High Performance Working and Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement - This is the communication between an employee and staff on all levels. There are 3 dimensions of employee engagement - Intellectual, Affective and Social. If these dimensions are positive, encouraging and work related, staff will feel valued and make greater contributions towards the organisation.

The CIPD (2014) factsheet states that Employee Engagement is a concept that ‘is generally seen as an internal state of being – physical, mental and emotional – that brings together earlier concepts of work effort, organisational commitment, job satisfaction and ‘flow’ (or optimal experience)’. An engaged workforce willingly demonstrates discretionary effort within their roles; their goals and values reflect that of their employers/organisation; they express a passion for work, feel valued and that their work has meaning.

One of the primary factors in employee engagement is a person’s relationship with his or her direct manager. Some managers are excellent at managing teams and making each person feel valued, while others don’t have the same abilities. Train your managers in the skills that can improve employee engagement, and it can boost your organization’s overall results. Most employees fear their supervisors, so they choose to leave because they don’t want to work in a stressful environment. However, they don’t always express their

3.2 Evaluate the business benefits likely to accrue from a culture of employee engagement – benefits for the organization, its executives/managers, its workforce and its customers

Workforce engagement is the feeling of emotional connection someone has to their workplace. An engaged employee feels satisfied and enthusiastic about their work. They feel valued, driven, and that they belong to part of a team. This is the way a school should feel for its employees. When teachers and staff of a school are engaged in fulfilling the work of the school they show higher levels of performance and thereby increase the achievement of students. Principals should know the engagement level of their staff and also any events or feelings that may impact that engagement level.

Employee Engagement is a measurable degree of an employee's positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and organisation which profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work. Thus engagement is distinctively different from employee satisfaction, motivation and organisational culture.

Employee Engagement: It’s a known perception that an engaged workforce provides many intangible benefits that is linked directly to retention. HR policies should focus on employee engagement initiatives that stimulate motivation levels of employees to perform better and bond with organisation. This process should be initiated right from induction and continue throughout their tenure by opening channels of continuous communication and encouraging interpersonal relations. HR is responsible to incorporate methods to measure engagement and at regular intervals track engagement contribution to company’s success.

Employee may affect the performance and at the same time the attitudes of their co-workers in business operation. When business grows, engaging employee is identified as one of the major strategy to help establish initiatives, processes as well as goals to help build positive environment (Cotton, 1993). On the other hand, employee can hesitant to change due to uncertainty. Managers in an organization are supposed to get employee to become much engaged and involved in progressive improvement. Employee involvement entails the way business may improve their performance through dedication and cultivating employee interests.

Engagement is a sign of satisfaction and loyalty to the firm which can be incurred by increasing job resources

Employee engagement, which reflects the emotional commitment an employee has to an organization is not just an organizational nicety but a business necessity due to direct ties to a number of performance outcomes, such as profitability,

Successful organizations demand satisfied employees. Figure 1 below shows a theoretical one-way linkage chain called the "Engagement-Profit Chain." This chain directly shows how active employee engagement leads to good service which ensures that customers will to continue coming back, providing a solid foundation on which the company can grow. As employee effort is indeed discretionary, it has been observed that higher levels of engagement, or the way management commits itself emotionally to employees, pushes a higher level of discretionary effort (Kruse, 2014). It is not by chance that

Blessing white from the division of GP strategy defines employee engagement as “ the intersection of maximum contribution for the organization and maximum satisfactory for the individual,” (Blessingwhite.com,

As Gallup measured in their research that there is still an overwhelming number of disengaged individuals in the workplace, which has cost the organizations in the United States at an enormous amount of about 300 billion dollars annually (Gallup Consulting, 2006). Certain programs are initiated in different workplace to embed employee engagement. Personally, apart from the traditional motivational factors of financial and non-financial incentives to increase employee morale and active participation within the goals of the organization; it would even be more remarkable to come up with innovative practices that would be unique to the organization and meet the demands of the business.

Companies that have higher levels of engaged employees have higher earnings per share (EPS) than companies that have lower engagement levels (Kelleher, 2011). Engaged employees are more productive, have higher levels of customer loyalty and help their employers become more profitable. An engaged employee is less likely to leave their current position. This saves their company money because there is no need to spend money to hire and train new personal. These saving can be passed along to the employees for increased wages, bonuses, and benefits. All of these items help in motivating employees, to attempt to engage the disengaged.

Today’s workforce who want to be the technology “Hollywood” geeks, work for a company called Netflix Inc. Netflix is one of the largest publicly traded companies, that allows anyone, to watch movies and television shows when and where they want; based on a monthly subscription. They key to their success is their employees. The concept employee engagement has been described to be a result of continued research on work attitudes and it is stated to can add value extending beyond the boundaries of the traditional organizational settings. Employee engagement is referred as an essential part to success and survival of a company and is more effective if human resources (HR) is made part of the planning and decision making process. Netflix’s culture has made it possible for HR to influence the decision making and planning process as the culture focuses more on freedom and responsibility. The company’s culture focuses on helping realize excellence and most of it is done through employee engagement. It is through revamping of the HR that Netflix could fully achieve success and retention of much of their employees. The idea of integrated employee engagement in Netflix is one of the successful products of Silicon Valley and more companies are adopting the idea that employees should be granted more freedom. This paper will discuss the concept of integrated employee engagement with looking at how it as heightened performance and productivity at Netflix by: flexible work