Tools that keep staff engaged

Are small companies at a disadvantage compared with big companies in attracting talent? What are the current priorities of Thai companies regarding people management? Chatphong Wongsuk, a board member of the Personnel Management Association of Thailand and vice president for people strategy and policies at PTT Chemical, provides some insights.

Most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) find it difficult to attract and retain talent. What is your advice for coping with this challenge?

It should begin with employee engagement. Human needs are complex. Beyond sufficient pay and other factors, the staff will be happy and satisfied if they are an important part of the organisation or are recognised.

I'm confident that today we can build a people-management tool that helps create love and loyalty. But this does not mean we can neglect their basic needs. We have to make them feel satisfied and secure.

But the real talent is usually far-sighted. They do not look for short-term success, such as the highest salary. We should ask what we can give them so that they feel it is worth their while to stay and enjoy the challenges. This is linked to reward management, which includes intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards cater to external needs, such as salary and allowances, while intrinsic rewards involve intangibles, such as job challenges and admiration for one's work.

We have to look at our engagement factors to see what we use, be it compensation, evaluation or opportunities for progress or personal development. Personal development is not achieved by offering training alone. If we connect this to a talent's need for achievement, one finds they crave learning experiences.

Is it true that small companies cannot provide enough of a challenge?

On the contrary, I think working for a small company offers more of a challenge. Because small companies cannot hire many people, each resource must be multifunctional. This should bode well for the needs of the new generation. In big companies, jobs are divided into many small pieces. Some people are happier as the head of a donkey than as the tail of a lion.

Apart from work, chances to build closer ties are higher in smaller companies. They find it easier to communicate and take care of each other. In big companies, you'll have many rules and regulations that come in between.

One of the tools you can use is appointing talented people to chair certain tasks in accordance with their competencies and giving them a free hand. For example, some people may like to contribute to society and participate in public-interest activities.

In small companies, you can take care of your staff like they are family. There are no limitations. In big companies, you must keep rules and regulations in mind whenever you want to do something. Thus the answer is the opportunity for winning the hearts of your people in SMEs is no less than that in big companies.

The old tao kae (business-owner) management style is valuable. Even though it is not systematic and everything goes by what the tao kae wants. But in terms of winning the hearts of subordinates, the system achieves better results than modern management styles, because the former is more flexible.

Applying the modern management style to SMEs can cause problems, because this is an "unequal bet" - you are using a system that was developed for big companies. Many people say the tao kae style is not systematic, trustworthy or efficient. I would like to say that for more than a decade, human-resource development has been focused primarily on systematic approaches. But today, many gurus and thinkers are shifting their focus to intangible factors and insights, such as studying mindsets and meditation. The re-engineering concept has failed, because it focused purely on changing the system and ignored the fact that humans are more than just their bodies.

We have forgotten about the "soft side" of humans. Many leaders who are really successful have become so by paying attention to the soft side, such as wining the hearts and minds of their people. SMEs should find a good balance between the systematic approach and the "soft side".

Looking at the current economic conditions, what are the main challenges for Thai companies in the context of people management?

The first rule is you must make sure that your existing staff is delivering to their full potential. Then a follow-up question arises: are your resources appropriated to the size of your business? The human-resource department must study how much the economy affects the organisation and whether it can still maintain current staff numbers.

If the impact is expected to be short term, we may try to retain the existing size.

To make sure that staff is contributing to their full potential, we can analyse whether the systems applied have been implemented for maximum gain or whether they can achieve more. For instance, if an employee is responsible for 50 units, can he or she deliver 60 and which tools can help him or her achieve that? The only way to survive is to enhance capability.

Some industries that are undergoing a downturn, such as airlines or cathode-ray tubes, may not have much of a choice. Some may have to evaluate the situation, but they still need to set a "trigger point".

I try not to resort to severe measures, because if you treat people as assets of the company, such measures prove expensive. In the tom yum kung [1997] crisis, the car industry demonstrated it was confident about the economic cycles by using pay cuts and work-time reduction first and choosing lay-offs as a last resort.

But is it not cheaper hiring fresh, younger staff as replacements?

In some regards, this may be true. But if we choose this course, it means we would have more of a choice to get the expensive people out. However, if each employee is an important cog in the machine, [one should reconsider lay-offs, because] one would be paying the same price for the same work.

Are Thai companies laying off lots of workers?

Newspapers and statistics show company shutdowns are not high. But we need to watch some industries. Despite all of that, the fact is that today companies are not hiring surplus workers. Employees are working hard. Companies are not hiring more people, but rather asking staff to do more. They learned their lesson from the previous economic crisis.

pichaya@nationgroup.com