Editorial
| Date | 12 June 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-04-2017-0024 |
| Pages | 105-106 |
| Published date | 12 June 2017 |
| Author | Javier Bajer |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Employee behaviour |
Editorial
Javier Bajer
When perks don’t work
Dear colleague,
A real story from last week. Senior Management Team talks about employee engagement
during a meeting: they are losing talent, cannot attract Millennials and rest of the workforce
struggles to drive consistent customer value. The HRD is charged with finding a solution
to rescue the organisation. But the conversation is stuck inside an old paradigm: “There
must be something that we could give to our people to motivate them to come, stay and
do the right things. Please find it!”.
We know that perks have little impact on long-term engagement, let alone performance.
Perks work as substitute motivators, with the risk of leading people to chase red herrings,
while moving away from performance, markets and customers. True engagement,
however, requires individual and collective commitment to create value out of conviction
rather than as part of a trade-off. Having a strong sense of purpose is the best motivator an
organisation can aspire to have.
However, perks are unavoidable these days. Employees expect them in the same way as
they expect comfortable chairs and fast wi-fi. For many, perks have become the main
reason for coming on board and also for jumping ships.
In this issue, we collected some interesting examples where engagement was achieved
without the use of perks, driving sustainable high performing teams with a strong sense of
purpose:
In engaging employees: three critical roles for managers, Elissa Tucker looks at specific
actions managers can take to remove barriers to employee engagement.
In engaging employees beyond the office freebies, Sue Eaglebarger sets out to define
engagement and its importance in attracting and keeping top talent.
In who benefits from benefits?, John Fisher examines the role of benefits within the
employee engagement mix of activities, and provides several areas for strategic
improvement.
In real-time, ongoing employee feedback: the perk that actually retains, Michael Heller
discusses how a simple ongoing feedback loop retains employees and helps leaders
with their performance management.
In the challenge of building support for human resource programs, Rick Maurer presents
a practical, straight-forward approach to boosting employee engagement and building
support for – and reducing resistance to – new HR programs.
In employee experience: the new human resource management approach, Josh
Plaskoff looks at how putting the employee’s total experience at the centre produces a
very different approach to engaging the employee in the workplace.
DOI 10.1108/SHR-04-2017-0024 VOL. 16 NO. 3 2017, pp. 105-106, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1475-4398 STRATEGIC HR REVIEW PAGE 105
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