Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has become an increasingly important international issue due to the direct relationship between employee engagement and an organisation’s productivity and success. Employee engagement is defined as employees being connected to, pleased with and enthusiastic about their job. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, only 13% of employees across 142 countries worldwide are engaged in their jobs (2013, 6). This shows that many employees are not passionate and not connected to their work. This essay will discuss what is meant by employee engagement in depth and how employee engagement can be improved.

Employee engagement is a workplace approach ensuring that workers are committed to their company’s principles and aims, determined to contribute to the organisation’s success, and at the same time increase their job satisfaction and own sense of well-being. It is often confused with the term “employee satisfaction”, however they are not the same. According to Macey and Schneider, engagement is above and beyond simple satisfaction with the employment arrangement and engagement is about passion and commitment-the willingness to invest oneself and expend one’s discretionary effort to help the employer succeed (2008, 7). Employee engagement not only measures how content employees are, it also measures their motivation level and emotional commitment. It is concerned with the job characteristics theory. Kahn suggested that jobs that are high on the core job characteristic (i.e skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback)provides individuals with the room and incentive to bring more of themselves into their work and become more engaged (Cited in Saks, 2006, 600) Furthermore, Bakker and Leiter states that employee engagement is usually measured on employee attitude survey (Cited in Arrowsmith and Parker, 2013, 2693) Employee engagement can be divided into two categories, individual and organisational. On the...