THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Employee engagement is the scope which employees motivated, committed and passionate about their jobs and put discretionary effort in to their work. It is an individual purpose and focused energy, evident to others, in the display of personal initiative adaptability, effort and persistence directed towards organizational goals. (Macey at al,2009).

Joo and Mclean (2006) stated that engaged employees are strong organizational assets for sustained competitive advantage and a strategic asset. While Richman (2006) mention that recent studies make it clear that high employee engagement translates in to increased discretionary effort, higher productivity and lower turnover at the employee level as well as increased customer satisfaction and loyalty profitability and shareholder value for the organization.

2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu7EG6EZeAM&t=5s

COMPONENETS OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

1.Engagement with the organization – this measures how the employees engaged with the organization, how they feel about the senior management, this factor has done with confidence in organizational management with trust, respect and values, and hoe people like to be treated.

2.Engagement with my manager – This is basically having a strong relationship with the manager. This include feeling valued, being treated fairly.

The ways to engaged the employees is giving them more responsibilities and challengers, this will create a path to boost your organization productivity since its more efficient to involve everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNr4tE74xUE&t=6s

WHY THE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SO IMPORTANT

1.Engaged employees will boost the productivity

2.Employee engagement escalates the customer satisfaction

3.The best people will retain

4.Employee engagement enhances the company culture

5.Engagement is a symptom of success

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AT APPLE

, Apple followed several creative strategies. With a good employee engagement strategy, Apple had been able to outperform is rivals in revenue and profit growth while continually spending less on innovation. Engaged employees put more effort on coming out with innovative ideas, which worked wonders for Apple. The 360-degree employee engagement strategy puts an emphasis on the association between passionate employees and customer satisfaction/retention leading to increased business profitability. Below are some of the ways in which Apple increased its engagement with its employees as part of the 360-degree employee engagement strategy:

Create a Culture of Fandom

Apple created an environment where the biggest fans of the company and its products are the employees themselves.

Emphasize Employee Retention

Apple had put lot of emphasis on retaining its talent pool. Apple attitude had a long-lasting impact on Apple’s employees.

Create Great Employee Experiences

Apple always focused on creating great experiences to its employees. This was visible in encouraging its employees to build products that they want to use.


Focus on Employee Development

At Apple, an employee’s contribution is not measured on the basis of how long he had worked with the organization, but on the basis of how many projects he had worked on.

ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The employee relations and employee engagement strategies practiced at Apple fit with each other well and create an environment where employees can grow in the organization and learn the required skills through the training facilities offered by the organization. The culture of fandom and the facility to express their opinions freely to the top management makes it easy for the company to retain the employees without much problem. Despite the excellent job done by Apple in creating this employee friendly environment, there are certain areas where the employees have expressed their displeasure regarding Apple. The extreme form of secretiveness that is maintained by Apple means that employees didn’t understand what they are expected to do on a particular job. This becomes even tougher in case of cross functional projects. Many times, the employees of Apple felt that they didn’t understand why they were asked to do a certain task (Business Insider n.d.). Apple should try to correct this problem by specifying the exact job roles that need to be performed by each of their employees.

There were also complaints from employees regarding the lack of work life balance at Apple and the provision of lesser perks like free lunches and gyms when compared with other technology companies like Facebook and Google (Business Insider n.d.). Provision of better work life balance for employees and perks could increase the relationships with employees and increase their commitment to the organization.But a more formal tool to measure employee engagement like conducting periodic surveys on the perceptions of the employees can go a long way in measuring the opinions of employees. Once the employee engagement levels are properly analysed, corrective action can be initiated where the company is lacking





REFERANCES
2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu7EG6EZeAM&t=5s

Employee engagement survey - https://www.custominsight.com/employee-engagement-survey/what-is-employee-engagement.asp

Jostle blog of 5 reasons why employee engagement important available at https://blog.jostle.me/blog/5-reasons-why-employee-engagement-is-important

Employee engagement: conceptual clarification from existing confusion and towards an instrument of measuring it available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286195083_Employee_engagement_conceptual_clarification_from_existing_confusion_and_towards_an_instrument_of_measuring_it

Apple 2014, Thirty years of Mac. Available from: <http://www.apple.com/30-years/>. [14 April 2014].

Business Insider n.d., Apple management lessons every company should steal. Available from: < http://www.businessinsider.com/>. [14 April 2014].