Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement

Engagement is defined as "employees' involvement in and commitment to work, and to their company's strategy, mission and proposition." (PWC report, 2011).

The PWC report also highlighted a research by Harter (2010) that, a highly engaged workforce translates to improved retention, customer loyalty, revenue and sales and profit. On the contrary, the lack of morale can cause excessive turnover which could be detrimental to the company's long term survivability.

In today's highly competitive working environment, the question is how do companies in Singapore keep their key staffs engaged?

The above is one of the fundamental questions that needs to be addressed in the development of a worthy HR policy on retention.

The Human-touch

Let us first take a look at the different working environments in Singapore. The general environment can be classified under two major tiers, the Public and Private Sectors. The Private Sector is further sub-divided into Multi-nationals and Local Companies.

Most working environments are driven mainly by the need to fulfil the business or organizational commitment, which relates to company's strategy, mission and proposition as mentioned in the definition of Engagement above.

An example of such organisational commitment in a public sector would be to upkeep a high-level standard in public service (such as healthcare, education, etc). In the private sector, an example would be the business commitment that is usually associated with generating profits for a company.

With the above widely varied landscape, the retention of talents presents an uphill task for companies competing for the talents from both within and outside of Singapore. Henceforth, being able to keep talents engaged in their job is of a paramount importance to the companies operating in Singapore.

With Singapore being a regional hub for many multi-national companies (MNCs) with strategic functions (Sales HQ, Finance,etc.) situated here, we will narrow our discussion in this paper and select MNCs as the focal point of employee engagement in the formulation of the retention strategy.

Part of keeping talents engaged is in finding the right match between personal aspirations of the key staffs and what the company could offer them in the job. The talents are usually highly dynamic people and typically have a strong desire to challenge and be challenged.

In this section, we'll assume most talents holding key positions in the companies have traits or characteristics of McGregor's Theory Y (1960). The summaries of Theory