing Director, Manvill Styles, the entrepreneur with a futuristic outlook, whose novel HR practice of employee engagement is being increasingly employed by the garment manufacturers in Bangladesh to connect the workers with organisational goals and objectives effectively.
