Employee Engagement and Work-Life Balance

Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement has been quite a buzz activity and heavily marketed by the Human Resources Consulting firms. An engaged employee is a person who is actively involved in, demonstrate great energy about his or her work. It is about how an employee commit to someone or something in there organization, how hard they work, how long they stay as a result of their commitment, investing efforts towards achieving job and tasks. It is also about the feeling empowerment, positive affectivity, the feeling of pride. An Engaged Employee puts that an extra efforts/voluntary efforts to do something better than expected, expands his role and broaden his areas of expertise.

Employee Engagement could be described as a construct of three below components.

• Trait Engagement - Positive view of life
• State Engagement – Feeling of energy, absorption
• Behavioral Engagement – Extra role behavior

Employee engagement is a top priority and is an asset and could be a key competitive advantage in this global ever changing nature of work.

Many companies has understood the reasons for making talent stick and have employee engaged with more compensation, benefits and more fun events. Many studies has proven that opportunities for career advancement, learning opportunities and mentoring & coaching tend to be factors that talent really looks for in an organization. This has been true irrespective of the workforce generation. Below tree summarizes it all.

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One of the most important factor is that most of the employees  don't have clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities, the skills/knowledge and training need to do the better and what all it takes to move to higher level of performance and move to desired level. Below are few approaches to increase Employee Engagement.

• Career: Providing challenging and meaningful work with opportunities for career advancement. Most people want to do new things in their job and be very clear on what the different options they have and what all it takes to reach their goal.

• Clarity: Most of the employee have no clarity on their roles and responsibilities, what exactly is expected of them and how they will be measured. Leaders must communicate a clear vision, organization goals and clearly defined job responsibilities and what is expected of an employee.

• Empowerment: Give more autonomy to Employees to do their job.

• Contribute: People want to know that their input matters and that they are contributing to the organization’s success in a meaningful way.

• Connect: Leaders must show that they value employees. Employee-focused initiatives such as profit sharing and implementing work–life balance initiatives are important. Employee engagement is a direct reflection of how employees feel about their relationship with the boss.

Maximizing employee engagement is crucial if one want to maximize his/her team's performance. While the two concepts aren't synonymous, the most productive people do tend to be highly engaged, and they're much less likely to want to leave the organization.  Leaders should actively try to identify the level of engagement in their organization, find the reasons behind the lack of full engagement, strive to eliminate those reasons, and implement behavioral strategies that will facilitate full engagement.