Importance of Employee Engagement and the Recommended Strategies
Managing Human Resources
Essay
Explain employee engagement and identify employee engagement strategies that will improve individual and organisational performance. Highlight the benefits of each of your employee engagement strategies.
This is a 2,500 word assignment (plus or minus 10%).
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What are you being asked to do?
1. You should offer some definition of the concept of employee engagement.2. You should discuss the benefits of employee engagement and its potential impact on the business and members of staff involved.3. You should construct an argument based upon your critical analysis of the issues involved, to support your recommended strategies for employee engagement.4. Your argument should be supported by citation. You must give due credit to the works of others that you use (see the Essay Guidelines and the material on Citation on MyAberdeen). Also remember that any work you cite must appear in your bibliography and that works you don’t cite should not be in your bibliography (see Essay Guidelines and material on Bibliography on MyAberdeen)
Read relevant sections of the Redman T & Wilkinson A & Dundon T textbook as closely as possible and take detailed notes as appropriate. Read and take notes from the additional material provided on MyAberdeen.Undertake further reading by; consulting relevant academic texts available within the library, accessing journal articles through Google Scholar (see https://scholar.google.co.uk/) and other sources (e.g. those available online). Avoid the use of Wikipedia as this does not always contain accurate information. It can be useful in pointing you towards other resource’s, but it is not a good one in itself.You should submit your assignment answer in essay format, including a word count. You must cite and include in your bibliography a minimum of three works, including at least one academic textbook. You may use headings to help structure your essay if you wish but be aware that this is an essay and not a report.Your work should adhere to the following basic structure – see below.• Title and word count.• Introduction• Main section• Conclusions• ReferencesYou should try to adopt an impersonal writing style by writing in the third person. For example, this would involve using the phrase ‘the author’ as opposed to ‘I’ or ‘me’.Please take special care with your spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Your answers to the question will be assessed on the basis of:
Focused response to essay topic – Does your essay answer the question asked or go off the topic into irrelevant arguments?Theoretical/ conceptual model emphasisDo you refer to existing theory/ies model/s in developing your arguments?Critical and analytical abilityDo you analyse existing arguments and think what is good/ bad/ missing/ limiting about them?Writing style and flowDo you use appropriate English, paragraphs, and linkage sentences? Is your essay structured and organised to aid comprehension? Introduction and conclusion? Academic style of writing?SourcesDo you reference quality sources (e.g. books and research articles) and include a wide range of relevant sources? Are your references cited appropriately?
In terms of the Structure, students are reminded that essays should be written in a business like, professional style with an executive summary, and points and ideas clearly enumerated and explained. Think about the structure of the note with particular focus on the sections that you think are important. Don’t forget to include a conclusions and recommendations section. You may also want to include an appendix section for additional and supporting material that may be of use to the reader.
In terms of the Content, students must demonstrate: [i] knowledge of the Business Management model/concept in question; [ii] the ability to search out additional (relevant) material to that given in lectures; [iii] the ability to collate material into logical and coherent lines of reasoning in a critical and analytical fashion; and [iv] the ability to inform the reader whilst answering the question.
General Instructions
• As noted above, your essay should be 2,500 words in length (±10%), using 12 font, Ariel, 1.5 line spacing and a 4 cm margin on the right-hand side of the page. All pages must be numbered. Do not exceed the maximum word limit. This excludes Table of Contents, References and Appendices. Word count should not be exceeded (an allowance of +/ - 10% of the stated value is allowed). • Include a total ‘word count’ at the start of your essay (excluding your bibliography but including any footnotes or endnotes) immediately after the title of your work.• Figures & Tables: All figures and tables should have a number, clear description and note any source reference(s) used in their creation.• References – When you directly or indirectly refer to an academic source within your essay it is imperative that use the Harvard System of Referencing. Consult the following guides: Harvard Referencing Standard Guide.http://www.abdn.ac.uk/library/documents/guides/bus/qgbus003.pdf
Please ensure that your work is written in your own words. A written piece of work cannot be a simple ‘cut and paste’ of material found on the web or in journals or books. Moreover, you must accurately acknowledge the contributions of others (i.e. your work must properly reference quotes, ideas etc.). A full list of the references you use (listed alphabetically and by surname) must be included at the end of your work.•
Employee Engagement Strategies
Author's Name
The Institutional Affiliation
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Employee Engagement Strategies
Executive Summary
This paper aims to assess the importance of employee engagement and, drawing on that case, recommend potential engagement strategies. The initial part delves into the conceptual framing of employee engagement with coverage of key benefits. It is followed by several strategic recommendations for HRM to consider. The HR is advised to adopt a holistic approach, applying the sum of intrinsic and extrinsic sources of engagement. An explanation of each strategic approach accompanies the rationale for its adoption. HR is recommended to focus on training and development, keeping the workplace environment productive, and building strong emotional and work relationships to serve as potential sources of engagement drawn from intrinsic sources. Besides, HR must leverage the potential of monetary benefits, including pay increases, bonuses, and other perks, to keep the employees externally enthusiastic and immersed in their work.
Introduction
The concept of employee engagement is central to human resource management and development. According to Gagne (2014), employee engagement is the degree to which an employee buys into the strategic objectives and vision of an organization and demonstrates their commitment to taking part in the process of achieving those objectives. According to another definition, an employee's level of enthusiasm for his work (Sale, 2015). The perceived meaningfulness of a job is higher when an employee is highly engaged and vice versa. As clear from these definitions, engagement engenders high energy and commitment toward work that understandably translates into high productivity and positive outcomes both at the individual level for employees and organizational level for employers. With a close inquiry into critical concepts and theories attached to employee engagement and its potential implications, it is evident that HRM should adopt a comprehensive approach to maximize engagement using the sum of strategies that contain both intrinsic and extrinsic sources of motivation.
Benefits of Employee Engagement and its Potential Impact on the Business and Employees Involved
For any organization, people are central to its performance and how those people are managed is central to the degree of performance the organization can squeeze from them. An essential part of human resource management is to keep the employees engaged. High employee engagement yields multiple benefits for employees and the organization on the whole. Key benefits include as follows:
High Productivity
Organizational performance counts on contributions from individual levels. This aspect is more pronounced in labor-intensive organizations as compared to technology-intensive ones (Prakash et al., 2017). According to Abdul Basit et al. (2018), engagement is a potential source of productivity since a high level of cognitive and emotional commitment drives employees into putting in maximum effort in the direction of broader organizational objectives (Abdul Basit et al., 2018). When highly engaged, employees aim to maximize their contributions and, in the process, contribute to the overall performance of the business.
High engagement translates into a sense of purposefulness which implies that employees draw satisfaction from the quality of their work. It engages them in a constant endeavor to improve their knowledge and skills, allowing them to utilize their full potential. Abraham Maslow, in his pyramid of motivational needs, as shown below, terms this sense as 'self-actualization, at which employees derive motivation from being able to apply their core skills to given tasks (Maslow, 1981):
(Simply Psychology, 2021)
Understandably, this productivity at individual levels translates into positive organizational outcomes. Therefore, keeping the employees engaged has a strong business case.
Low Employee Turnover
Customers take time to build familiarity with employees. Employee turnover is a critical area to consider for the HR department. High turnover incurs high costs resulting from recurring processes of recruitment and training of new employees. Similarly, a low retention level has a detrimental impact on customer buying behavior, considering that employee-customer relationships strongly impact customer engagement (Basnyat & Clarence Lao, 2019). However, over a period of time and this element of familiarity is lacking in a scenario where faces change at frequent intervals.
Employee engagement and loyalty significantly relate to each other. When employees feel highly engaged, their turnover intention will likely remain low. The turnover intention is usually based on a sense of being underpaid, treated unfairly, or burnout (AK, 2018). The organization creates enthusiasm in its employees using engagement strategies, which counters all these negative feelings. Therefore, employees are likely to seek longer-term commitment to their organization and are less likely to look for alternative opportunities. Hence, engagement strategies result in improved satisfaction and commitment that ultimately crystalizes into high retention and avoidance of the cost and another detrimental impact of a high turnover scenario.
Improved Team Performance
The impact of the engagement that employees attach to their work is not limited to the individual level. It expands at the collective level if accompanied by a proper strategic approach. The employees who are highly committed to contributing toward organizational objectives adopt a selfless approach to their work. A part of such an approach is to complement other team members and enable each other (Uddin et al., 2019). This high complementarity and collaboration ensure potential benefits for the organizations, especially in contemporary scenarios where flat structures and teamwork are among critical success factors (Uddin et al., 2019). This aspect of improved organizational performance drawn from employee engagement at the collective level also contributes to the rationale for keeping the employees engaged.
Impact on Customer Relationship
Aside from moderating the relationship between employee and customer relationships discussed earlier, this benefit can be explained concerning two critical outcomes of engagement: emotional engagement and ownership. As the employees feel emotionally engaged, they are likely to put in more effort than contractually required to satisfy the customers (Tampubolon, 2016). It is for the fact that customer satisfaction is a source of their own satisfaction, leading them to feel that they have genuinely contributed to the value of their business. This aspect more prominently applies to the customer care department, where employees with high engagement may go to any length to solve customers' queries and problems and serve as a solid defense to their organization's reputation.
At the second level, the employees with high engagement have a sense of ownership. They keep themselves accountable for their activities and have an internal yardstick to gauge their performance irrespective of formal performance appraisals (Farhani, 2019). While seen from this perspective, employee engagement can be seen as the vehicle of positive behavior of the customers towards the business. Since the financial performance of a business is highly dependent on a business's success in keeping them happy, this aspect of employee engagement is indirectly linked to the financial performance of an organization.
Impact on Workplace Culture
Employee engagement has its reflection in an organization's culture. Shahid (2019) holds that defining and living organizational values are two distinct experiences. Employee engagement bridges the gap between establishing the values and enabling a brand or business to embed them across all levels within an organization. Highly engaged employees take pride in getting identified concerning their organizational identity. It makes them blend their identity into the culture of their organization. In this way, a proper strategic approach to fostering high engagement culminates into an organizational culture that defines a brand and attracts potential customers and talented pools of prospective employees.
Recommended Strategies
Keeping in view the value flowing from high employee engagement; and significant outcomes at different levels, human resources management is recommended to focus on the following key strategies:
Performance Appraisal
To keep employees engaged, HR is advised to focus on periodic performance appraisals. According to Montani et al. (2017), employees feel more committed to work and enthusiastic to demonstrate high performance when they feel recognized. The recognition comes from assessing the value that they add to the business. For this purpose, the department should rely on a comprehensive performance assessment.
The performance appraisal process needs to be comprehensive and consider all aspects of employees' contribution to business value. With a careful comparison among different methods, a 360-degree appraisal is round to be a better fit for the contemporary business environment. It involves taking feedback from an employee to be assessed at different points of contact or interaction, such as co-workers, peers, customers, and managers (Idowu, 2017). It gives a holistic view of an employee's overall outlook. At the same time, it keeps employees motivated to bring energy and enthusiasm to all these touch-points. In this way, a comprehensive performance appraisal process...