Employee Engagement

Assessing Employee’s Engagement in Catholic Religious Non-Profit Organizations: Basis for Heightening the Engaged Workforce

Introduction:

“A better understanding of employee engagement may help organizations identify better strategies to engage their employees, avoid burn out, and decrease turnover rates, in addition to lowering costs and creating more effective organizations. True to our mission, this demonstrates our commitment to support nonprofit organizations build successful human resource strategies.” Quotes Karen Beavor, President and CEO of Opportunity Knocks.

Today more and more families with differently abled persons go in search of the services of non-profit groups to seek help in the context of worsening economy. As more and more people come in for services, the stress levels the frontline workers are feeling continues to increase. As a result, most non-profit employees find themselves in a position of not only low wages but also high stress. The stress of their workload often leads employees to flee from the non-profit human services sector and pursue positions in private and government sector jobs that offer more pay and less stress. Moreover, many non-profit organizations struggle a lot to recruit and retrain new employees in line with the mission and vision of their organization when the retention of qualified employees occur (Kim and Lee, 2007). Low wages, heavy case loads, excessive regulations and few opportunities for career advancement are causing disengaged and dissatisfied employees, and in turn, increased turnover. The challenge of retaining qualified employees and committed workforce is not something distinct to non-profit organizations, but research shows that “non-profits have higher annual employee turnover than government and business; 3.1 percent, compared to 2.7 percent in the business sector and 1 percent in the government sector”( Gazely,2009).

To keep the committed...