Employee Engagement Strategies and Organizational Performance (Research Paper Sample)

Employee Engagement Strategies and Organizational Performance Student’s Name Institution Affiliation Course Name Instructor’s Name Date of Submission Employee Engagement Strategies and Organizational Performance Employee engagement has become a crucial incentive for performance in an era of intensifying competition at an organizational level. Organizations need to attract and retain talented and skilled employees to foster competitive and sustainable advantage. Consequently, management experts, including Bridger (2022), have explored the incentives, approaches, and core benefits of employee engagement for over a decade. Employee engagement is one of the most feasible ways of reinventing performance and steering an organization to input optimization. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) 2009) cited a research report by the Corporate Leadership Council that found that engagement accounted for 40% of the observed performance improvements in an organizational setting. The CIPD (2009) concluded that engaged employees perform better than others, are more likely to recommend their organization to others, and are less likely to quit their work. Employee engagement can reinforce people management strategies by offering a framework for addressing critical dimensions that can undermine positive work relations and supporting the affective performance management process. The concept of employee engagement is defined in multiple dimensions, although scholars have not agreed on a universal definition. According to Alfes et al. (2010) and Bridger (2022), employee engagement was originally defined as “being positively present during the performance of work by willingly contributing intellectual effort, experiencing positive emotions and meaningful connections to others.” This definition captures three dimensions of employee engagement: intellectual, social, and affective engagement. However, some scholars later contended that this definition focused on ‘work engagement’ instead of employee engagement. Schaufeli (2014) defined employee engagement within the scope of work engagement as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption.” Schaufeli (2014) affirmed that work engagement and employee engagement could be used interchangeably as long as both terms are used to refer to the relationship of the employee with him or her work within an organization. Generally, all the definitions of employee engagement have some efficacies in contemporary application to the extent that they seek to harness organizational members’ selves to their work. According to Kular et al. (2008), engagement contains multiple elements of both commitment and organizational citizenship behavior, which can all be harnessed to improve organizational performance. The concept of employee engagement is a central theme of performance modeling for modern human resource managers targeting performance improvement. Employee engagement is a crucial concept, especially for human resource managers seeking to underpin the performance paradigm of their organizations. HR managers that can identify the vital strategies for improving employee engagement succeed in streamlining the performance matrix of their organizations. Human resource (HR) interventions such as selection, reward, and performance and talent management are crucial to building a sustainable advantage in organizations. Redman and Wilkinson (2013) explored contemporary human resource management and identified the core aspects of recruitment, selection, training and development, reward management, and performance appraisal, which can be skewed to provide key advantages of growth and development. Within the new working-cultural paradigm of relaxed and creative offices, the recruitment strategy that seeks to improve the work-life balance within an organization improves employee engagement and satisfaction, all crucial elements of performance modeling (Redman & Wilkinson 2013). Guest (2014) affirmed that HR managers should select staff with a propensity for engagement, and this can be achieved using personality measures such as optimism, proactivity, and conscientiousness. Most global corporates focusing on performance oriented-HRM have adopted the talent pool strategy in which they recruit the best, build relationships with potential candidates, and anchor their initial engagement with the prospective employees on the promise of learning opportunities and professional freedom. Therefore, recruitment and the subsequent selection of employees become the foundation for attaining employee engagement. Training is identified as one of the most effective employee engagement strategies. Wilkins (2001) explored the aspects of training and development in the United Arab Emirates and found the practice to be a good starting point for maximization of productivity and effectiveness in the workforce. Generally, training and development guarantee employee skills growth while giving them the affective connection to the work they need to become more effective (Albrecht 2010). When employees feel that the training and development strategies in an organization foster an increase in their knowledge and opportunities and access to highly rewarding work, they become more committed to the overall discourse of performance in the organization. On-job training and development that is well-defined allows HR managers to promote the organization’s values and communicate them as part of realistic job previews (Kwon & Park 2019). During the training, the efforts made to improve self-efficacy through coaching, employee feedback, and guidance can be crucial antecedents of employee engagement. Training and development not only demonstrate the HR manager’s intention to invest in human capital as a component of work performance building but also enhance the sense of reciprocity, encouraging employees to perform optimally and give back to the organization. Reward management strategies are perhaps the most impactful when redefining the performance orientation of a team of employees in an organization. Reward management can also incorporate the strategies of recognition that seek to give employees a sense and feeling of having an impact on the organization. Recognition is normally relational, unexpected, and intangible, while rewards are transactional, expected, and tangible (Sharpe 2023). The differences notwithstanding, both reward and recognition are strongly associated with commitment, especially regarding satisfaction with pay and recognition (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), 2021). In the 1990s, when business became less predictable and companies needed to acquire new skills fast, they adopted “broadband” compensation which gave HR managers the latitude to reward people for growth and achievement of their goals (Charan et al. 2019). As annual appraisals were done in most organizations that redefined their reward and recognition strategy to become more holistic, it was evident that employees were more willing to perform to the optimum. A simple adaption to agile work in organizations such as Macy’s, and instant rewards on performance have reinforced instant feedback in powerful ways. Compensation has also been used effectively to reinforce agile values such as learning and knowledge sharing in leading corporations such as Rent the Runway, an online clothing-rental company (Charan et al. 2019). Employees invest themselves in roles that reward them in currencies they value, and this is a key facet of employee engagement improvement and performance management that HR managers must maximize. Identifying what people want in the course of their employment can help HR managers and their organizations to make strategic decisions that would foster employee engagement. Goler et al. (2018) reported a survey of the Harvard Business Review that sought to identify what employees value most. Goler et al. (2018) summarized the three big buckets of motivators: career, community, and cause. People want a job that provides autonomy, enhances personal skills and development, and allows them to optimize the application of their strengths. Also, people want to feel respected and recognized by others. Lastly, people at work want to feel that they are making a meaningful impact on the overall growth and orientation of the organization. HR managers can create a decentralized and agile work environment when these three aspects are realized to boost employee engagement and set the organization on a steady performance trajectory. The relationship between job design and work engagement or employee engagement is evident in many instances (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) 2021). When employees perceive that the job design fosters their development and enhances organizational justice, including interactional and procedural practices, they are willing to make stronger commitments to employee performance, which is critical for engagement. Employee engagement is strongly connected to the leadership and management model adopted within an organization to drive performance. According to Maharmeh (2021), both transactional and transformational leadership styles are related to and have positive impacts on employee engagement. However, transformational leadership is considered more impactful in underpinning employee engagement because it leverages the relationship potential between leaders and managers and allows the application of innovative approaches to work management (Maharmeh 2021). Contemporary leadership insights effectively integrate the facets of fostering employee engagement with the goal of redefining the performance trajectory within an organization. An effective leader will enhance employee engagement by promoting the right behaviors and improving the incentives to this end. The benefits of emp...