Explain the term ‘employee engagement?
The employees having the feelings of emotion regarding their work place or employment organization are known as employee engagement (Walker, 2012). These feelings of emotion towards their organization usually affect the behaviors of the colleagues, and therefore, it also affects the work level of the colleagues. Therefore, it is simple to understand the relation between the employee engagement and the effort given by the works men – more the employees would be engaged with the organization, more the effort they would provide for the work done. These would help in the growth of the organization. The job types of the employees are related with the employment engagement, if the colleagues feel stimulated mentally, the communication between management and the colleagues, trust between them, the ability of the colleagues to feel the importance of their work for the organization, probability of promotion of the employees, the pride of the work men for working in the particular organization (McGee, 2011).
Sainsbury’s aim is to be the trusted retailer in its home country, such that people love to join their organization. Sainsbury’s implements unique strategy to gain and retain its customers, which is possible due to the cooperation of its employees. Thus the company keeps its employees well satisfied and happy.
Employee engagement has lead to about 26 % more growth of the annual income of the company.
Sainsbury’s by performing a market research and a market survey found it that by increasing the level of engagement, the sales in all the stores generally increases and thus ultimately the profit of the company too. About 16 % growth of the company takes place yearly, due to major emphasis on the employee engagement of the company.
There is a system of regular feedback in the company Sainsbury’s from both the employees and the customers, which help the management of the company to understand its customers and employees better regarding their feelings about the services they expect, their views about the quality of the products and many more. These provides a better scope to the company for product modification and thus ultimately, customer satisfaction.
Lack of self-respect of an employee, disregard of individual performance, lack of trust factor among the employees and scarcity of work culture among the employees cause a demonization and disengaged among the employees. Unwillingness to work perfectly makes an employee mostly underperformer ultimately it turns an employee most inefficient and lazy. Business of an organization may be affected i.e. profit of the company will fall with the callousness of the demotivated employees (Armstrong, 2013). Uninterested workers decrease retention of employee which inculcate new recruitment process as a result with the performance of new employee the output of the company becomes lesser which would affect the business of the organization.
The human resource department of Sainsbury’s has recruited a team specialist in shrinkage for reduction of level of loss, wastage and boost of the works men to retain ‘engaged’ employee engagement. Market researchers studied the relationship between retail loss and employee engagement, which indicates that about 26 % shrinkage reduced with the increase in the employee engagement. 9.7 % reduction of waste and 9.6 % cash loss could also be saved by this (Garber, 2011). The two companies that is, Sainsbury’s and ECR jointly made the company understand about the important relation between enhancement of the business and the employee engagement. Because of this study, the company Sainsbury’s has came to know about the negative effects of demotivated and disengaged employees of the organization.
Now a day, times have been changed a lot; thus, people are thought to be working in a leaner team rather than people working for job guarantee or security. With the evolution of the work forces, various factors came into role and various concepts of work have been changed. Like – today people get bonus in the form of balance of the work life, or for job security but few years back it was a driver of work, such that for maximization of their earning by working all hours.
There is a huge difference between the motivation of an individual and the engagement of an individual. Thus, a successful business can be established by offering initiatives with the aim of motivating the employees of the organization.
There are usually two methods, extrinsic and intrinsic techniques of employee engagement. The method which will result into high performance for a specified time period, especially the short term is called extrinsic technique (Rivera, A. and Flinck, J. 2011). This technique can be made better understand by the explanation of an idiom which indicates that, the employee will work until there is a dangling carrot in front of them, as the dangling carrot is the motivation of work done by the employee.
The technique used to get higher performance for a long term period, is called intrinsic technique of employee engagement. This is assumed that, intrinsic technique is present within an employee and not in the external forces like desire of achieving reward. Therefore, intrinsic technique raises the commitment of long term, satisfaction of employee and loyalty.
Sainsbury incorporates both the intrinsic and extrinsic technique for employee engagement and motivation:
Sainsbury incorporated the intrinsic technique by introducing the system of rewarding the employees with stars depending on individual work, performance and achievement. The more stars an employee can get, the more reward the employee will get at the end of the month. By incorporating the idea of stars, the employees got the motivation to perform well. It is not the reward in form of incentive or benefits but the number of stars the employee is getting mattered more. The stars urged the employees to perform better as it became a matter of prestige and gave the employees a feeling of achievement and motivated the employees to work for betterment.
Sainsbury incorporated the extrinsic technique by implementing the provision of gifting the employees with bonus/scheme cards. These cards are initially deactivated. The cards will help the employees to avail a discount of £1000 on any product bought by the employees. It can be any commodity ranging from clothes, food items, health products and so on. Moreover there are in-store discounts available to the employees. With the idea of getting the discounts on products that they can avail if perform better, the employees got motivated and worked harder to achieve the goals for both personal benefit and benefit of the company.
To enhance employee engagement, Sainsbury incorporates various intrinsic and extrinsic techniques, the key findings are:
The employee engagement is largely contributed by the organization. As the growth of the company occurs, the numbers of people will also increases that will get interested and attracted to the company, and thus some of them would like to join the organization as an employee or want to be a part of the organization by becoming a loyal customer to it (J-sainsbury.co.uk, 2015). Any person before entering the job of a specified company, he would like to get a clear idea about the past, present and future position of the company and also about its reputation in the competitive market. Thus, the aim of an organization should be enhancement of the organization by increasing employee engagement. As employee engagement leads to the growth of a particular individual as an employee of that firm. There are other factors also which generally improves the engagement of employment within an organization. These are – providing good amount of incentives to the works men, as it is the most common way to motivate the employees, again, the healthy atmosphere of the organization is employee – friendly, which also motivates the employee regarding the employment engagement, for example, maintain good and friendly relationship between the seniors and the juniors, maintaining trustworthy relationship between all the employees, maintaining healthy competition within the organization and many more helps to improve employee engagement within an organization .
Sainsbury’s currently has employed around 11500 individuals of 60 years of age, according to some motivational theories, which would help the employees to motivate. Timely incentives and schemes of staff reward are provided by the company for more encouragement and interest of work within the employees. These rewards and incentives have increased the productivity of the company; sales revenue has also increased, and has inspired the work men for better performance . Condition free bonus cards are provided by the company for raising employee engagement. On these cards employees generally get a discount of up to amount £ 1100 on purchasing anything, starting from beauty products to clothes. All these are the various types of measures of improvement of the employee engagement within the company. But the company may include also other motivating theories for enhancement of the employee motivation and also for the employee engagement.
To increase the employee engagement within the organization is not very easy or simple thing, as all the employees might not like the particular way of employee engagement. Thus, it can be challenging for the authority of the organization to implement the employee engagement within the organization, especially if it is voluntary and informal. Thus the question may arise about the implementation of the employee engagement within the organization, as it is very important and necessary for growth and expansion of any organization in one hand and on the other hand it has various barriers and obstacles to implement it within the firm.
Motivating people is not an easy matter as each and every people might get motivated by different factors. So for an organization to implement an average motivating factor is mandatory to make its employees more enthusiastic. Generally the influential factors vary from each individual to other . But some of the influential factors are – organization culture, local relevance, meaningful involvement of employees, socializing and personal interest. Usually the organization motivators are working with other employees, recognition and achievement. An organization is an ideal place to start integrating sustainable thinking into operational aspects. By creating more sustainable organization culture, the management department of the firm can build the space and attitudes for more appropriate decisions, and also new innovative ideas. If the employees are encouraged throughout the organization, then employees behave in a sustainable way, rather than asking only some particular employees for changing their behavior regarding the organization.
There are some strategic approaches to develop enthusiasm and motivation within the employees. Strategic planning is the best way to highlight the potentiality of the employees, or the actual weaknesses of the employees, or even the challenges which the management of a particular organization faces in implementing the employee engagement . Some of the ways to overcome the barriers of implementing the employee engagement are as follows:
The major barrier of employee engagement is the management of the company. As the mangers think themselves to be most important part of an organization and their executive leadership seems to create an unfriendly working environment for the employees. Due to the designation the management department or the managers are in the top position of any organization, but the employees are the most important part of an organization as they only bring in the business .. Thus, this management hindrance should be cleared out by understanding themselves that the objectives of the organization can only be fulfilled by the employees only.
Conclusion:
Employee engagement has become a vital part of any organization. Now a day, every organization has a human resource department, thus, they better understand the employees of the organization and new measures in need could take place. But for any new implementation, the management of the company has to face various obstacles, similarly for implementation of employee engagement; the managers also have to face various barriers, but there aim should be to overcome these for betterment of both the employees and the organization as employee engagement brings in business.
References
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