Employee
Engagement For Business Excellence
Written By: Dr.Gandham Sri Rama Krishna
Published
in the Journal of International
Journal of Research & Business Innovation (IJRBI), Vol.3, No.2,
January-June, 2015. PP.28-31. ISSN: 2321-5615.
Abstract
Employee engagement is
the willingness and involvement of the employees to work for the success of an
organisation by devoting most of their focus and abilities. A successful
employee engagement helps create a community at workplace. When the employees
are positively engaged with their
organisation they form the emotional connection with the company. Researchers
have describes that high levels of employee engagement leads to a positive
impact on the company’s fortunes. Not engaged employees are essentially those
who have ‘checked-out’ from the organisation. Actively disengaged employees are
unhappy at work and busy exhibiting their unhappiness. Effective leadership is
the key to developing and maintaining employee engagement.
Key
words:
Engaged Employees, Disengaged Employees, Job Involvement, Empowerment,
Enchantment, Rational Engagement, Emotional Engagement.
Introduction
The
engaged employees are not just committed, not just passionate or proud. They
have ‘line of sight’ on their own future and on the organisation’s mission and
goals. They are using talents and discretionary efforts to make a difference in
their employer’s quest for sustainable business thrust. Thus employee
engagement is a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values
plus a willingness to help out the colleagues.
Employee
engagement is the willingness and involvement of the employees to work for the
success of business organisation by devoting most of their focus and abilities.
The business organisations that have highly engaged employees respond
proactively to all kinds of competitive challenges and attain continued success.
Employee engagement is critical for organisations to attain and maintain
excellent levels of performance.
A
successful employee engagement helps create a community at workplace and not
just a workforce. When the employees are effectively and positively engaged
with their business organisation they form the emotional connection with the
company. High employee engagement has long been linked with many business
benefits, including revenue growth, cost containment and productivity. Employee
engagement means to positively influence the profitability of a business,
improve productivity and create a positive working environment and at the same
time decrease the absenteeism and employee turnover. With the potential for
these types of results, many companies talk about engaging their employees as
the means to performance improvement.
Engagement
is defined as being involved or being committed to something. According to Hewitt, employee engagement is
the energy, passion, ‘fire in the belly’ employees have for their employees, so
as they ‘stay’ (desire to be a member of the organisation), ‘say’ (speak
positively about the organisation) and ‘strive’ (go beyond what is minimally
required). Schaufeli (2004) define engagement “as a positive, fulfilling,
work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigour, dedication and
absorption”.
Engagement
is the state of emotional and intellectual commitment to an organisation or
group. An engagement employee is a person who is fully involved in and
enthusiastic about his or her work.
Researchers
have describes that high levels of employee engagement leads to a positive
impact on the company’s fortunes. A highly engaged employee will consistently
outperform and set new standards. An engaged employee will exhibit not only
better performance but will be intrinsically motivated. He/she will have a
strong commitment and a willingness to contribute more voluntarily. The
employees themselves become strong brand ambassadors and work towards forging
strong relationships with the clients, business partners and the customers.
In an organisation, there are
basically three categories of employees depending upon their level of
engagement: engaged employees, not-engaged employees and actively disengaged
employees.
1. Engaged
employees are builders. They want to know the desired expectations for their
role so that they can meet and exceed them. They are always curious about their
company and their place in it. They perform consistently at high levels. They
want to use their talents and strengths at work every day. An engaged employee
is a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about his/her work.
Engaged employee care about the future of the company and are willing to invest
the discretionary effort-exceeding duty’s call to see the business organisation
succeeds. Engaged employees are loyal and psychologically committed to the
company. High levels of engagement is the fast train to career development.
2. The
‘not-engaged employees are the ‘task doers’. They tend to focus on tasks rather
than the goals and outcomes they are expected to accomplish. They concentrate on accomplishing tasks versus
achieving an outcome. Employees who are not-engaged tend to feel that their
contributions are being constantly overlooked and their potential is not being
tapped. They may be productive but are
not psychologically connected to the company.
3. The
actively disengaged employees are the ‘cave dwellers’. They are ‘consistently
against virtually everything’. They are not just unhappy at work; they are busy
acting out their unhappiness. They sow seeds of negatively at every
opportunity. Every day, actively disengaged employees undermine what their
engaged co-employees accomplish. Actively disengaged employees are unhappy at
work and busy exhibiting their unhappiness.
Many
times the effectiveness of engagement could depend upon a balance between the
two. The engagement has two factors namely:
· Rational Engagement: It
is the involvement, understanding and motivation of an employee in the job.
· Emotional Engagement:
It constitutes the attitudinal attachment of an employee to the company and the
source of pride.
Engagement
is most closely associated with the existing construction of job involvement.
Employee engagement can be described as the level of commitment and involvement
as employee has towards his/her organisation and its values. An engaged
employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve
performance with the job for the benefit of the organisation.
Employee
engagement has taken on different forms,
and people often refer to it by other names: ‘participation,’ ‘involvement’, ‘employee
empowerment’, ‘enchantment’ and ‘commitment’ to describe a workplace culture
that considers maximizing the talents of a workforce for better job satisfaction
and business performance.
‘Job
involvement’ is defined as the degree to which the job situation is central to
the person and his/her identity. Job involvement is a belief state of
psychological identification. Thus job involvement results from a cognitive
judgment about the ability of a job to satisfy the needs.
A
famous industrialist had once remarked ‘hire the best people, train them and
set them free.’ This quote in itself sets-up the tone of empowerment. The
relationship between empowerment and engagement of employees is unmistakable.
Engagement is all about getting employees
to ‘give it their all’. Some of the most successful business organisations
are actually known for their unique work environment, in which employees are
motivated to do their very best. Empowerment means making people feel valued by
involving them in decisions, asking them to participate in the planning
process, praising them and continually providing adequate training and support.
It’s giving your employees the opportunity to contribute to the business overall
success. When you allow your employees to think independently and assist the business,
they will respond with increased work effort and greater efficiency.
Enchantment
means captivation, a feeling of great liking for something wonderful and
unusual. It an art of changing hearts, minds and actions. Being enchanting in
the field of human resource is more than just hiring and firing. It helps establishing
relationship, meaningful connections
with all these personal relationships affecting HR matrix including
employee turnover or retention, employee engagement and recruiting statistics
like time to fill. The key for Guy Kawasaki is simple: to lead change, you need
to enchant others. He defines enchantment “as the process of delighting people
with a product, service, organisation or idea”. The result of enchantment is
voluntary long-lasting support that is mutually beneficial.
Employee
engagement is a key to the retention of talent. Effective talent management
policies and practices demonstrate commitment to human capital, resulting in
more engaged employees and lower employee turnover. Consequently, employee
engagement has a substantial impact on employee productivity and talent
retention. Employee engagement, in fact, can make or break the bottom line
(Lockwood, 2007). Engaging employees- especially by giving them participation,
freedom, and trust – is the most comprehensive response to the ascendant
post-industrial values of self-realization and self-actualization.
Employee
engagement begins with an on-boarding program and is essentially a part of the
human capital pipeline or talent pipeline. Engaged employees within
organisation provide a competitive advantage to organisations.
Drivers of Employee Engagement
· Decision-making
authority and belief that management explains reasons for major decisions.
· Employee clarity of job
expectations and career advancement and empowerment
opportunities
· Organisation system and
strategies and a clear vision from senior management about future success
· Communication is a key
to engagement. Effective internal
employee communication and respects employees as individuals.
·
Reasonable workload and
reward to engage. Clear link between performance and pay.
· Quality of working
relationship with superiors, subordinates and peers.
· Perceptions of the
ethos and values of the organisation.
Some
tips for practicing managers to elicit the discretionary efforts of the
employees by engaging them better:
·
The employees always
look out for timely recognition for their efforts to obtain a feel good factor,
which motivates them to perform up to their highest potential.
·
Truly great companies
have always believed employees to be the central of all their visions, plans,
and strategies.
·
The employee
performance has to be used as an effective tool for designing the future path
of the employee. The employers need to assess employee performance in a
transparent manner.
·
Employees always think
good of the themselves and wish to participate more than just accomplish their
work.
·
Employee feel more
engaged when they work in a safe, cooperative environment.
·
Jobs must be designed
in such a way that it is both enlarged and at same time enriched.
·
The formal network or
work network essentially represents a structured way of getting things done in
an organisation. Informal network helps people build relationships share ideas
and help in information and knowledge flow in the organisation.
·
The primary career
development initiatives include training and internal mobility.
·
Coaching can be a
valuable tool to help employees feel involved and committed by providing
support and guidance and by helping employees think on their own on how to
accomplish goals.
·
Effective leadership is
the key to developing and maintaining employee engagement. To ensure and
maintain employee engagement, leaders must know what factors influence an
employee’s sense of commitment to their job as well as to the organisation.
Conclusion
Engaged
employees lead to increase productivity, retention, customer loyalty and
profitability. Employee engagement is critical for organisations to attain and
maintain excellent levels of performance. The organisations with engaged human
resource experience low employee turnover, low employee absenteeism, high
quality and other benefits.
The
business organisations that have highly engaged employees respond proactively
to all kinds of competitive challenges and attain continued success. The highly
engaged employees can improve a variety of critical business aspects of an
organisation, which include customer satisfaction, gaining more profits,
organisational development and economic development.
India’s
competitive advantage as compared to other countries has made it a target
destination of multinational for their back-end business operations. To begin
with, the abundant skilled human resource gives the country an edge in business
process outsourcing. A framework for employee engagement in the BPO sector can
provide interesting leading points for practitioners and academicians to plan
training interventions to arrest disengagement and hence quitting behaviour in
the human resource and leverage the quality of the engagement index as a
competitive advantage. Hence there is an immense need to study employee
engagement in the BOP sector.
Reference:
·
Gubman E(2004),
Engagement to Passion for Work: The Search for the Missing Person, Human
Resource Planning, 29,25-26.
·
Lockwood N.R(2007),
Leveraging Employee Engagement for a Competitive Advantage, Alexandria, VA:
Society for Human Resource Management.
·
R.N.Misra(2011), Employee
Engagement: An Imperative for Organisational Success, Personnel Today, Kolkata,
July-September, Vol. XXXII, No.2.PP.11-16.
·
Schaufeli, W.B, Bakker,
A B (2004), Job Demands, Job Resources and Their Relationship with Burnout and
Engagement: A Multi-Sample Study: Journal of Organisational Behaviour, 25,
299-315.
·
Towers Perrin (2007),
Closing the Engagement Gap: A Road Map for Driving Superior Business
Performance. Retrieved from www.biworldwide.com
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