Understanding Employee Engagement
I am sure you have a clear goal to be achieved from your employee engagement initiatives. Employee engagement is a key element of organizational climate and relates to the bonding between the employee and the organization. A high level of engagement drives employees to better identify with and own organizational goals as their own. They show a higher level of solidarity in meeting organizational challenges and demonstrate cohesion, teamwork, involvement, and passion to achieve results. Well-engaged employees are passionate about seeing the results of their efforts and therefore cross all barriers in a missionary mode to achieve positive results for the organization. They need less supervision, are self-motivated, preempt conflicts, resolve any conflicts internally, innovate to achieve end results, and impose minimal organizational costs, such as supervision, while operating under formal structures.
Such behavior is dissociated from their direct relationships with expected monetary rewards. Engagement derives from feelings of being cared for by the organization through measures such as policies to maintain a healthy work-life balance, job content, sharing, recognition and rewards, relations with management, openness and pooled coordination, career advancement opportunities, welfare facilities, and also monetary rewards. The term employee engagement did not exist in the industrial era, which was dominated by manufacturing, where formal rigid command and control organizational structures were the norm. It is a term that evolved with the evolution of the knowledge industry to reflect the expectations of knowledge workers and new paradigms of managing productivity.
Engagement encompasses a variety of elements and forms of the organizational context that lead to commitment to the organization and its values, a willingness to help colleagues, and loyalty to and pride in being part of the organization. The objective of engagement is to create the right organizational climate unobtrusively by touching on the softer elements of unstated but perceived human needs. The level of engagement is reflected in how far people value, enjoy, and believe in what they do and contribute to positive outcomes.
I am not sure just knee-jerk actions like a few sporadic games would yield really engaged employees for the long term. Engagement is a process and not just an event. I am conducting research on behalf of a UK university on perceptions of employee productivity among knowledge workers in the Indian context.
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