The Impact of Employee Engagement on Productivity

Business operations techniques, priorities and considerations have been changing over the period of time.First, there was production era that transformed into marketing and now firms are considering their employees as important as their customers. Employees of a business are the key concern in this age because today’ leaders know that best performing staff is the competitive advantage that helps them to grab many other competitive edges over other players of their industry. Performance of employees is measured by the level of their engagement in their job and company that shows in terms of productivity, innovation and overall company performance.

The true purpose of increasing the engagement of employees to reduce the cost of business that incurs when there is low employee engagement. The cost incurs in different terms first the low employee engagement results in low productivity that is wastage of resources, further, it increases hiring and retaining costs of finding high performing staff. The first thing that an organization needs to do in terms of increasing employee engagement is to measure the existing level of engagement so the gap can be identified. Top organizations of the global market say that they are gaining a competitive advantage by developing, implementing and measuring engagement practices by improving the system of quantified measurement of the performance level of each employee.

In human resource studies, the employee engagement has been the key area of research and researchers have found that the importance of employee engagement is differently perceived and evaluated by different levels of management. As upper-level management is more optimistic about the engagement level of their employees while the middle management who are directly working with frontline staff have the different view on it. Middle management says that most of the employees in organizations are not highly involved and most of the time this management layer finds it difficult to measure the level of employee engagement and find the exact financial outcomes incurred by high employee engagement level.

At this era of business growth, almost fifty percent of companies are satisfied with their employee performance evaluation metrics by measuring the increase in overall market share and level of customer satisfaction. Companies those consider the employee engagement agenda among key concerns of their strategy, are following these best practices for increasing employee engagement level and measuring the performance against the level of engagement;

• Ask direct questions: To measure the level of engagement or find the gap in desired and actual engagement level companies asks their employees direct questions instead of asking routine questions with hidden meaning. Then they analyse results to find the reason of behind the scene scenario that gives an unbiased set of measurement outcomes and management keeps this information under high considerations while developing employee policies and strategies.
• Individual and Organizational Goal Alignment: Employee engagement without aligning their individual goals with organizational goals can go into vain as the purpose of each employee to be highly engaged in his job is to contribute in the overall performance of the organization to achieve a collective goal. For this purpose, companies provide individual goals to each employee that gives the ease of performance measurement at individual and organizational level.