The WIFI of employee engagement

Businesses today need to ensure they have talented employees who will achieve results aligned to business strategic objectives as one of the factors most critical to success.    It’s not as simple as just having talent in your organisation; employees need to deliver results against the organisations vision.   So attracting the right talent (capability, skill, and knowledge) is one component of success, retaining that talent to deliver is a different objective altogether.

There have been a number of case studies which show that companies have achieved successful embedded employee engagement resulting in increased sales growth, net income growth, increased employee morale & higher retention percentages (Baumruk 2006).   These successes where achieved through initiatives of active listening to employees, developing and implementing good HRM practices and trustworthy leadership.

There is no doubt that successful engagement is essential for attracting and retaining talent.  If engagement isn’t present or is poorly managed, turnover will increase and talent will not be drawn to the company, therefore affecting the company’s bottom line performance (Doherty 2010).

So what is that magic formula to ensure employees are engaged?  Fundamentally, employees are seeking for their leadership & human resource departments to listen to their wants, needs, desires and goals (Guild 2007).  Organisations need to run focus groups with their employees and leaders, to re-engage with them and build effective strategies, and of course leaders and HR need to respond with action.

The Well-being, Information, Fairness and Involvement model – WIFI  (Cook 2008) are four stages to ensure employee engagement in your organisation to drive attraction and retention of talent.  The WIFI model was adapted by Microsoft who witnessed successes of attrition rates as low as 6 per cent.   The components of the WIFI model are:

·        Well Being – focuses on how employees feel about the organisation in areas such as employer branding, work life balance, job design and structures

·        Information – is about having a clearly defined and communicated vision for where the organisation is heading and ensuring there are clearly defined organisational goals and objectives.

·        Fairness – ensuring hiring right people for right jobs.  Fairness in how managers rate individual performance and issue reward and recognition.

·        Involvement - is recognition that communication occurs two ways.  It’s about actively involving employees in discussion and decision making processes.

      For companies to attract and retain talent within their organisations, employee engagement needs to be successfully embedded within the company.  Employees need to feel respected and heard.  They need to be able to observe transparency across all levels of the organisation and they need to see human resource management practices that support them as employees in reaching their objectives and career goals (Doherty 2010).  For employee engagement to be successful, executive leadership needs to actively sponsor, listen, communicate and deliver and the WIFI model is one way to encourage success.

Baumruk, R 2006, ‘Why managers are crucial to increasing engagement: Identifying steps managers can take to engage their workforce’, Strategic HR Review; Volume 5; Issue 2; 2006

Cook, S 2008, ‘The Essential Guide to Employee Engagement: Better Business Performance through Staff Satisfaction’, Kogan Page 2008 Citation

Doherty, R 2010, ‘Making employee engagement an end-to-end practice’, Strategic HR Review; Volume 9; Issue 3; 2010

Guild, M 2007, ‘Employee Retention is an important as Recruitment’, Facilities Engineering Journal, November/December Issue 2007.