However, in many ways, it makes even more sense to focus your efforts on the bulk of employees who are neither engaged nor disengaged.

The Corporate Leadership Council is a membership of senior executives with a shared commitment to steward enterprise-wide human resources management. This membership offers a set of services and tools designed to assist human resources leaders with their most pressing managerial, communications, and decision-making challenges.

Drawing on employment preferences data from more than 58,000 employees around the globe, the CLC has investigated how employers can best communicate the strengths and virtues of their organisations to prospective employees - and to current employees to strengthen their commitment. CLC's research has uncovered a handful of attributes that consistently accomplish both outcomes across all talent segments (e.g. geographies, levels, etc.).

Analysis

With that said, significant geographic differences exist that organisations must take into account when building a value proposition. The analysis demonstrates that organizations effectively managing their employee value proposition (EVP) - the set of attributes that current and potential employees perceive as the value gained through employment in the organisation - garner significant benefits in terms of attraction and commitment.

There are thirty-eight separate attributes clustered under the headings of 'Rewards', 'Opportunity', 'Organisation', 'Ethics', 'Work' and 'People' that together form the degree of engagement that an employee will have with your hotel or hotel business.

This was the topic discussed at breakfast club meeting hosted recently by talent retention specialists learnpurple. They suggested that hotel company and unit management should use the 38 potential employee value propositions to find out what your employees most want from you, their employer, to:

-define your deliverables

-write it down

-publish it widely

-deliver it

-reinforce it - over and over again

And they pointed out that in today's world of Facebook, Bebo, etc., potential future employees can rather easily assess the EVP attributes that are important to them.

Promoting the values

So whilst received wisdom is that the newest generation of employees has fundamentally different work/life aspirations from previous generations, progressive people management will start with this as a positive rather than as a negative and will redesign HR processes accordingly.

Defining the employee value proposition that your organisation offers, and making sure it is visible internally and externally, will be very powerful in focusing your business.

Just as it was when the Board sat back and defined and started to deliver against your shareholder value proposition.