Tamkeen facilitates Best Employers' workshop conducted by Hewitt Associates to discuss HR Best Practices

"Bahrain has always had a strong reputation for HR excellence and pioneering new standards," said Dr. Ahmed Abdul Ghani Al-Shaikh, Tamkeen's Vice President for Enterprise & Human Capital Development, "This study matches our work in developing the larger picture of the workplace of the future and in building a rich, scientific database of trends and requirements of employees and employers alike. BCCI will also participate in this initiative, as we believe that this study will help all stakeholders to understand the future and plan for it and urge companies to register with Hewitt Associates in this eye-opening study."

The workshop focused on HR best practices which enable leading organizations to become Hewitt Best Employers around the world. Workshop facilitator Sandeep Chaudhary, Consulting Leader, Hewitt Associates, said:

"Becoming a Best Employer isn't easy, yet it is nothing which requires overly complex strategies or people practices. Its core is essentially a belief amongst leaders that employees can drive a sustainable competitive advantage."

Hewitt argued that becoming a Best Employer isn't merely an HR initiative, but an organizational requirement since Best Employers generate higher business results. The data showed that Best Employers have a higher Total Shareholder Return than the Rest of the organizations they surveyed.

Hewitt's Best Employers database comprises benchmarks from thousands of organizations representing millions of employees worldwide.

Hewitt analyzed this data to show that Best Employers have higher shareholder returns by having higher levels of employee engagement (and therefore higher employee productivity and lower turnover), more satisfied customers, improved organizational productivity (measured through sales per employee) and a resulting growth in shareholder returns.

The workshop also shed light on how an organization can strive to become a Best Employer. "Organizations need to focus on five aspects- Leadership commitment; Compelling promise to employees; Alignment between the company strategy and the HR strategy; a High-Performance culture; and Aligned people practices." added Chaudhary.

For each of these five aspects, Hewitt compared the organizations' people practices to their employee opinions to show that Best Employers are able to strongly align the two.

Hewitt has extended their flagship study to the Middle East for the first time this year. Hundreds of organizations have already registered their participation in the inaugural study.

Debabrat Mishra, Middle East Consulting Business Leader, Hewitt Associates, said, "We are very pleased with the overwhelming response we have received for this study. This response is representative of the commitment of organizations in the Middle East towards improving their people practices and creating a sustainable competitive advantage through people".

Hewitt launched its inaugural study in September, and will announce the results by April 2009. All participants will get four complementary reports that will provide insights about their own organisation, as well as benchmark them externally to the rest of the market.

Participation in the study is confidential and only the final list of Best Employers will be publicly shared. Judging for the final list will be conducted on a classified basis where the Judging Panel will be given coded data and they will not know which organisation is associated with which set of data, until they have picked the Best Employers.