There are no best practices in Employee Engagement

There are no best practices when it comes to employee engagement. In fact best practice for one company may turn-out to be worst practice for another company. Take for example the case that one of my friends discussed with me some time back, regarding the people problems that they face in a business run by his dad. His dad owns a franchise for Britannia foods manufacturing, somewhere in Gujarat, a state on the western part of India. They manufacture breads and they face huge problem of attrition among the sales personnel that they have employed for bread distribution. These sales personnel are low-paid workers and often competition poaches them offering them paltry raise. Apparently it appears to be a compensation issue and we probably start getting some solutions in our head, most of which comes from the success stories from the trenches. These are the best practices. But hold-on, consider the next piece of fact before you jump to conclusion.


The bread business typically starts as early as 4 a.m. in the morning and by 11:00 a.m. everything is over. These sales personnel are at work between this period of the day and after 11 they have nothing to do. Most of them are doing other part-time jobs or nothing. Their engagement with the bread is for a limited time and they are paid accordingly. From the perspective of Bread Company, although they do want to let these people-off after 11, they have nothing to keep them engaged as well. So what do we now? Considering the fact the market is highly competitive, the sales personnel must be paid at a competitive rate. Despite this someone can add Rs. X and attract them. Added to this is another peculiarity of this bread manufacturing unit that my friend told me and according to him it is also a characteristic of most manufacturing units in Gujarat. The units are skeptical of employing labour from the state, considering the fact that most people of the state are enterprising in nature. Hence the labour employed comes from other state and is naturally scarce.

Take another example, this time of major retail giant. In one of my meetings with DGM (HR) of the company, he told me that they had serious problems in retaining the store executives. They would switch for as less as Rs. 500/- and they could hardly do anything about it. The engagement that store executives had was very low. Besides because of the frequent replacements the store executives were not every well informed. Training was an issue, especially in terms of their ability to help the customer, which could be sometimes as simple as helping them locate stuff on the shelf.

Take one more, my conversation with a HR head of a garment manufacturing company. Majority of the workers that they employed were females. Recently they had started experiencing a high attrition. The low wages, long working conditions and the few cases of harassments seemed to trigger and compound the problem. The cases of harassments have affected the perception of the public in general very negative and many have started considering it a taboo if someone from a family works in a garment manufacturing firm. Added to this more attractive retail jobs are also attracting the female workers.

The point I am trying to make is very simple. What works for the Bread Manufacturing Firm, doesn’t work for the retail giant and likewise for the garment manufacturing firm. Their problems are unique (although they may sometimes appear to be similar on the surface) and hence their solutions are going to be unique as well.