Professional Development Opportunities For Employees

Crim and Seijts (2006, p.1) define employee engagement as “a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work”. Employees that are engaged are inspired and go above and beyond their job functions to support the company and help the company achieve its goals. The lack of engaged employees are a major problem in the United States. According to Gallup, in 2014 only 31.5% of employees were engaged (Adkins, 2015). Even though this sounds low, it is actually the most engaged the United States workforce has been since 2000. The author’s research is important because if there is a link between leader’s

In the competitive market where corporations vie for customers, customer satisfaction is an integral element of the organizational business strategy. Wal-Mart customers’ satisfaction ratings have powerful effects on the organization’s bottom line. If Wal-Mart’s customer satisfaction rate drops, this tells the organization that there are problems in areas of the organization that affects the customer satisfaction rating. Wal-Mart will have to correct these problems to ensure the organization customer satisfaction rate improves. A drop in satisfaction ratings for the organization affects sales and profit. Wal-Mart always ensures that their customer satisfaction rating is high enough to keep current customers and to attract new customers. Customer satisfaction is the key element of Wal-Mart to exist in this modern day world of business with such a diverse society.

Employees not only want good pay and benefits, they also want to be valued and appreciated for their work, treated fairly, do work that is important, have advancement opportunities, and opportunities to be involved in the agency. Recognition and rewards play an important role in work unit and agency programs to attract and retain their employees. It is the

Thompson Technology’s HR can assess the level of employee disengagement by using surveys to gauge job satisfaction. Once they make the proper assessment, then they can begin to improve employee engagement through “communication, feedback, restructuring and reassigning work, collaborating, structuring the organization, training, rewards, advising supervisors, balancing life/work expectations, and career planning and development” (Gusdorf, p.10-11, 2012). … I hope that the changes to improve employee engagement will help maintain productivity. If Thompson Technology does not manage to assess the actual level of employee disengagement and find ways to improve employee engagement and maintain productivity, they will find their business slowly going upside down.

In other nations meeting the altruistic and simple human needs of being part of something greater than yourself are the driving forces to an engaging environment (Vorhauser-Smith, 2013). According to Major Angelo’s actions of communicating with employees and developing a relationship with them demonstrate how leaders begin to create an engaging environment. According to Harter & Adkins (2015), employees whose manager communicate with them through meetings are practically three times more likely to be engaged as employees whose managers do not hold regular meetings with them. Another method to engage employees is by ensuring they understand their goals and helping them understand the big picture of how their role impacts the whole organization structure.

Thanks for your comments and links. Developing strategies to promote a learning organization within a child care organization is an ongoing process. Working with young children and families is complex and challenging work. An important focus of a learning organization in child care is to improve quality in early learning and care services that will develop better services for children (Anning and Ball, 2008); however, honestly, my desire is to help the organization learn from failures to improve future performance. I believe that professional development, when planned and implemented effectively, is a key tool that can be used to promote a learning organization. As a child care director, providing opportunities for ongoing

If you review the statistics given by the Ivey Business Journal you will see that there is a big disconnect between employees and engagement with the company they employ. (Dan Crim, 2006)

In studies, there is a correlation between a highly engaged workforce and the overall success of the company. Engaged work groups are 33% more profitable and 50% more productive (right.com 17). Common problems employers have is they carry the false assumption that employees are aware of the corporate goals of the company. This problem is easily overlooked in both management and employees as they are focused on the immediate tasks and are not aware how their actions contribute to the organization as a whole. This causes employees to not goals aligned with their organizations goals. Not having this understanding, employees become disengaged because they believe their work contributes to anything significant. When an organization’s goals are not understood, it becomes increasingly difficult to improve their performance (business salary). Keeping well performing employees is vital to the success of any company. It is also important to identify TWK’s employees do not work as a team. Instead, employees work for their individual goals. In TWK’s case, the goal for the majority of people at TWK is to retain their jobs, keeping themselves employed. An example of this separation

I like the point you made regarding training for the team. I do feel that in any organization you have to take a proactive approach and plan ahead for different scenarios. I do feel that this incident could had been avoided had they planned for the possibility of things going wrong. However, it’s impossible to predict certain things because we have no control of them like in this case, but I feel that adequate training could have changed the outcome. The problem here was that they did not follow orders and as a result some lives were lost. Unfortunately, before changes are made in an organization it usually a result of something that went wrong.

Reward and recognition systems must be adaptable to the changes at the speed of the business, as well as adjust to the existing business climate. A good reward and recognition program should have the capacity to motivate employees while aligning its goals to those of the organization. This program would essentially involve creating a balance between the remuneration of employees and acknowledgement of a job well done while optimizing competitiveness and getting good return-on-pay-expenditure. It is imperative that a clearly or properly thought-out strategy is articulated reflecting the requirements and needs of the organization, as well as its population especially considering the cost of the reward and recognition programs in the

Employers have been coming up with innovative employee rewards to boost morale and acknowledge employee needs for creativity and personal goal accomplishment. Some of the latest potential employee rewards include using the internet at work for personal reasons such as shopping, communicating with friends, or personal finances; bringing a pet to work; instituting a controlled napping policy, and the sports and office betting pools..

Providing recognition to employees that have met the expectations of the company and give small rewards such as a day off, Starbucks gift card or a flexible schedule is one of the many ways a company to get results. In France there is a company who has done remarkably well with motivating their employees in a pharmaceutical company. “Our experience suggests that bonus schemes can be very motivational and result in a ‘win-win’ for company and employees alike — as long as they are well designed and properly implemented. (Turner et al., 2007).” This company’s strategy was to be fair across the board and allow the salespersons to make up to 40% in bonuses. Their process was known as the “Commitment Process” which aligns the interests of the individual and company harmoniously and incentive sales people to stretch their performance and maximize sales results; this resulted in low turnover rate and the employees felt that they were valued employees. In Ayame’s position it would be to her benefit to find a company with these values or convince management to change their style or they would lose her as an employee and others who might feel the same way.

Our survey resulted a slight correlation between frequent SF and overall employee engagement. However previous academic research on the topic suggests there is a much stronger correlation than we were able to conclude with our survey. We believe this is a direct result of convenience sampling method. According to researchers the article, Driving Employee Engagement, cites five major components of performance management as an enabler to employee engagement: one of these factors being ongoing feedback in setting goals, recognition, development opportunities, appraisals, and establishing trust. It is clear that feedback is important; however, we cannot confidently conclude that the frequency of the feedback is directly correlated to employee engagement. Further research is required to understand the impact of the feedback content, managerial behaviors, role and time in the organization. Organizations looking to improve engagement should focus on the department level on what manager does, and how often, could lead to better worker productivity, greater goal achievement (both departmental and organization), longer employee tenure, and ultimately, greater profits. The answer to this question will enable organizations to have a deep understanding of employee engagement drivers, remain competitive, profitable and reduce turnover.

A Gallup poll recently revealed that around 70% of employees don't feel engaged at work. There are many reasons for this, but a big one is lack of communication between employees and management. In a world where the cost to recruit and train new employees is prohibitive, employee retention is vital. Helping your employees feel engaged, and keeping the lines of communication open can help you retain the best and brightest on your team.

This week’s chapters focus on “Trends in Employee Engagement”. The topics range from the employer/employee relationship, employees being treated as partners in the organization, work-life balance, HR’s role in promoting employee performance and retention, and methods of communication. The messages from the assigned chapters were indicative of what is observed daily within my workplace. So much that I could not disagree with any of them. However, the one message that I agree with the most is organizational development being a strategic tool in Human Resources.