Employee Engagement, Also Called Worker Engagement, Is A: o o o o o
Employee Engagement, Also Called Worker Engagement, Is A: o o o o o
Employee Engagement, Also Called Worker Engagement, Is A: o o o o o
An "engaged employee" is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organization's interests. According to Scarlett Surveys, "Employee Engagement is a measurable degree of an employee's positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and organization which profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work". Thus engagement is distinctively different from employee satisfaction, motivation and organisational culture.
Contents
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1 Origins 2 Research Studies o 2.1 Emotional attachment o 2.2 Involvement o 2.3 Commitment o 2.4 Life insurance industry o 2.5 Productivity 3 Generating engagement 4 Drivers of Engagement 5 Potential red flags 6 References in Popular Culture 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading
[edit] Origins
Employee Engagement is the extent to which employee commitment, both emotional and intellectual, exists relative to accomplishing the work, mission, and vision of the organisation. Engagement can be seen as a heightened level of ownership where each employee wants to do whatever they can for the benefit of their internal and external customers, and for the success of the organization as a whole. Employee engagement was described in the academic literature by Schmidt et al. (1993). A modernised version of job satisfaction, Schmidt et al.'s influential definition of engagement was "an employee's involvement with, commitment to, and satisfaction with work.Employee engagement is a part of employee retention. " This integrates the classic constructs of job satisfaction (Smith et al., 1969), and organizational commitment (Meyer & Allen, 1991). Harter and Schmidt's (2003) most recent meta-analysis can be useful for understanding the impact of engagement.
Linkage research (e.g., Treacy) received significant attention in the business community because of correlations between employee engagement and desirable business outcomes such as retention of talent, customer service, individual performance, team performance, business unit productivity, and even enterprise-level financial performance (e.g., Rucci et al, 1998 using data from Sears). Some of this work has been published in a diversity context (e.g., McKay, Avery, Morris et al., 2007). Directions of causality were discussed by Schneider and colleagues in 2003. Employee engagement is derived from studies of morale or a group's willingness to accomplish organizational objectives which began in the 1920s. The value of morale to organizations was matured by US Army researchers during WWII to predict unity of effort and attitudinal battlereadiness before combat. In the postwar mass production society that required unity of effort in execution, (group) morale scores were used as predictors of speed, quality and militancy. With the advent of the knowledge worker and emphasis on individual talent management (stars), a term was needed to describe an individual's emotional attachment to the organization, fellow associates and the job. Thus the birth of the term "employee engagement" which is an individual emotional phenomenon whereas morale is a group emotional phenomenon of similar characteristics. In other words, employee engagement is the raw material of morale composed of 15 intrensic and extrensic attitudinal drivers.(e.g.Scarlett Surveys 2001).
[edit] Involvement
Eileen Appelbaum and her colleagues (2000) studied 15 steel mills, 17 apparel manufacturers, and 10 electronic instrument and imaging equipment producers. Their purpose was to compare traditional production systems with flexible high-performance production systems involving teams, training, and incentive pay systems. In all three industries, the plants utilizing highinvolvement practices showed superior performance. In addition, workers in the highinvolvement plants showed more positive attitudes, including trust, organizational commitment and intrinsic enjoyment of the work.[4] The concept has gained popularity as various studies have demonstrated links with productivity. It is often linked to the notion of employee voice and empowerment.[7]
[edit] Commitment
It has been routinely found that employee engagement scores account for as much as half of the variance in customer satisfaction scores. This translates into millions of dollars for companies if they can improve their scores. Studies have statistically demonstrated that engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer-focused, safer, and less likely to leave their employer. Employees with the highest level of commitment perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave the organization, which indicates that engagement is linked to organizational performance.[8] For example, at the beverage company of MolsonCoors, it was found that engaged employees were five times less likely than non-engaged employees to have a safety incident and seven times less likely to have a lost-time safety incident. In fact, the average cost of a safety incident for an engaged employee was $63, compared with an average of $392 for a non-engaged employee. Consequently, through strengthening employee engagement, the company saved $1,721,760 in safety costs in 2002. In addition, savings were found in sales performance teams through engagement. In 2005, for example, low-engagement teams were seen falling behind engaged teams, with a difference in performance-related costs of low- versus highengagement teams totaling $2,104,823.3 (Lockwood).
[edit] Productivity
In a study of professional service firms, the Hay Group found that offices with engaged employees were up to 43% more productive.[10]
The most striking finding[citation needed] is the almost 52% gaps in operating incomes between companies with highly engaged employees and companies whose employees have lowengagement scores. High-engagement companies improved 19.2% while low-engagement companies declined 32.7% in operating income during the study period[citation needed]. For example, New Century Financial Corporation, a U.S. specialty mortgage banking company, found that account executives in the wholesale division who were actively disengaged produced 28% less revenue than their colleagues who were engaged. Furthermore, those not engaged generated 23% less revenue than their engaged counterparts. Engaged employees also outperformed the not engaged and actively disengaged employees in other divisions.[1]
As employee productivity is clearly connected with employee engagement, creating an environment that encourages employee engagement is considered to be essential in the effective management of human capital.[12]
communications is seen as its most destructive in global organisations which suffer from employee annexation - where the head office in one country is buoyant (since they are closest to the action, know what is going on, and are heavily engaged) but its annexes (who are furthest away from the action and know little about what is happening) are dis-engaged. In the worst case, employee annexation can be very destructive when the head office attributes the annex's low engagement to its poor performance when its poor performance is really due to its poor communications. * Reward to engage - Look at employee benefits and acknowledge the role of incentives. "An incentive to reward good work is a tried and test way of boosting staff morale and enhancing engagement." There are a range of tactics you can employ to ensure your incentive scheme hits the mark with your workforce such as: Setting realistic targets, selecting the right rewards for your incentive programme, communicating the scheme effectively and frequently, have lots of winners and reward all achievers, encouraging sustained effort, present awards publicly and evaluate the incentive scheme regularly. [14] In "A Historical Perspective of Employee Engagement: An Emerging Definition", Michael Bradley Shuck and Karen K. Wollard study the evolution of the term employee engagement and synthesize a possible consensus definition. Why is employee engagement an important concept? Shuck and Wollard write: Employee engagement has generated a great deal of interest in recent years as a widely used term in organizations and consulting firms (Macey & Schneider, 2008) especially as credible evidence points toward an engagement-profit linkage (Czarnowsky, 2008). Employee engagement has been characterized as "a distinct and unique construct that consists of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components . . . associated with individual role performance" (Saks, 2005, p. 602). Engaged employees often display a deep, positive emotional connection with their work and are likely to display attentiveness and mental absorption in their work (Saks, 2006). Although engaged employees are consistently more productive, profitable, safer, healthier, and less likely to leave their employer (Fleming & Asplund, 2007; Wagner & Harter, 2006), only 30% of the global workforce is estimated to be engaged (Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002; Saks, 2006). Nonetheless, despite continued evidence of linkages to positive business outcomes, employee engagement is declining (Czarnowsky, 2008). The first published use of the term employee engagement was in the Academy of Management Journal article "Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work" (W. Kahn, 1990), but since then many varied and conflicting definitions of employee engagement have made it difficult to compare and contrast research findings. To determine a common definition, Shuck and Wollard reviewed 140 articles that mentioned employee engagement and observed four areas of consistency or inconsistency: 1. Engagement is a personal decision, not an organizational decision as implied by some definitions. 2. While early definitions treated engagement as an atomic concept, later definitions divided it into three basic concepts: emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement.
3. Employee engagement has "no physical properties, but is manifested and often measured behaviorally". Different definitions look at behavior as the employee's basic job performance or extended effort or the success of the employer. 4. Employee engagement is about the behaviors that meet or exceed organizational goals. Synthesizing the reviewed definitions, Shuck and Wollard define employee engagement as "an emergent and working condition as a positive cognitive, emotional, and behavioral state directed toward organizational outcomes".
Confusion is sometimes caused by people using the term interchangeably for other constructs, such as employee commitment, job satisfaction, employee happiness or internal communication.