India's Best Employers: The new 'I's in the organisation

Inclusion Is Key
Companies are yet to embrace diversity and inclusion in its truest form. Aon Best Employers, on the other hand, realise that diversity is not the end, but a means to a more just and more effective employee experience. While most companies ‘target’ inherent diversity (traits people are born with—gender, ethnicity etc), Aon Best Employers focus on ‘acquired’ diversity (traits gained from experiences). They acknowledge that merely hiring a person from a minority group is not the be all and end all. While other organisations spend disproportionate effort in tweaking their recruiting, hiring, and onboarding practices, Aon Best Employers go further and address the institutional biases that shape their company culture.

Aligning tech and touch
The next level of discord in employee experience arises from the organisations’ struggle to deliver on their promises. Aon Best Employers are aware of this misalignment and accordingly set expectations with employees—83 percent of them deliver on their promises vis-à-vis 66 percent for the rest. That said, determining what to offer your employees is the job half done. The key here is knowing what employees need. The research points out that although the CEO, HR, and employees have overlapping priorities, the way organisations are curating employee experiences is a matter of concern.

A diverse workforce has varied needs, requiring diverse solutions. Aon Best Employers offer a spectrum of choices to personalise solutions for the masses, instead of the destined-to-fail one-size-fits-all approach. They also leverage technology for infusing personalisation and striking the right balance between technology and touch inputs.

• High Tech: 84 percent employees at Aon Best Employers feel they have the right technology to enable them vs only 68 percent from other organisations.

• High Touch: Aon Best Employers also ensure higher levels of senior leadership connect (85 percent vs 68 percent among the rest) and manager support (84 percent vs 73 percent among the rest).

Call out your culture
Focus on celebrating the individual through customised employee experiences entails a shift in the lens from ‘We’ to ‘I’, from organisation to individuals. Yet it’s important to have a culture that brings together all that’s needed for the organisation to deliver on its strategy effectively.

Aon Best Employer CEOs hold themselves more accountable in creating an effective culture, even as they work on high engagement and effective people practices (CEOs of only 38 percent of Aon Best Employers state that their organisations have a defined culture, as opposed to 55 percent of the rest).

Good Culture Is Good Business
Organisations that have been voted Aon Best Employers (more than once in the last five years) have witnessed a 2.6X total shareholder return as compared to the market. This is enough to prove that an aligned culture drives business outcome.

Our research shows that three things matter while creating a strong culture within an organisation:

Senior Leadership: They have the greatest relative impact on creating a high-performance culture. People Programmes: They play two vital cultural roles: Developing talent through career and learning opportunities and motivating through rewards systems.

Enabling Infrastructure: Institute the right processes, policies, structure, and technology to enable people to do what is expected of them. The highest-impact item here is providing employees with the tools and resources required to perform effectively and efficiently.

Moving forward, the Aon Best Employer programme will be offered by Kincentric, a Spencer Stuart company, as a result of Aon’s divestiture of this business. 

Raswinder Jit Singh is senior consultant and Ankit Abrol project manager, AON Best Employers India