Employee Engagement

There has been significant interest in employee engagement, but this has been coupled with a good deal of misunderstanding. According to Kular et al (2008), this misunderstanding can be partly attributed to the fact that there is no definitive definition, resulting in engagement being operational and subsequently measured in varying ways. .
             From a HR perspective today, engagement continues to be an important consideration. Due to the challenging economic climate, organisations now more than ever are deciding to restructure and re-size, which has resulted in organisations investigating new approaches to maintain and increase engagement. Organisations fight to recruit and train their talent, so they need to do their best to keep hold of it. Organisations need to strike the right balance between fostering and enhancing employee engagement levels while at the same time not compromising their competitive position. .
             The connection between the attitudes and behaviours of employees and the connection to the organisations bottom line was first successfully displayed 19 years ago by US retail company Sears. Sears advocated employee engagement in the form of the ˜employee-customer-profit chain'. The results which Sears attained from this initiative were astounding. In one year, Sears transformed its biggest loss making division (merchandising) from a three billion dollar loss to the company to a $752 million dollars in the revenue generating division (De Vita, 2007). .
             As a result of the immense impact employee engagement had on Sears, HR consultancy firms began to work with organisations to develop metrics in order to quantify employee attitude and behaviour and its resulting impact on customer satisfaction and organisational performance. According to Jim Crawly, a principle at HR research and consultancy company Towers Perrin, "while previously anyone would intuitively have said there is a link between people being well disposed towards an organisation and the likelihood of that organisation being successful, now there is evidence to prove it " (De Vita, 2007).