Expert seeks employee engagement in workplace

President of the Nigerian chapter of the Employee Assistance Professionals Association (EAPA), Marcel Nwaogu, has stressed the need for employers to inculcate employee engagement strategies as a catalyst to improve productivity, efficiency and stability among their workers.

He said employers of labour needed to encourage the culture of employee commitment in the Nigerian workforce, which he said, was important for the country to maintain a competitive advantage in retaining talents and helping people to maintain mental health.

He pointed out that increasing workers salaries does not improve productivity, insisting if that were the case, we would have experienced it in the Nigerian civil service.

“Successive governments have made efforts to increase the salaries of public servants but we don’t see the commiserate improvement in productivity because people appear to go to work just to collect salaries,” he said.

Nwaogu disclosed this in Lagos at a press briefing on the forthcoming national conference of the association slated for August 28 to August 29, 2017 with the theme: “Productivity and Employee Wellbeing in Recession and Insurgency.”

He said the conference was an avenue for employers of labour from all sectors of the economy to learn how they could use Employee Assistance Professionals (EAPs) to increase their productivity and Return on Investments (ROI) by addressing the human factors that prevent employees from performing effectively.

“EAP is a unique Human Resource economic tool for bringing higher turnover/profit and lowering expense. It is also a great employee benefit programme that assists employee with personal and work-related challenges that impact their job performance, health, as well as mental and emotional wellbeing,” he added.

Also speaking, Chairperson of the 2017 Conference Organising Committee, Chinonye Nwankwo, said the conference was expected to host over 500 delegates from various sectors of the economy, including oil and gas, health, banking and finance, telecoms, the academics and public sector.

With the conference, she said participants would learn how EAP provides the ultimate enabler in business profitability, safe workplace and healthy workforce.

“We want to build capacity among prospective practitioners who can act as counselors in their various establishments.

“There will be case studies, lectures and panel sessions to be chaired and facilitated by prominent persons from the Corporate Human Resources community in addition to medical and occupational health practitioners.”