IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Recruiting talented employees and retaining them is a big challenge in this knowledge economy but to engage employees in their work is even tougher task for today’s HR Head’s and HR professionals. Let us try to understand what is employee Engagement and I will define it as degree of measure of employee’s commitment and involvement in completing the organization task, in other words we can say voluntary extra efforts put by employees at work in completing the task without any external stimuli.
Employee engagement is important because:-

1. Engaged employees shelf life in the current company will be much higher compared to other employees. Since they are staying for longer in the company they can give better feedback and opinions.
2. They will put their best effort, and give higher performance consistently all the time. since they are emotionally connected with the employees, passively they became the brand ambassadors of the company automatically , and they might take care of customers and other colleagues as family member since they are emotionally connected and in return company benefits by increased bottom line.

3. Engaged employee results in repeat and referral customers.

4. Engaged employees participate actively in change management initiatives of the company without any negative resistance.

5. It increases trust and loyalty in the organization, and forces other employees to research why they have so much trust and loyalty with the company and in due course those employees will also be converted into the engaged employee’s category.

6. Engaged employee behavior will create a competitive and vibrant environment and fresher who join them look at them as role models.

7. It will help the company to have higher level of profitability.

8. Actively engaged leader will be able to cascade the company goals, vision, mission and core values effectively compared to a disengaged employee.

9. Engaged employee will actively promote the health and safety in the company.

10. Actively engaged employee will do any work from start to finish and also can do half completed job of others with full dedication.

11. Engaged employees will have more motivation compared to any other.

12. Engaged employees will sail with the company in good and rough weather without any negative thoughts.

13. Higher level of engaged employees in the company will help to reduce the attrition.

14. Engaged employees will have the sense of responsibility and they will own the work /role what they have.

15. Engaged employees will take the extra mile to understand their roles and project milestones being explained by the project manager.

16. Engaged employees will try to build the relationship with clients, peers and vendors.

17. Engaged managers will coach and mentor the new joinees and who are lacking the skills or knowledge.

18. High level of employee engagement will help in maintaining the job satisfaction level.

19.Engaged employees are regular to office and even if they are on leave, they try to get connected with happenings in the office.

20. Engaged employees don’t get into office politics.

21. Engaged employee will be showing a high level of constructive behavior, which is useful for increasing the organization culture effectiveness.

The greater challenge lies is converting the “Not Engaged Employee “ into “ Engaged Employee” but before that organization needs to identify the Not Engaged Employee, now the question arises do the employee engagement surveys will help to identify ? but according to my views; by the time we do survey and come out with identifying the not so engaged employee; the time is ripe and already the damage is done , we need to have employee engagement done before his joining itself , probably the day recruitment team calls him for interview .

To manage “Not Engaged” employee; Theory X aptly fits in and for Managing “Engaged” employee Theory Y aptly fits in.

In today’s fast paced culture HR has to discover / identify the drivers of the employee engagement and suitable interventions to be bought, the successful intervention adopted in one company may be utterly flopped in another company because every companies cultural DNA is totally different.
Same article of mine is also been published at :
http://www.chrmglobal.com/Articles/688/1/Importance-of-Employee-Engagement.html