Employers all around the world are
struggling to devise effective strategies for their organizations to cope with
the emerging issues of employee engagement. Employee engagement has always been
the main concern of top management as the relationship between organizations
and their employees revolves around it. In simple words, it encloses an
organization's and its employees' mutual effort regarding a healthy and
productive working environment.
Embracing
Employee Engagement
Employers usually focus on building
strong organizational culture, leadership, rewards and recognition, and
professional growth of the employees. This is a vast category within human resource
management and a tremendous amount of research work and theories about it have
been established until today. Yet, employee engagement has eternally been the
most challenging matter even for large multinational organizations.
Identifying
the Real Obstacles
When organizations fail to identify problems
of their employees accurately within the working environment, they cater to
those issues which might not be the real causes of organizational problems.
Because of this false identification of the impediments within the organizations,
employers have to face both short-term and long-term complications in maintaining
relations with their employees. Consequently, despite putting extravagance
efforts into building up the employee engagement policies, organizations fail
to meet their set goals in this regard. This mistake occurs due to many
miscalculations and wrong evaluation procedures. However, one of the reasons is
that organizations have started to consider every rising concern within the
category of employee engagement. Without deeply analyzing the root causes of
the organizational issues, the top authorities begin to devise plans and
policies relating to employee engagement. The biggest dilemma is that employers
being too much concerned to maintain high employee engagement, unintentionally overlook
the underlying obstacles and misunderstood them.
Misinterpreting
Employee Engagement
A common mistake that many organizations make
unconsciously is that they confuse work engagement issues with employee
engagement issues. When work engagement problems are needed to be treated
distinctively, organizations cater to all engagement problems under the same
roof. They misinterpret employees’ concerns and overlook the fact that work
engagement is somehow different from employee engagement. Several research
studies have presented respected theories in this regard, yet, the difference
is still unpopular and insignificant among the employers of various
organizations for different reasons.
Knowing
the Difference
Work
Engagement is
a set of as positive behavior with
an optimistic mindset towards work. This kind of optimism is prone to yield
positive work-related outcomes for an organization and the employees themselves.
Work engagement is related to the behavior of employees specifically towards
their work for the organization. The term work engagement was first used
in the 1990s when organizations started to modernize their structure while
bringing major functional transitions and structural changes within themselves.
Work
engagement is found to be specifically related to the Burnout-Antithesis
Approach. When employees feel a sense of engagement with their work or
workplace, they are consequently more energetic and effectively connected with
their work. Work engagement brings encouraging outcomes for the organization
and its employees. However, when employees feel burned out and exhausted from
their work routine, their engagement with their jobs gets negatively
influenced. Several research studies show that work engagement directly affects
job performance. Various dimensions of work engagement (vigor, absorption, and
dedication) have a positive impact on the most critical dimensions of an employee’s
job performance, for instance, task performance, contextual performance, and
counter-productive performance.
In
various research studies, employee engagement is explained as involvement,
commitment, passion, enthusiasm, absorption, effort, dedication, and even
satisfaction with the organization. Whereas, work engagement is related to an
employee’s psychological devotion, particularly towards job responsibilities.
Reasoning
An
employee may be happily engaged in his workplace/organization but may not
necessarily be engaged in his work, consequently, might not be more productive.
Whereas, an employee who is more engaged in his work, irrespective of how less
he is attached to his organization, may be more productive and qualitative. Therefore,
organizations need to conduct periodical internal surveys to identify whether
their employees are dealing with either work engagement or comprehensive engagement
issues with their organizations.
As
work engagement is a positive and satisfying work-related condition
characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption as described by Schaufeli and
Salanova in 2002, the retention of such work-engaged employees seems to be the
most desirable aspect. All these attributes relate to the affective-cognitive
condition of employees. The High level of energy and mental resilience is
related to Vigor along with a willingness to bring more efforts, Involvement
towards work, a sense of importance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenges
related to Dedication. Absorption is referred to as being completely determined
and happily absorbed in work.
The
three different levels of employee engagement in a particular workplace verily
exist in those situations where an employee perceives his autonomy and work
attributes much desirable. Shuck, in 2011, conducted a meta-analysis of 213
studies and discovered four approaches relating to engagement: The
Needs-Satisfying Approach, the Burnout-Antithesis Approach, the
Satisfaction-Engagement Approach, and the Multidimensional Approach. The roles
of engagement in the forms of independent, dependent, moderating, and mediating
variables have been explored since the origin of engagement theory until
recently (Soieb et al., 2013). The term engagement is found to be moderately
and negatively correlated to turnover intention whereas work engagement
mediates the relationship between job resources and turnover intention. This
specifies that when the job becomes more resourceful, the levels of work
engagement rise, and the intention to quit the job lowers (Schaufeli and
Bakker, 2004).