Employee Engagement - Generating Engagement

Generating Engagement

Commitment theories are rather based on creating conditions, under which the employee will feel compelled to work for an organization, whereas engagement theories aim to bring about a situation, where the employee by free choice has an intrinsic desire to work in the best interests of the organization.

Recent research has focused on developing a better understanding of how variables such as quality of work relationships and values of the organization interact and their link to important work outcomes. 84% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact the quality of their organization's products, compared with only 31 percent of the disengaged. From the perspective of the employee, "outcomes" range from strong commitment to the isolation of oneself from the organization. The study done by the Gallup Management Journal has shown that only 29% of employees are actively engaged in their jobs. Those "engaged" employees work with passion and feel a strong connection to their company. About ⅔ of the business units scoring above the median on employee engagement also scored above the median on performance. Moreover, 54% of employees are not engaged meaning that they go through each workday putting time but no passion into their work. Only about ⅓ of companies below the median on employee engagement scored above the median on performance.

Access to a reliable model enables organizations to conduct validation studies to establish the relationship of employee engagement to productivity/performance and other measures linked to effectiveness.

It is an important principle of industrial and organizational psychology (i.e. the application of psychological theories, research methods, and intervention strategies involving workplace issues) that validation studies should be anchored in reliable scales (i.e. organized and related groups of items) and not simply focus on individual elements in isolation. To understand how high levels of employee engagement affect organizational performance/productivity it is important to have an a priori model that demonstrates how the scales interact.

There is also overlap between this concept and those relating to well-being at work and the psychological contract. Research by Gallup Consulting has shown a strong correlation between the degree of well-being of an individual and the extent to which they are engaged as an employee - high well-being yields high engagement. A well and engaged employee is likely to have less sick days, lowering the cost of lost productivity to their organization, and come to work energized and focused. A well and engaged employee is efficient and effective and a valuable asset in the workplace.

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.