Enhancing Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is under sharp observation of organizational stakeholders due to its ultimate significance. In order to improve employee engagement different psychological conditions are used to serve personal engagements: Psychological meaningfulness, psychological safety, and psychological availability.

Psychological meaningfulness reflect the practical value of the role for individuals’ aptitude as employees feel the role matters a great deal for individual’s personal development. The Psychological meaningfulness as affected by task characteristics as well as by work interactions. Psychological safety pertains to individuals’ sense of security as they fear the roles’ characteristics influencing their personal characteristics and values. It is of view that such security concerns are relevant to interpersonal relationships, group dynamics, management patterns, and more.

Psychological availability is related to individual’s own self perceptions. Employees’ perceptions need to be in line and conducive to the roles they are required to obtain and such capacity come from all physical, cognitive and emotional domains. The few distractions influence psychological availability of employees in a negative manner such as lack of physical and emotional energy, and insecurity. Management scholars and researchers have advocated the Kahn’s framework as predecessor of employee engagement evolution. As far as meaningfulness of work is concerned, job enrichment and job fit predicted positive behavior while rewarding is sure recipe of safety for employees. The psychological availability dimension gets ample support from resources physically available to the employees.

Few current practices used in industry to promote employee engagement at workplaces include surveys and benchmarking. Different organizations have been using employee surveys and benchmarking to gauge numerous conditions available in work environment since all of the conditions might be related to engagement in any way. The results out of such initiatives are used conclude as to how engagement should go about taking the center stage in employee relations. Popularity of surveys in employee relations can be witnessed by the fact that consulting firms along with popular press have been reporting the engagement levels in organizations and those too against other organizational performance indications. The use of surveys to benchmark employee engagement levels, however, is rife with limitations.

Keywords: Employee Engagement, Organizational Performance