Employee Engagement

INTRODUCTION

Employee engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to your business goals and values. By involving them in your business, you will motivate them to contribute to your business success and at the same time improve their sense of well-being.

Employee engagement starts with managers showing a clear and collective commitment to making employee engagement part of business culture. This means sharing information on business plans and performance, making sure you live your business values and seeking views and ideas from employees on how to improve your business.

Employee engagement is the extent to which employees think, feel, and act in ways that represent high levels of commitment to their organization. Engaged employees are motivated to contribute 100% of their knowledge, skills, and abilities to help their organization succeed. They care deeply about their company, want to contribute to its success, and regularly have peak experiences at work.

Why is Employee Engagement Important?

Engagement represents the motivational capital that exists within an individual, a unit, or an organization. It is a valuable resource that can boost company performance. The research shows that engagement is linked to a number of important business outcomes, including but not limited to:

Ø      Engaged employees offer significantly higher levels of service to customers

Ø      Engaged managers are more likely to create a work environment that is collaborative, creative, and stimulating

Ø      Engaged work teams tend to have fewer accidents and injuries

Factors That Boost Employee Engagement:

1.                   Achievement: The vast majority of employees want to achieve something important and meaningful at work. They want to grow and develop their skills and capabilities and they want to be rewarded and recognized for their efforts.

2.                   Camaraderie: We are social beings. Employees enjoy working productively with others while developing healthy interpersonal relationships. How managers interact with their teams is especially important in motivating employees to go above and beyond.

3.                   Equity: Employees want to be treated fairly when it comes to pay and benefits, day to day treatment, and psychological and physical safety.

When the above needs are met, employees are highly engaged—even enthusiastic—at work.

Benefits Of Employee Engagement:

Employee engagement benefits everyone involved with your business by creating an informed, involved and productive workplace that helps propel your business towards its goals. Engaged employees:

Ø      Have a desire and commitment to give their best to your business

Ø      Generate more revenue for your business

Ø      Demonstrate higher levels of innovation

Ø      Act as advocates for your business

Ø      Have lower rates of sickness or absenteeism

Ø      Are less likely to leave your business

Ø      Behave in ways that support your business values

Ø      Have a positive impact on customer services

Ø      Engaged employees also have a stronger sense of personal well-being and feel more involved, committed and productive at work.

NEED OF THE STUDY

Employee engagement is a route to business success. An engaged workplace encourages commitment, energy and productivity from all those involved to help improve business performance.

Employee engagement within any business organization is absolutely essential for the simple reason that it is inextricably linked to its business results. As a matter of fact, employee engagement can be taken to be directly proportional to the growth and success of any organization.

Employee engagement is an umbrella term that captures any number of factors including job satisfaction but it's important to recognize that different factors lead to different outcomes. The distinctive feature of employee engagement as an idea is that it pulls all of these positive job and work attitudes together under one umbrella.

Given that employee engagement is an idea that helps develop strong positive attitudes among people towards their work and their organisation, and this plays a major role in ensuring that they give their best even when times are tough, surely there is a need to need to grasp and take seriously: employees need to feel that their organisation is genuinely interested in them. Focusing on how to get discretionary effort from people, or how to ensure that they believe in the organisation's mission, must not take priority over demonstrating concern over employees' wellbeing.

Most organisations today realise that a ‘satisfied’ employee is not necessarily the ‘best’ employee in terms of loyalty and productivity. It is only an ‘engaged employee’ who is intellectually and emotionally bound with the organisation, feels passionately about its goals and is committed towards its values who can be termed thus. He goes the extra mile beyond the basic job responsibility and is associated with the actions that drive the business. Moreover, in times of diminishing loyalty, employee engagement is a powerful retention strategy. The fact that it has a strong impact on the bottom-line adds to its significance.

Engagement is about motivating employees to do their best. An engaged employee gives his company his 100 percent. This is what makes the difference in an industry where the most valuable resource of a company walks out of the door every evening. “This is of particular importance in a knowledge industry. The quality of output and competitive advantage of a company depend on the quality of its people,” says Anupama Babbar, Senior Manager, HR, at Flextronics Software Systems.

An organization’s productivity is measured not in terms of employee satisfaction but by employee engagement. Employees are said to be engaged when they show a positive attitude toward the organization and express a commitment to remain with the organization.

Organizations that believe in increasing employee engagement levels focus on:

1.             Culture: It consists of a foundation of leadership, vision, values, effective communication, a strategic plan, and HR policies that are focused on the employee.

2.             Continuous Reinforcement of People-Focused Policies: Continuous reinforcement exists when senior management provides staff with budgets and resources to accomplish their work, and empowers them.

3.             Meaningful Metrics: They measure the factors that are essential to the organization’s performance. Because so much of the organization’s performance is dependent on people, such metrics will naturally drive the people-focus of the organization and lead to beneficial change.

4.             Organizational Performance: It ultimately leads to high levels of trust, pride, satisfaction, success, and believe it or not, fun.