Employee Engagement

Employee engagement can be crucial to a company's competitive advantage because that leads to higher productivity and lower turnover. The greater the employee's engagement with their company, more likely are they to "go an extra mile" to strive excellence and achieve their goals.

But what exactly is "employee engagement"?
It is a sense of attachment, willingness to stay w/ the company, organizational citizenship, employee's willing to go above and beyond their call of duty, and willingness to put effort in achieving employer goals. It provides satisfaction and greater pride for the employee.

Ground-breaking research on "Work Trends" conducted by Dr. Jack Wiley, Director of the Kenexa Research Institute suggests that employee engagement is most in employees less than 1 year & employees who stayed more than 10 yrs w/ the same company.

Engagement index is calculated as Satisfaction + Retention + Advocacy + Pride

Some of the top drivers of employee engagement that surfaced in the research were

-Opportunities for career path
-Having confidence in future of the company and in its senior leaders
-CSR efforts the company is engaged in,
- Kind of work
- Satisfaction w/ amount of pay
- Company supports employee efforts to balance work and family/personal responsibilities
- Company’s mission, vision, & value

Thus it definitely seem to be essential for companies to design program strategically to reinforce employee engagement.

More information about employee engagement at
http://www.shrm.org/foundation/1006EmployeeEngagementOnlineReport.pdf

Workplace flexibility

Who does not want an added benefit of flexible work hours?

With the constantly changing work dynamics, many people factor in the flexible work hours in their decision making for a job. For many it provides a healthy work/life balance, allows working parents to accommodate visits to their kids games, functions, and school meetings etc.

Well said by someone in a supervisor role that "you may have many different jobs during your life, but you only have one family".
I worked in a company that valued workplace flexibility. Employees can take off early if required because they know they can put in that time some other day. We could work from home 1 day per week and set our own work hours. I think companies are slowly realizing the impact of such benefits are huge. Employees are more productive, enthusiastic and responsible with such work norms. The incentives could be huge both for employees (personal growth and satisfaction) and for the company (reduce turnover, labor costs, and more profits).


More in SHRM Sep 2007, Employees' Reactions to Workplace Flexibility.