Jim Thomson has a word of advice for companies facing the perennial challenge of keeping their employees engaged. The word is "listen".

As director of human resources operations for Ceridian Canada Ltd., - a company consistently ranked among Canada's best 50 employers - Mr. Thomson sees employee engagement issues from a couple of angles: employer and consultant. Either way, his prescription is concise: "Listen to your employees. If there's something bothering them, get to the bottom of it and fix it."

Of course Mr. Thomson is well aware that heeding staff is only one of the keys to this complex problem, which concerns employers across the board. The Human Resources Professionals Association of Ontario also continues to recognize employee engagement as a pervasive issue, including various sessions on the topic in the agenda of its annual conference. "It should top the agenda of human resources departments everywhere," says
Mr. Thomson.

Indeed, he sees employee engagement as nothing less than a dynamo. "It creates all the energy you need," he says. "My background is in the electrical industry, and here's how I see employee engagement: It keeps the lights on and gives you the power to meet all the day-to-day challenges in the business."

In Mr. Thomson's view, it's not a simple matter of being engaged or not. "It's generally easy to identify the fully engaged employees," he says. "They're the ones who say good things about the company, the ones who intend to stay and who work hard at improving themselves. And it's just as easy to spot the disengaged - badmouthing the company or just not interested in it."

But there's a third group that falls somewhere between the two - neither fully committed nor completely turned off. "They're in no-man's land," Mr. Thomson says. "It seems like they're sleepwalking, but they're the ones you really want to get at. I call them 'non-engaged. " Mr. Thomson sites two studies, one by The Gallup Organization of Princeton, N.J., which found that found 52 per cent of employees in the United States fall into that middle category and another by the publication Canadian HR Reporter, which made a similar finding.

"The disengaged, I'd say forget it. You're never going to make them happy," Mr. Thomson says. "But you've got almost half of your employees 'non-engaged.'

They're not passionate about the business. They're surfing the Internet, they're socializing with co-workers, they're conducting personal business. They're filling a chair, getting a pay cheque, and they'll do what they're asked to do, but not a whole lot more." Nonetheless, he says, "they're the people you can really move."

Mr. Thomson notes that Ceridian works very hard at practising with its own staff what it preaches as a human resources consultant. Indeed, the company - which delivers payroll services, employee assistance programs and recruiting services - continues moving up the ladder in Hewitt Associates' annual survey of Canada's
best employers.

He cites two key drivers of engagement. One is recognition by management that employees need opportunities for personal growth within the organization. The other relates to work-life balance.

For a case study in fostering personal growth, Mr. Thomson needed to look no further than Ceridian's own Location Manager program, which involves staff at various offices across Canada. The position - strictly
volunteer - came into being after the company changed its structure from regional to national and phased out branch managers. "These are employees who stepped forward to help us with our communications - by and
large administrative people - and they became informal leaders," Mr. Thomson says. "It gives them a huge
growth opportunity."

In addition to administering budgets for social activities, and Community and Charitable donations, location managers each month prepare reports that Mr. Thomson relays directly to the president. "It's a very big benefit to us," he says. "The president learns directly from employees what's going well, what's not going so well, what they'd like to see improved. They take the pulse of the office."

"Helping employees balance work and home life is equally important in creating a high level of engagement," Mr. Thomson says. "The biggest thing I've seen in my years in business is the push toward work-life balance. Now the younger generation looks for this balance. Not only do we believe in it for ourselves, it's also part of our business," he says, referring to the employee assistance program that Ceridian offers clients.

Where employees are not engaged, you have to look at what the company is trying to do for them. "They have kids, they have mortgages, they have problems. And if you're a manager you have to remember this," he says.

Ceridian makes extensive use of employee surveys and focus groups to identify and deal with problems, making sure to include the significant number of virtual employees working from home. Mr. Thomson points to the Hewitt Best 50 survey as evidence that Ceridian has found a winning formula. "The fact that our rating has gone up three points in each of the past four years tells you that it's working," he says. "We're not spectacular, we're not No.1, but we have been steadily improving our ranking among the best. And that's because we're consistently doing employee recognition, listening to employees, telling them they're appreciated. That's our way of life."