EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT OR WORK ENGAGEMENT? Identify Your Organizational Issue

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).