Methodologies to measure and define Employee Engagement

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Leadership and Human Resource Management - Miscellaneous, , language: English, abstract: Employee engagement has been characterized as a distinct and unique construct that consists of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components associated with individual role performance. Engaged employees often display a deep, positive emotional connection with their work and are likely to display attentiveness and mental absorption in their work. Engaged employees are consistently moreproductive, profitable, safer, healthier, and less likely to leave their employer.Employee engagement is a new term for organizations due to its recenttransformation from the previously known concepts of employee satisfaction and employee commitment. Although the organizations often struggle in achieving their desired goals, they tend to claim employees to be one of their important assets. This is mainly because of the importance attached to their efforts and their impact on theorganization’s overall performance and productivity. Hence, employee engagement holds great significance not only for the traditionally operating companies but also for the knowledge worker organization which is based on human intellect and creativity.Despite the influential role of employee engagement, companies continuously struggle with it. This can be attributed to the inconsistency and difference in the way Employee Engagement is defined and measured. Thus, there is a dire need to achieve universality in this context in order to achieve greater improvements for the organizations. One specific group of employees in high tech companies are knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are employees such as data analysts, product developers, planners, programmers, service providers and researchers who are engaged primarily in acquisition, analysis, and manipulation of information as opposed to production of goods. Today’s workforce in a working environment, where knowledge, the application of that knowledge in research and development and thespeed and quality of product development, sales and marketing is more important, than traditional production knowledge is often described as the Knowledge worker age.