Nurturing talent and a work-life balance
Best employers value their people by putting more effort into retaining talent and helping employees maintain a work-life balance.
The title goes to employers who do well on alignment and engagement. Alignment measures the extent to which employees, management and HR programmes support the overall business direction of the company, while employee engagement indicates how committed, both intellectually and emotionally, an employee is to the organisation.
'There is a very clear relationship between the alignment score and the engagement score,' said Aaron Yim, chairman of the judging team. 'The higher the alignment score, the higher is the engagement score.'
Companies that participated in Hewitt Associate's Best Employers in Hong Kong 2007 study were required to fill in three different sets of questionnaires. A CEO questionnaire collects information on the chief executive's philosophies and approach to managing people, as well as the alignment of people practices to the firm's strategies.
A second set of questionnaires, the People Practices Inventory, gathers information about the human resource philosophies of the firm, and its practices and policies that influence the management of its employees. An Employee Opinion Survey is then made of a randomly selected sample of staff and measures how connected they are to their organisation.
Mr Yam said the alignment score would be high if the responses closely matched each other.
Participation in the study is free and it represents a huge investment on the part of Hewitt Associates, whose consultants spend a large amount of time working on it.
