Employee Engagement I would describe employee engagement as how an employee takes pride in their work and how willing and able they are to help not only themselves succeed, but to help the entire organization succeed; they are always willing to go the extra mile for the good of the company. Employee engagement is defined as how engaged an employee is in their work and how willing they are to put in extra work for the good of the position and organization (Phillips & Gully, 2012, p. 397). Employee satisfaction refers to how happy or unhappy an employee is with their desires and needs in the workplace; this is more personal and relates to individual employee success. Employee engagement is important because it allows employees to really get involved with the company culture, values, and goals overall to succeed. This, in turn, helps the company to reach its goals by having committed employees that are willing to work hard to watch the company grow along with themselves. Employee engagement can also increase employee morale, work efficiency, and retention, helping to reduce turnover, and can help a company maintain a competitive advantage. Working with Broward County has great advantages and opportunities for employees to get engaged in their work. Recently, the county began to implement a new payroll system. To do this, the accounting department held monthly meetings to engage payroll liaisons in the process to make it fun and educational. Liaisons were able and encouraged to actively participate in these meetings with Jeopardy questionnaires at the end each meeting and light snacks and refreshments. Payroll managers also made themselves available to employees to explain the new system step by step in a one on one setting if needed. If the County Administrator asked me to engage employees by creating a plan, I would start by working with employees to create a clear goal and promotional career path within the organization to help them realize where they see themselves in the organization. Once an employee is more aware of their goals and how to reach them, I would then implement a communication and collaboration plan so that employees can be engaged, not only with the job, but with fellow coworkers.
Yahoo
Melissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, recently ended employee telecommuting to increase communication and collaboration within the company. All employees who are currently working from home will now be mandated to commute to the Yahoo office, if they are not willing to do so they will be asked to leave the company. Another change Mayer has implemented is the ranking of employees on a bell curve, with those at the end of the curve being let go. I do not necessarily agree with these choices Mayer has made, but I can see her reasoning behind putting an end to telecommuting to work for employees. While telecommuting is a great way to be flexible for employees, it can put less importance on communication and collaboration in the workplace. With employees not interacting with each other face to face, it can make it difficult to really get a feel for each other’s ideas and feelings about a particular project at work. I do not agree with Mayer’s implementation of the bell curve to rank employees as it is outdated and puts too much pressure on an employee to perform to the company’s standards with little or no risk taking or thinking outside of the box. The ranking system can have negative effects on employee morale and retention as it will cause more pressure on employees to work only the company’s way with serious consequences should they not meet the appropriate rankings. Positive effects may be that employees may work much harder to attain these good ranking scores, but in turn will cause morale to drop if employees are overworked. The elimination of telecommuting can help employee morale if employees have the ability to interact face to face with coworkers to increase collaboration and engage employees on a