Employee Engagement & Retention Flashcards
Employee engagement
- Employees’ emotional commitment to an organization, demonstrated by their willingness to put in discretionary effort to promote the organization’s effective functioning.
- Is the opposite of burnout
Employee engagement is Characterized by:
- Vigor
- Energy and investment put into work
- Dedication
- Pride and enthusiasm about work
- Absorption
- Concentration in work
Types of Engagement
- Trait engagement
- State engagement
- Behavioral engagement
- Transnational engagement
Trait engagement
- Inherent personality-based elements that make an individual predisposed to being engaged
- Ex: natural curiosity, a desire to be involved, an interest in problem solving.
- Traits may figure into recruiting and hiring efforts.
State engagement
Influenced by workplace conditions or practices (e.g., task variety, opportunities to participate in work decisions) that can be improved through organizational interventions directly under management’s control.
Behavioral engagement
- Found in effort employees put into their jobs, which leads to greater value, creating higher performance than from their less-engaged counterparts.
- Can occur when both trait and stage engagement are present.
Transnational engagement
- Employees look to be engaged (longer hours, responses to engagement surveys) but are not engaged
- May act engaged due to an organizational expectation or they will be rewarded/punished otherwise
Strategic plan is advanced by creating an environment that
- Promotes positive relations between employers and management
- Seeks to balance the needs of employees with those of the organization
- Marketed by greater employee engagement
Four Drivers of Engagement (consistent across the world)
- The work itself, including opportunities for development
- Confidence and trust in leadership
- Recognition and rewards
- Organizational communication that is delivered in a timely and orderly way
How to look at global engagement
- View global HR decisions in the context of national culture. U
- se valid research—not stereotypes—to align HR practices for a local population with actual employee attitudes and perceptions.
- Remember that the norm for engagement varies widely from country to country, critical to have data on national norms to interpret employee surveys correctly.
Engagement Drivers Include
- Engaging leadership
- Talent focus
- The work
- The basics (job security, safety)
- Agility (collaboration, decision making)
Engaged Employees
- Say
- Speak positively about the organization to coworkers, potential employees, and customers.
- Stay
- Have an intense sense of belonging and a desire to be a part of the organization.
- Strive
- Motivated and put effort toward success in their job and for the company.
Well-being
- Physical, psychological, and social aspects of employee health
- Enhances the relationship between employee engagement and productivity
Highly engaged individuals with high levels of well-being
Most productive and happiest employees
Highly engaged employees with low levels of well-being
- More likely to leave their organizations
- Have high levels of productivity, they were also more likely to experience high levels of burnout.
Employees with low levels of engagement but high levels of well-being
- Posed a problem for organizations.
- They were more likely to stay with the organization but were less committed to the organization’s goals.
Employees who were both disengaged and had low levels of well-being
Contribute the least to the organization
Types of Culture
- Authoritarian
- Mechanistic
- Participative
- Learning
- High-performance
Authoritarian Culture
- Power resides with top-level management.
- Employees have no involvement in the decision-making or goal-setting processes.
Mechanistic Culture
- Tasks and responsibilities are defined clearly to the employees and shaped by formal rules and standard operating procedures.
- Communication processes follow the direction given by the organization.
- Accountability is a key factor.
Participative Culture
- Collaborative decision making and group problem solving are embraced.
- Employees actively participate in the decision-making or goal-setting processes.
Learning Culture
- Organizational conventions, values, practices, and processes encourage individuals—and the organization as a whole—to increase knowledge, competence, and performance.
- Shared and continuous learning are embraced.
High-performance Culture
- Talent is championed.
- Innovation, elevated performance, customer-centric strategies, relationships, communication, and other characteristics are driven from the bottom up.
Questions to Determine Employee Engagement About Organizational Culture
- What organizational culture have we created?
- Does this culture support achievement of our strategic goals? Is it the culture we need and want?
- How can the organization’s culture be expressed in a way that increases employee engagement?
Managers and Engagement
- Managers are one of the most important components of employee engagement.
- Employees want to feel that managers care about them as professionally and personally
- Managers facilitate engagement when they show gratitude, amplify accomplishments, and communicate well and often, with an emphasis on positive feedback.
- HR supportings managers’ efforts to engage employees.
Management Competencies for Enhancing Employee Engagement
- Supporting employee growth theme
- Autonomy and empowerment
- Development
- Feedback, praise and recognition
- Interpersonal Style with Integrity
- Individual interest
- Availability
- Personal manner
- Ethics
- Monitoring direction
- Reviewing and guiding
- Clarifying expecations
- Managing time and resources
- Following processes and procedures
Challenges to Employee Engagement
- Global competition
- Harsh economic conditions
- Continuous innovation
- New technology
- Organizational restructuring and changes to nature and structure of work
- Boundaries between work and non-work life blurred
Engagement Strategy Should
- Commit long term
- Measure consistently
- Connect engagement to business results
- Seek employee input
- Gain leadership support
How to make a business case for employment engagement strategies
Demonstrate measurable outcomes related to organizational goals
Retention
- Ability to keep talented employees in the organization.
- Organizations aspire to keep high performers and to exit the low performers.
Turnover consequences
- Negates time and money put into filling a position
- Rsults in additional time required to rehire and retrain.
- Lost training time and lost knowledge and skills.
- Negatively impacts employee morale and productivity.
- Can compromise an organization’s ability to sustain a diverse workforce.
- May create lost opportunity costs.
High Performers and More Likely to Stay When They
- Believe they are doing meaningful work.
- Recognized for going above and beyond.
- Tools and resources they to succeed are provided
- Performance management systems are fair, consistent, and transparent.
- Appealing incentives and perks
“Friend at work”
- Leaving a job means leaving social and value networks
- Concept many large multinationals encourage to build engagement and commitment.
Retention strategies
- Start with branding and recruitment efforts
- Continue through the employment experience
- Good reputation in the community and industry and employees (past and present) and customers have a better chance of attracting and retaining top talent.
Key Areas of Employee Engagement
- Leadership characteristics
- Team practices
- Organizational values
- Work itself
Categories and activities HR professionals can use in measuring and analyzing employee engagement.
- Career development
- Relationship with management
- Compensation and Benefits
- Work environemnt
Employee survey
- Tool to ollect and assess information on employees’ attitudes on and perceptions of the work environment or employment conditions.
- Gives formal documentation on organizational issues
Types of Employee Surveys
- Employee attitude surveys
- Employee opinion surveys
- Employee engagement surveys
Employee attitude surveys
- Measures employees’ perceptions.
- Topics can include company culture and company image, the quality of management, the effectiveness of compensation and benefits programs, organizational communication and involvement issues, diversity, and safety and health concerns.
Employee opinion surveys
- Measure important data on specific issues.
- Used to to gain opinions on specific processes an employee performs, safety procedures, or some other issue the employer may be evaluating or considering.
Employee engagement surveys
- Focus on employees’ level of job satisfaction, commitment, and morale.
- Survey questions or statements should explicitly link to business objectives.
Company Designed Employee Surveys
Allow you to focus only on your organization
Purchased Employee Surveys
Saves time and may allow you to compare your organization to others
Benefits of Employee Surveys
- A direct way to assess employee attitudes that would otherwise be unreported.
- Improve employee relations by signaling to employees that their views are considered important.
- Increase levels of employee trust—if results are acted upon.
- Improve the satisfaction levels of customers—happy employees = happy customers.
- Detect early warning signs of workforce problems and/or sources of conflict.
Engagement Surveys
Questions need to be tailored to the organization and the current strategic plan and goals
For efficient surveys, employees should be
- Aware of the purpose of the survey
- If it measures attitude, opinion, or engagement.
- Guaranteed confidentiality and anonymity.
- Given feedback on the results.
- Surveyed about significant areas.
- Generic surveys may miss key areas that are crucial to a specific workforce or emphasize areas that are less relevant while minimizing attention on critical areas.
Employment Survey Issues
- HR and leaders should be prepared for the brutally honest evaluation done by employees
- Don’t address issues with employees unless you are prepared to address the problems
- HR is always criticized or scrutinized
- Multiple translators may be needed
- Cultural differences in acceptance of surveys
Guidelines for Employee Engagement Surveys
- Include questions that could be asked every year to create a basline of engagement
- Language should be neutral or positive
- Focus on behaviors
- Beware of loaded or uninformative questions (questions that would give a no even for engaged workers)
- Keep reasonable length
- Taylor a standard list of questions
- Consider what you are saying about the organization’s values by sending a survey
- Ask for a few written comments
- Consider doing multiple types of surveys with different questions, frequencies and audiences
Communicating Employment Survey Results
- Data should be broken down for each business unit to make changes
- Line managers can communicate results to own employees and create action plans to respond to survey recommendations
- All employees may have engagement objectives in performance reviews - allowing engagment goals to be developed both top down and bottom up
Employment Survey Results
- Once results have been analyzed, action must take place on the information received in a way employees recognize that action is being taken
- Surveys can be harmful to engagement levels if not properly handled.
How to respond to employment survey restults
- Identify drivers of engagement each time an engagement survey is conducted.
- Identify engagement drivers that can be realistically addressed given available resources.
- Make action plans realistic and measurable.
- Track and communicate efforts and results.
Advantages of Employee Surveys Online
- Higher response rates due to employee access convenience (e.g., online access 24 hours a day via Internet or intranet connections).
- No surveys are “lost in the mail.”
- Increased and/or improved responses to open-ended questions.
- Quicker results.
- Current viewing of up-to-the-minute results (via password-protected access).
- Elimination of interviewer biases.
- Ease and flexibility in analyzing data.
Disadvantages of Employee Surveys Online
- Information may be confidential but not anonymous
- All employees must have access and ability to use a computer
- Accurate, up-to-date e-mail addresses are required.
- Pilot testing is critical to ensure reliability of the format and delivery across all operating platforms.
- Respondents may run out of space to answer open-ended questions.
- Virus-checking software must be kept current.
- The server must be secure to ensure the integrity of the results (e.g., one survey per person, only authorized people take the survey) and to prevent unauthorized people from reading the results.