Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement can be described as the emotional commitment the employee towards its organization and its goals. This emotional commitment creates engaged employees who actually care about their work and their company. Engaged employees don’t work just for a paycheck, or just for the next promotion, but work on behalf of the organization’s goals.

Employee engagement is an important aspects of the relationship between an organization and its employees. An “engaged employee” is one who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization’s reputation and interests. An organization with ‘high’ employee engagement might therefore be expected to outperform those with ‘low’ employee engagement. Acquisition, developing and retaining employees has become a big challenge to HR. professionals. Employee engagement is another important challenge faced by HR professionals in the present scenario.

Employee Engagement- The case of Rackspace

Employee engagement is crucial for the growth of organizations, but for many companies and HR professionals worldwide, it remains a challenge as observed from the startling findings of Bain & Company in association with Netsurvey. 

Their findings show:

 Employee engagement scores are low for experienced employees.

 Employee engagement scores are low for front line employees.

 Employee engagement scores are the lowest for sales and service employees,

who have the most interactions with customers.

The experience of Rackspace Company, which is listed in Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For, speaks a totally different version. Rackspace, the global leader in hybrid cloud and founder of OpenStack, based in Texas, has highly engaged and motivated employees with abundant customer loyalty and support. This is mainly because Rackspace invests heavily in creating a culture of employee engagement. The reasons for the success of Rackspace are:

Line Supervisors involve directly with employees in engaging them and employee engagement is top priority for them.

Supervisors are trained to handle sensitive issues and winning the confidence of employees by highlighting the importance of their contributions.

Supervisors try to understand the pulse and views of employees through regular and frequent and short surveys that help in improving customer satisfaction.

They get insights from the employees on improving business and building the ranks of customer promoters.

The only way to have high employee engagement is to encourage constant dialogue and close interaction between the employees and supervisors with support from top executives. Highly energized, enthusiastic and creative employees can do wonders to organizations as is seen in Rackspace.

Source: http:// blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/the-four-secrets-to-employee-engagement/

Globalization and liberalization have changed the business activities and in the process HR professionals have to cope up with the market demands and challenges in order to remain competitive in the knowledge society. Effective leaders can enhance worker productivity and employee engagement by being demanding and considerate.