There are a number of theories pertaining to employee engagement and retaining talented employees. But unfortunately, most of these are purely academic in nature and do not have any practical values. When we say that employees should be motivated, we forget to say how the employees get motivated. When we say that employee engagement should be improved by continuous feedbacks and rewarding the activities, we forget to see the other side of the picture that it will become a practice then and following, the employees become engaged only when they get rewards. Making them feel that they are part of the organisation or giving them more responsibilities will have very short life.
I feel that reward, recognition and security are perhaps the factors which would motivate the employees to stay with an organisation. The degree of influence of these on employee engagement or retention may change depending upon the nature of industry and the level of employees. If reward factor and job security are the primary thing as far as low grade workers are concerned, being in a branded company may be the basic criterion for managerial personnel because this would give a pride of recognition to them. I am safe attitude is always there but hypocrites will not open up to say that they would like to be safe always.
The degree of employee engagement will vary from industry to industry. You cannot measure it using any technology also, though there are HR Organisations who claim that they will conduct a survey and get the results. The results may not be perfect especially in such organisation wherein the majority of employees is not highly educated. Now again coming to fields like IT wherein we expect that 99% are highly educated, we can find the most disgruntled employees. At the same time these are the organisation who display that “Ours is an employee Friendly Organisation”. In fact companies who proclaim like employee friendly are the companies where you can see a very high degree of employee dis engagement.
The above are a few of my observations from my own experience and what I experience by sharing the thoughts of various employees and managers through citehr.com. These may not have any academic importance but for the purpose of your study if you visit and meet employees of different sectors, you will understand if there is any match between what you were taught in College about Employee Engagement and what you experience live. If you really wish to do the project or research you should not fully accept the theories, but should conduct a survey involving different types of industry and different categories of employees. While conducting the survey you have to consider the values of the organisation and whether these are reflected in employees in the form of rewards, recognition, etc.
Madhu.T.K