Keeping millennial employees engaged takes a lot of work

Sudakshina Ghosh, team manager at SAP India in Gurugram, is happy with her 12-year-old job. “The biggest reason in Indian companies is that employees do not identify or feel psychologically attached with the company they are likely to invest their energies in,” says Manish Gupta, assistant professor, ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad, who has researched work engagement. Leaders and managers need to see engagement as an organizational strategy rather than a series of events, retreats or metrics for employees to find meaning in their work, explains Sapna Popli, professor of marketing at the Institute of Management and Technology, Ghaziabad, who published a paper in the Journal Of Service Theory And Practice in May 2017 on employee engagement in India’s services sector. Even the workspace design makes a difference, according to the “Global Employee Engagement Report”, released in 2017 by research firm Ipsos and office furniture company Steelcase. In the last few years, Landmark has implemented employee engagement programmes that aim to listen to their employees—“Connect over Coffee” are skip-level meetings for employee concerns, while People Pulse is an anonymous survey to identify areas of improvement—resulting in the company being recognized as one of the “Top 10 places to work in Retail in India” by the Great Place to Work Institute, a global organization certifying workplaces, in 2018.