Employee Engagement
Mackleod (2009) defines employee engagement as “A workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being”.
Employee
engagement is an organizations livewire.
Respect, trust and performance are the basement of employee engagement (Davila, 2014). Employee engagement is the willingness and
ability to assist the organization to achieve their objective and be a part of
the organizations success (Markos,
2010).
Employees
have to be made to be more passionate, sensitive and become more creative
contributors towards the organizational achievements. This is a called a shift from “improving
employee engagement to a focus on building an irresistible organization” (Bersin, 2015).
(Bersin,
2015)
According
to figure 1, the under-noted facts
are discussed.
Meaningful work:
Employees who does meaningful work act as an active team member and be more
engaged in the work they assigned to.
These employees show more curiosity towards their work and learn how to
meet the challenges without any fear (Gerrad,
2017).
Nowadays,
employees spend more time at the working places, and when they feel that
working environment create a source of meaningfulness in their life they stick
to the organization without leaving (Alexander,
2017).
There
are some senior staff members in the organization which I work (A leading
commercial Bank) who are working hard and create a positive environment and
encourage the younger staff members to perform well. They never expect any reward or recognition
from higher authority. They are
instinctively motivated and they need very less encouragement to perform their
duties. Our institution awards these
types of employees when they complete 25 years with valuable awards.
Employees
who are committed and do meaningful work feel that they are valuable and a part
of the organizational growth. They feel
that the job satisfaction is an intrinsic reward. Meaningful work encourages to increase
participation in their work (Osborne,
2017).
In
the bank many employees are motivated by making their work meaningful. Staff members who are nearing retirement are
more engaged in their work and they support the younger generation staff. They not only perform well, but also they
feel that the organization their second home.
Hands on Management:
Hands on Management is a difficult task to handle, Managers empower responsibilities
to employees, this involve more follow-ups in day today work and helps reduce
errors (Manzoni, 2014). Gamefication
is a strategy that, transform a working environment in to a game-like
environment. Organizational challenges
can be applied as to playing a game and solving problems and achieving
objectives (Stoyanova, 2017),
Some of our employees are allowed to exercise temporary signing powers when permanent staff members are on leave or any emergency requirement arise. They are given full empowerment as to work in the office during these days.
Positive Work Environment:
This term means that the organization is enriched with positive vibes. The
employees work with more positive attitudes and this would create a more
productivity eventhough the situations are challenging (Parent 2015).
Due
to the heavy competitions between financial institutions in the market, working
environment becomes more stressful in our organization. This would easily draw more negative
attitudes. Staff have to juggle through
deadline to achieve targets, uncooperative co-workers and would get to deal
with different types of personalities.
With regard to this discrepancies our organization has arrangement many
workshops, online training programmes on self-development, and compulsory
annual leaves are given for stress relief.
Growth Opportunity:
Professional ability development, training programmes are conducted to enhance
professionalism among employees (Shafer,
2010). Employees are promoted according to their experience and
qualification. Organizational rewards
enhance the performance of the employees.
This would result in high employee turnover (Mohsin, 2015). Career development is an ongoing process which
involves planning and directing the personal and life goals towards a
prosperous achievement (Lee, 2019).
Training
prgrammes are conducted online in order to update our staff members banking
knowledge and product knowledge. Our
organization has developed a talent management system in order to assist staff
members for their self-development. Many
rewards schemes such as appreciation letters, cash prices, and then awards are
granted to staff who perform well in their careers.
Trust in Leadership:
Employees following a good leadership will succeed in achieving their
targets. Leadership creates a positive
environment and assists them to deliver best performance. Trust must be an
interactive process among leaders and employees (Grant, 2019). A leader
should possess of three main elements of trust, which are positive
relationship, Good judgment and consistency.
These elements are highly connected with the organization’s performance (Zenger, 2019).
The bank in which I work follows transformational leadership style and leaders encourage, inspire and motivate employees to innovate and create changes that will help them to grow and shape them to meet prevailing challenges as well as future challenges. Our leaders allow employees to work independently and build a strong sense of corporate culture, employee ownership and independence in the workplace. Our institution trust well trained employees and grant authority in decision making and allows them to exercise authoritative work.
Video 1 : Engage for Success - Get Engaged!
Engage focus (2021)
References
Alexander A. K. and
Douthit M. (2017), The Power of Purpose:
How Organizations are Making Work More Meaningful, Academy of Management (online),
available on: https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/ambpp.2016.11489abstract
cited on 29th March 2021.
Bersin J. (2015), Becoming Irresistible, A New model for
employee engagement, Deloitte Review (online), available on: https://www.yolocounty.org/home/showpublisheddocument?id=43808
cited on 28th March 2021.
Davila N. and W.
Pina-Ramirez (2014), What Drives Employee
Engagement? It’s All About the “I” (online), available on: https://www.td.org/magazines/the-public-manager/what-drives-employee-engagement-its-all-about-the-i
cited on 01st April 2021.
engageforsuccess.org. (Sep 11, 2012). Engage for Success
- Get Engaged!
[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqO3sfRZDAE&t=5s , cited on 28th March 2021
Gerrad L. and
Chamorro-Premuzic T. (2017), How to Make
Work More Meaningful for Your Team, Harvard Business Review (online),
available on : https://hbr.org/2017/08/how-to-make-work-more-meaningful-for-your-team
cited on 29th March 2021.
Grant K. O. (2019), Leadership and Employee Engagement,
Walden University (online), available on: https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9074&context=dissertations
cited on 31st March 2021.
Lee J., Kim S. B., Chae
C. and Lee J. (2019), Career Growth
Opportunity on Turnover Intention: The Mediating Role of Organizational
Commitment in Multiple Corporations (online), available on : http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/ijhrs/article/view/15245/12111
cited on 01st April 2021.
Macleod D. (2009), Employee Engagement (online), available
on: https://www.managers.org.uk/knowledge-and-insights/resource/employee-engagement/
cited on 01st April 2021.
Markos S. and Sridevi M.
S. (2010), Employee Engagement: The Key
to Improving Performance (online), available on http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.1591&rep=rep1&type=pdf
cited on 28th March 2021.
Manzoni J. F. (2014), Dealing with a Hands-Off Boss (online),
available on: https://hbr.org/2014/12/dealing-with-a-hands-off-boss
cited on 31st March 2021.
Mohsin F. H. (2015), The Linkage between Career Growth, Work
Engagement and Organizational Citizenship Behavior: An Insight (online),
available on http://www.ijsrp.org/research-paper-0515/ijsrp-p4170.pdf
cited on 31st March 2021.
Osborne S. and Hammoud
M. S. (2017), Effective Employee
Engagement in the Workplace, International Journal of Applied Management and
Technology, Walden University, LLc, Minneapolis. MN (online), available on
: https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1239&context=ijamt
cited on 29th March 2021.
Parent J. D. and Lovelace
K. J. (2015), The Impact of Employee
Engagement and a Positive Organizational Culture on an Individual’s Ability
Adopt to Organization Change (online), available on: https://scholarworks.merrimack.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=mgt_facpub
cited on 31st March 2021.
Stoyanova
T. and Iliev I. (2017), Employee
Engagement Factor for Organizational Excellence, International Journal of Business
and Economic Sciences Applied Research (IJBESAR) (online), available on: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/185656/1/v10-i1-p23-29-organizational-excellence.pdf
cited on 01st April 2021.
Shafer S. (2010), Professional Development to Promote Employee
Engagement: A Multi-Case Study (online), available on: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1533&context=all_dissertations
cited on 01st April 2021.
Zenger J. and Folkman
J. (2019), The 3 Elements of Trust,
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Of course Treva, a positive work environment will encourage employee engagement. According to the article published in the Harvard Business review by Seppälä and Cameron (2015), a positive workplace will increases positive emotions and well-being which will improve people’s relationships with each other and creativity over time. On the flip side, a positive work place will protect the employees from stress and strengthen the ability face challenges.
ReplyDeleteExactly Oshadee, Osborne (2017), suggested, Monitoring and tracking employee engagement strategies of an organization and its competitors can be useful when planning to implement effective employee engagement strategies. To reach maximum results for the organization, most business leaders plan to increase productivity, increase overall profitability, improvement in employee engagement should be an organizational goal.
DeleteAgree with the points provided in this post. Employee Engagement is a key to satisfy an organization’s customers. HR consultants consider that engagement is how the employee feels about the work and how the employee is treated in the organization( Vani and Babu, 2018). Employee engagement is a deciding factor for organizational effectiveness. It does not only have the potential to affect employee retention, productivity and loyalty but also has an impact on customer satisfaction, company reputation and value (Sundaray, 2011).
ReplyDeleteAgree with your statement Nivethini, As Macleod (2009), revealed, a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.
DeleteAgreed with your view, further employee engagement is what employees willing to give and involve for the organization’s success as engaged employee produce more and link with organization’s success (Bukker, 2011).in addition to this engaged employees expressed affectively, cognitively and physically for organizations success hence employee engagement is most crucial part in any organizations (Byrne, 2015).
ReplyDeleteExactly, Employee satisfaction is not the same as employee engagement and since managers cannot rely on employee satisfaction to help retain the best and the brightest, employee engagement becomes a critical concept. Engagement is about passion and commitment-the willingness to invest oneself and expand one’s discretionary effort to help the employer succeed (Markos, 2010)
DeleteAgreed Treva, Employee engagement is a two-way process. It is all about how you treat and interact with your employees. And only the manager can bridge the gap between employee engagement and disengagement. Measures like employee perks, rewards, and recognition, etc. are good. These measures help you keep your employees motivated and satisfied (Angshuman, 2021).
ReplyDeleteAgree with you, the construct employee engagement is built on the foundation of earlier concepts like job satisfaction, employee commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. Employee engagement is stronger predictor of positive organizational performance clearly showing the two-way relationship between employer and employee (Kompaso, 2010).
DeleteExactly Treva, Employee engagement refers to employees’ physical, mental and emotional involvement in the work, there are three main factors can be impacted to employee engagement, Organizational factors, job factors and individual factors(Sun & Bunchapattanasakda,2019).
ReplyDeleteIn addition, employee engagement is a heightened connection to work, the organization, the mission or coworkers. Engaged employees find personal meaning and pride in their work. They believe their organizations value them. In return engaged employees are more likely to go above minimum job requirements and expend discretionary effort to deliver performance and support their colleagues and the organization (Lavigna, 2019).
DeleteI am agreed with you. According to Cook (2012), Employees' positive thinking and feelings about the organization will help achieve their goals effectively.
ReplyDeleteEmployee engagement is a vast construct that touches almost all parts of human resource management facets we know hitherto. If every part of human resources is not addressed in appropriate manner, employees fail to fully engage themselves in their job in response to such kind of mismanagement (Kompaso, 2010).
DeleteVery true Treva. Adding to your article, Employee engagement has emerged as one of the greatest challenges in today’s workplace. Organizations that have highly engaged employees have greater profits than those that do not. Organizations with highly engaged employees experience increased customer satisfaction, profits, and employee productivity (Orborne & Hammoud, 2017).
ReplyDeleteIn addtion, Employees decide if they want to be engaged. Thus, even though employee engagement entails an emotional connection, it also involves a rational component as the employee decides whether or not to be engaged given individual circumstances (Davila et al., 2014).
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ReplyDeleteAgree with you. Employee engagement is positively related to retention. This relation is even stronger when the organization is undergoing structural changes such as downsizing and layoffs. Under such circumstances, disengaged employees are more likely to hold intentions to leave the company than engaged employees
ReplyDelete(Wiley and Campbell 2006 cited in Zeuch,, M., 2016).
And also, dedicated and meaningful work enables employees to realize how valuable they are within the organization and makes them engaged. Meaningful work can influence those around them (Osborne, 2017).
DeleteAgreed with you and notice that leaders can play vital role in the improvement of employee engagement in many ways . on Hewitt’s (2014) Trends in Global Employee Engagement Report suggests that leaders hold the key to employee engagement: Leaders play an important role in employee engagement and becoming a best employer company.
ReplyDeleteExactly, employee engagement has been perceived as a motivational factor towards organization’s objectives achievement. The good environment that is offered to the worker enables him to offer the best that the organization needs for its achievement of goals and objectives (Kazimoto, 2016).
DeleteYes, I agree with you, trust in leadership is a vital factor in employee engagement. Trust is a significant feature in the relationship that leaders have with their subordinates and that it is through this subordinate trust and respect for their leader, that subordinates are motivated to perform beyond expectations (Gillespie & Mann, 2004; Dirks & Ferrin, 2002).
ReplyDeleteAnd also, when employees demonstrate dedication, they are enthusiastic and feel pride for their work. Dedicated employees feel that the work they are in charge of is significant and contributes to the overall objective of the organization (Towler, 2018).
Delete